On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary: Going the Bloody Hard Way
 2020950988, 9781793638809, 9781793638816

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On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary

Ramal, Randy. On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary : Going the Bloody Hard Way, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest

Contemporary Whitehead Studies Edited by Roland Faber, Claremont School of Theology, and Brian G. Henning, Gonzaga University Contemporary Whitehead Studies, co-sponsored by the Whitehead Research Project, is an interdisciplinary book series that publishes manuscripts from scholars with contemporary and innovative approaches to Whitehead studies by giving special focus to projects that explore the connections between Whitehead and contemporary Continental philosophy, especially sources, like Heidegger, or contemporary streams like poststructuralism; reconnect Whitehead to pragmatism, analytical philosophy, and philosophy of language; explore creative East/West dialogues facilitated by Whitehead’s work; explore the interconnections of the mathematician with the philosopher and the contemporary importance of these parts of Whitehead's work for the dialogue between sciences and humanities; reconnect Whitehead to the wider feld of philosophy, the humanities, the sciences and academic research with Whitehead's pluralistic impulses in the context of a pluralistic world; address Whitehead’s philosophy in the midst of contemporary problems facing humanity, such as climate change, war and peace, race, and the future development of civilization.

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Recent Titles in this Series On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary: Going the Bloody Hard Way, by Randy Ramal Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality and Context, by Timothy E. Eastman Mind, Value, and the Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy, by Andrew M. Davis Whitehead’s Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time, by George Allan Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory, edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis Whitehead and Continental Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: Dislocations, edited by Jeremy D. Fackenthal Beyond Whitehead: Recent Advances in Process Thought, edited by Jakub Dziadkowiec and Lukasz Lamza Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics, by Steve Odin Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation, by Brianne Donaldson Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists: Experience and Reality, edited by Brian G. Henning, William T. Myers, and Joseph D. John

Ramal, Randy. On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary : Going the Bloody Hard Way, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest

On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary Going the Bloody Hard Way

Copyright © 2021. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Randy Ramal

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Ramal, Randy. On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary : Going the Bloody Hard Way, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com

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Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950988 ISBN: 978-1-7936-3880-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-7936-3881-6 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Ramal, Randy. On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary : Going the Bloody Hard Way, Lexington Books, 2021. ProQuest

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To Ayat, Adam, and Julian

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction xiii 1 On Ordinariness and Philosophy’s Responsibility to Intelligibility 2 Speculating on Being in the World with Plato and Aristotle

1 31

3 Courting Ordinary Language with the Ideal Language Philosophers 63 4 Negotiating Ordinary Experience with the Empiricists 5 Rubbing Shoulders with Wittgenstein on Ordinary Realism

93 123

6 Inverting the Logic of Ordinary Atheism with Flew and Dawkins 157

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7 Animalizing Philosophy with Derrida and J. M. Coetzee Conclusion: Final Thoughts

193 223

Bibliography 229 Index 237 About the Author

243

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Preface

This book deals with the responsibility that philosophy owes the intelligibility of ordinary forms of discourse, and with the accountability to which it holds philosophers, and people generally, when they violate that intelligibility. Fulflling this responsibility has become a diffcult task at this time because the idea that philosophy should focus on the hermeneutical task of clarifying the sense that everyday discourse has is not in fashion, both within and outside of philosophy. Non-philosophers expect from philosophy that it should be practical, offering solutions to the world’s economic, political, social, and environmental problems. Many contemporary philosophers share this expectation and, following Marx, they believe that philosophy’s main responsibility is to change the world and not only interpret it. They see no philosophical diffculty whatsoever in fusing the normative and logical aspects of responsibility when philosophizing. One of my aims in this book is to demonstrate the monumental importance of keeping philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility as is, without normative interventions. I offer reminders about the dangers of turning philosophy into a normative discipline while emphasizing the importance of philosophical hermeneutics for the clarity of normative thinking. The normative and logical aspects of responsibility are certainly interrelated insofar as we cannot uphold normative responsibilities, or converse about them, without fulflling our logical responsibility to analyzing and clarifying the sense that everyday discourse has. But philosophers should not allow their normative biases to get in the way of doing good philosophical work, I argue, and their normative interventions in politics, ethics, religion, economics, and other practical areas of human existence should not count as philosophical. Whatever else philosophers choose to do, they should not shirk their main responsibility to intelligibility. ix

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Preface

People often employ language in their ordinary conversations that does not carry the meaning they think it does. Whether the topic is democracy, the universe, God, or non-human animals, people often carry on pseudo conversations about it because the references they assign to their words do not match up with the reality they think they are discussing. Conversations about atheism are a prime example of this confusion. They go nowhere because the concepts used when the reality of God is discussed are confused, turning atheism, for example, into a rejection of the existence of a physical being called God. This is also true of conversations about democracy, socialism, race, and non-human animals, among other topics. Luckily, on occasion, people discover that they cannot carry on with some of these “conversations” because of the conceptual resistance they encounter from others—for example, “this is not what I mean when I speak of socialism” (or God or charity). This, in itself, demonstrates that people fnd themselves held accountable for how they speak but, unfortunately, this is not always the case. For various reasons, there is high tolerance for incoherence, inconsistency, and even conceptual confusion in everyday life, and philosophy needs to step in to offer corrections for these problems and for the many pseudo conversations that are carried on. In pointing out where these problems and pseudo conversations exist, and how to correct them, philosophy is able to fulfll its responsibility to intelligibility and to open up the door for genuine conversations.

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Randy Ramal Claremont, California 2020

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Acknowledgments

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This project has been in the works for several years. I spent a semester during the Spring of 2017, working on it at the Center for Ethics, University of Zurich, where I was a visiting researcher. I am grateful to Ingolf Dalferth, Professor Emeritus at Claremont Graduate University, and to the staff and then director of the Center’s Institute for Social Ethics, Richard Amesbury, for making my memorable time in Zurich possible. I am also grateful to Roland Faber and Brian Henning, editors of the Contemporary Whitehead Series at Lexington Books, for their unceasing encouragement throughout the writing process of the manuscript. Last but not least, I thank the anonymous reader for raising helpful questions about my main arguments, and my partner, Ayat Agah, for her patient proofreading of the manuscript.

xi

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Introduction

Whatever else philosophy is expected to do, it is not controversial that one of its main concerns has always centered on questions of sense and intelligibility. In spite of Socrates’s normative aims at improving the moral nature of his fellow Athenians, for example, he never lost sight of philosophy’s responsibility to the analysis and clarifcation of discourse in its ordinary, everyday contexts. His powerful but normative tone when he told his jury in the Apology that it is more diffcult to avoid wickedness than it is to avoid death (Grube 1981, 42) was preceded, throughout his life, with a serious philosophical commitment to clarity in thinking. For him, as I show in chapter 1, this is how philosophy fulflls its responsibility to sense and intelligibility. This book promotes the need to refocus the current philosophical energy onto this responsibility, but the task is diffcult. Although many philosophers besides Socrates emphasized the centrality of sense and intelligibility for philosophy throughout its history, this centrality is not in fashion nowadays and has not always been so. As I show below and in chapter 2, even the Presocratics had chosen a different path. In the twentieth century, however, Ludwig Wittgenstein skillfully linked the emphasis on sense and intelligibility with the question of the diffculty of doing philosophy. He pointed out that the kind of diffculty raised in philosophy is one where no short cuts should be taken to answer it, and that this kind of diffculty requires committing oneself to giving serious attention to the intelligibility of life (Rhees 1969, 171). This is a diffcult task mainly because the intelligibility of life, as Socrates had shown, is linked with the intelligibility of discourse. If the language people use does not have intelligible forms of life in which it belongs in a meaningful way, then these forms of life are themselves not intelligible. Another reason for the diffculty of keeping philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility on track is the current tendency among philosophers xiii

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to want to change the world and not only to understand it or to show how it is intelligible. Marx’s well-known and often quoted remark against Feuerbach that “philosophers have only interpreted the world . . . ; the point is to change it” (Raines 2002, 184) resonates well with these philosophers. But what is not typically provided in the objections to focusing philosophy’s energies onto sense and intelligibility is a philosophical argument as to why philosophy should be normative in the frst place, or how it would be different from other normative practices if it becomes normative in itself. Instead, there is the abstract worry that narrowing philosophy’s responsibility to the hermeneutical tasks of analysis and clarifcation is a form of exclusivism. Why can’t intellectuals or thinkers who seek to change the world practice philosophy outside of its hermeneutical boundaries, they ask? In this book, I do not mean to suggest that no philosophical work can be done by non-philosophers. As long as the analysis and clarifcation are undertaken without normative biases, i.e., without being rooted in particularized forms of normative justifcation, there is no reason as to why they cannot be carried out by non-philosophers. If philosophical arguments are justifed on the basis of normative arguments, however, how are they philosophical? There is no neutrality when it comes to values, no matter how liberal or enlightened the holders of these values are. It seems that the diffculty that some of the objectors to returning to the centrality of sense and intelligibility in philosophy have is one of the will, not the intellect. Their noble aspirations to want to offer philosophical solutions to practical problems get the better hand in the struggle between the good will and the disinterested intellect. Rush Rhees reports that Wittgenstein often expressed the importance of appreciating the diffculty of doing philosophy in a neutral fashion by advising his friends and students to go “the bloody hard way” when philosophizing (1969, 171). As the tile of my book indicates, I aim to go the bloody hard way in this book, promoting the need to safeguard philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility and showing how turning philosophy into a normative activity is one way of taking an undesirable, or at least unwise, short cut. I give two examples from Greek philosophy below—the Presocratics and the Sophists—to show the negative hermeneutical consequences of taking short cuts in philosophy. One philosopher I discuss in this book who appreciated the diffculty of doing philosophy proper in his later career is Hilary Putnam. Although the shift in his thinking regarding this issue emerged due to a disillusionment with producing new positions and continually revising them in philosophy— rather than the main reason I am promoting here, which is the appreciation of the diffculty of avoiding turning philosophy into a normative discipline—the shift demonstrates one way of going the bloody hard way in philosophy. As James Conant rightly notes, Putnam moved away in the last years of his

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philosophical career from revising his position on the diffcult question of realism, a topic on which he frequently changed his mind, to discussing the diffculty of philosophizing on that topic (1995, xii). Progress in philosophy cannot come about from continued revisions of positions, or even from expanding upon them, Putnam stated at one point, but from remembering previous insights regarding the diffculty of discussing it (1994, 445). Being stuck in a position that one continually revises is akin to leaping “from frying pan to fre, from fre to a different frying pan, and from a different frying pan to a different fre, and so on apparently without end,” he stated (Putnam 1994, 445–46). Another philosopher who also appreciated the diffculty of doing philosophy, albeit due to centering philosophy on questions of sense and intelligibility, is D. Z. Phillips. If there is any serious argument by normative philosophers against this kind of centering, Phillips’s work received the brunt of it. If philosophy is meant to be descriptive, the argument goes, should it not be itself defned in terms of its actual practices, some of which are normative? Why insist on narrowing philosophy’s task to that of analyzing and clarifying ordinary discourse, excluding its normative side, when its history is full of normative arguments? Phillips’s response to these questions is illuminating, particularly since he has been accused of acting normatively while calling for a contemplative conception of philosophy that is strictly descriptive in orientation (see, e.g., Bloemendaal 2006 and Sass 2010). “The nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical problem, a problem as old as philosophy,” Phillips maintains, and how it should be carried out “cannot be answered by a survey of what philosophers actually do” (1999, 1). Phillips’s point is that philosophy is a critical, second-order activity that refects not only on normative practices but also upon itself. But the critical component of philosophy works differently in these two dissimilar contexts, even when it acts non-normatively in both of them. When philosophy refects upon normative practices critically, it exercises analysis in a descriptive manner, but when it refects upon its own nature critically the analysis is about whether or not it makes sense for it to be normative or otherwise. One might say that Phillips promotes a conception of descriptive philosophy, what he calls a contemplative philosophy, but does not promote a descriptive conception of philosophy. I support Phillips’s understanding of philosophy and, from my perspective, it is certainly feasible for professional philosophers not to be doing philosophy proper while non-philosophers could be engaged in proper philosophical work. Philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility is abandoned in the former case but not in the latter. Another reason for claiming that philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility requires a descriptive approach to all normative claims is that maintaining a sense of philosophical neutrality about how people think and live their

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lives—challenging as that may be—is important for explicating all forms of discourse, the ones that philosophers agree with and the ones with which they disagree. As diffcult as it is to arrive at a neutrality of an approach, going the bloody hard way and achieving it guarantees that what is being said by those with whom one disagrees on a normative level is analyzed and shown for what it is, without moral or other normative biases. Furthermore, philosophy could then retain its treatment of the big questions of philosophy without bias or unneeded speculation—for example, the sense in which “all things” are said to be real and the meaning of concepts such as “the meaning of life,” “God’s existence,” and “infnity.” There are lessons to be learned from the history of philosophy as to what happens when philosophy abandons its responsibility to sense and intelligibility. In Western philosophy, one of the lessons can be found in the Presocratic literature. Although the Presocratics did not promote normative ideas in the strict sense of the term, their speculations as to what counts as an ultimate reality entails the kind of position that Putnam criticized when he began to appreciate the diffculties of philosophy. Their speculations entailed positions that led to several cases of unintelligibility. I do not mean by this the kind of unintelligibility that Aristotle attributed to them in response to their answers to the question about the ultimate nature of reality. As I show in chapter 2, Aristotle was unhappy with their answers because he thought they reduced the number of causes responsible for explaining the idea of being as such to either one or more of the four causes he promoted (material, effcient, formal, and fnal causes), rather than to all of them at once (Ross 1964, 57). But this fact about the Presocratics hardly counts as jettisoning the intelligibility of ordinary discourse. To see in this context the importance of why philosophy’s main responsibility to intelligibility must lie in the analysis of ordinary discourse, which subsumes all forms of frst-order discourse, scientifc discourses included, it is important to also see that philosophers such as Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus failed philosophy in their language about the nature of “all things.” In some cases, these thinkers used the ordinary terms “water,” “air,” and “fre” in a technical and legitimate sense rather than in their ordinary senses, but no signifcant intelligibility regarding the question of “all things” was produced. Rhees might be correct to say, for example, that Thales’s hyder is not meant to be a reference to liquid water but, rather, that it belongs to a “phraseology in terms of which you can talk about things”—in this case regarding the three forms in which water appears in nature: liquidity, gaseousness, and solidity (2004, 2). But it is not clear to which explanatory “phraseology” the ordinary terms “fre” and “air” belong or how this kind of phraseology sheds light on the intelligibility of the idea of “all things.” Language “goes on holiday” in

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these circumstances, as Wittgenstein would have put it, and they create philosophical problems rather than solve them (1958, §38). Similarly, one of Socrates’s main quarrels with the Sophists centered on their lack of attention to the ordinary sense of words when philosophizing on matters such as piety, beauty, justice, and truth. His conversations with them reveal that their skepticism about the possibility of speaking of an absolute sense of beauty or truth or justice is the confused outcome of their shirking philosophy’s responsibility to elucidate the ordinary sense of absoluteness where values are concerned. After all, the idea itself of “absoluteness” does not always have to be essentialized into an objective category, but could have a pragmatic sense in the way people speak of, and adhere to, their values and beliefs with absolute determination. This is not to endorse Socrates’s additional tendency to locate the objectivity of values in the metaphysical realm of Ideas, but only to point out that this tendency would not make sense had he not engaged in the hermeneutical task of analyzing the ordinary sense of words. Some forms of skepticism are justifed in denying sense to certain everyday ways of speaking—for example, in various political and religious practices where, say, democracy is called for in nondemocratic language and means, and where religious faith is contradicted in how people speak and live their lives. If people are not consistent in their language and actions, one might say, then the skeptic is entitled, in some cases, to question whether anything meaningful is being said at all. But not all forms of skepticism are justifed, and those who deny sense to intelligible forms of speaking should be resisted. If Aristotle was right to be skeptical about the use that his predecessors made of ordinary concepts such as water, air, and fre, the Sophists were not entitled to their relativism, and Socrates was right to oppose them on the issue of absoluteness. I take philosophy to be one of the main forces of resistance against confused forms of skepticism and, in this book, I adopt its emphasis on sense and intelligibility as the means to successful resistance. I argue that philosophy owes the intellect and everyday life the responsibility of being neutral about sense and intelligibility, and that accepting the important task of being descriptive in philosophy, without letting normative considerations be the guide, is the right approach to doing philosophy. The responsibility of philosophy to intelligibility here is the responsibility to explicate and point out the coherent sense that everyday discourse has, and to restore that sense when it is displaced due to misuses, or inconsistent uses, of discourse. From this perspective, philosophy is the unbiased discipline that tidies up confusion in people’s thinking when sense is displaced and intelligibility lost. But this should not mean that philosophy is limited to the role of an underlaborer in the way John Locke, A. J. Ayer, and others, for example, thought of it

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(Winch 1990, 3–4). I only mean, to repeat, that it should not be normative in its methods of analysis. My reader might be surprised to learn, at this point, that I will be giving the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead a central place in this book. I do so for three main reasons. First, unlike many twentieth-century philosophers of his generation, Whitehead has remained an infuential thinker in both philosophy and outside of it, and his work has been discussed in relation to major ideas and philosophers from various traditions in the history of philosophy, including most recently the continental, pragmatic, and analytic traditions. The examples are too numerous to mention here, but I should state that this frst reason is not the most important one for giving Whitehead a central place in my discussion of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. A second, more important reason is that Whitehead displays both descriptive and normative approaches to philosophical problems, which makes him especially relevant to my discussion. This fact is true of other philosophers I discuss in this book, but since his philosophy has been mostly characterized as strictly descriptive in nature, I take this opportunity to offer the bloody hard and, in my view, correct, way of discussing his approach to philosophy. I do so, however, by relating Whitehead’s philosophy to the larger discussion on whether or not philosophy could promote a normative view without violating its responsibility to intelligibility and sense. The latter is the overarching theme of this book. Thus, in chapter 1, I argue against the tendency to succumb to the temptation of making philosophy normative by comparing and contrasting Whitehead’s approach to the approaches of Socrates and Kierkegaard. All three philosophers engage in normative philosophizing, paying attention to the role of ordinary ways of speaking in clarifying the meaning of concepts, but Whitehead is more complex, I argue, due to the fact that he oscillates between trusting and distrusting the relevance of the ordinary for philosophy’s fulfllment of its responsibility to intelligibility. Whitehead himself exemplifes what it means to go the bloody hard way when philosophizing, I argue, and I show that certain inconsistencies in his views about the ordinary should be expected when this happens. The third reason for giving Whitehead’s philosophy central attention here is closely related to the second reason. I argue that the signifcant role the ordinary plays in his thinking has not been fully appreciated, and that paying attention to his discussion of this topic in relation to the descriptive-normative divide in philosophy makes a clarifcatory contribution to both Whitehead scholarship and the recent scholarship on the question of the ordinary. The focus within Whitehead scholarship on his views regarding the relevance of ordinariness for philosophy has centered, unfortunately, on his negative assessment of analytic philosophy’s trust in ordinary language for philosophical refection. While taking this fact about Whitehead into account, I aim

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to show, beginning with chapter 1 and throughout the rest of the book, that Whitehead’s philosophy provides a complex picture of the idea of the ordinary, one that is gleaned from his various discussions of the nature of reality (chapters 2 and 5), the nature of ordinary and ideal discourses (chapter 3), experience, perception, and knowledge (chapters 4 and 7), and the questions of God and atheism (chapter 6). The complex picture that Whitehead presents us with should reveal that his trust in the relevance of ordinariness for philosophical refection does not always mirror the normative moments of his philosophizing, and that his distrust of the ordinary does not always parallel the descriptive moments of his philosophizing. This fact exemplifes the diffculty of keeping philosophy on the path of descriptive analysis, and I illustrate this point throughout the book by situating Whitehead alongside philosophers and thinkers as diverse as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, David Hume, Kierkegaard, J. L. Austin, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Rosen, Derrida, Rorty, Michel de Certeau, Anthony Flew, J. M. Coetzee, Richard Dawkins, and Gustav Bergman, among others. Doing so expands the conversation on the question of philosophy’s responsibilities, particularly in relation to the importance of paying attention to ordinary discourse for alleviating the diffculty of doing philosophy proper. To my knowledge, none of the contemporary thinkers I discuss mentions Whitehead in their work, which makes writing this book all the more challenging. In suggesting that Whitehead’s philosophy offers a fertile ground for discussing the descriptive-normative divide in philosophy, as well as the questions of the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibilities to intelligibility and sense, I do not hold back on my critique of some of its aspects that I think are problematic. My critique is appreciative, however. Beginning with chapter 1, I argue that although Whitehead’s incorporation of a normative function into philosophy risks putting its responsibility to intelligibility at a considerable risk, particularly in the context of combating skepticism, his ethical biases (e.g., in promoting the humanitarian ideal) are universal rather than particular. What I mean is that, like Rorty, Whitehead uses philosophy to promote a democratic way of life that goes beyond specifc religious or ethical values that are biased and exclusivist in orientation. Furthermore, since in my view this promotion of democracy is not a job for philosophy to do, I utilize Whitehead’s position to demonstrate how the pull to reform the world is as strongly found among philosophers as it is in applied ethicists, theologians, and politicians. This pull also explains why philosophers cannot stick to seeing philosophy in exclusively descriptive terms. My discussion of Whitehead’s position on the humanitarian ideal is preceded in chapter 1 with an in-depth introduction of the topic of the ordinary. I trace the origins of this topic in Western philosophy to Socrates’s debates

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with the Sophists on the questions of relativism and skepticism. I discuss opposing readings of Socrates’s stand on the nature of philosophy and its relation to ordinary discourse by Oswald Hanfing and Rush Rhees, on the one hand, and by Stanley Rosen, on the other hand. Although I think Socrates had metaphysical aspirations for his analysis of ordinary discourse and that he promoted a normative view of moral purity that went beyond the descriptive limits of philosophy, my aim here is not to adjudicate between the mentioned opposing readings of him—Rosen sticking to the traditional reading of Socrates as a metaphysician in spite of acknowledging his interest in the ordinary, and Hanfing and Rhees rejecting the common reading of him as a metaphysician and proposing, instead, that he is an ordinary language philosopher whose interests lie in restoring intelligibility to areas of discourse where ordinary sense has been lost. Rather, I juxtapose my reading of Socrates with a discussion of Kierkegaard’s similar assignment of descriptive and normative tasks to philosophy, showing that although Whitehead keeps good company with them on these tasks, they all put the logical integrity of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility at risk. Stanley Rosen is also important for my discussion of Whitehead because he specifcally advocates a form of normative metaphysics that aims to justify how to live life in a virtuous manner. He does not discuss Whitehead’s metaphysics, but his views on metaphysics and the ordinary open the door for accepting the idea that the questions of the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility are central in Whitehead’s philosophy. Including Rosen in the discussion also helps show that there is more to Whitehead’s view of the ordinary and the nature of philosophy than both his defenders and critics acknowledge. In particular, I argue that the presupposed distrust typically assigned to Whitehead regarding the ordinary should be toned down. As I indicated above, there is no exact parallelism between his normative and descriptive practices, on the one hand, and his tendency to alternate between trusting and distrusting the ordinary, on the other hand. This should reveal, in turn, that limiting his views on the ordinary to his explicit remarks on everyday language and analytic philosophy’s trust in it is misguided. If the common perception of Whitehead’s distrust of the ordinary continues as is, his views not only regarding language, experience, perception, and knowledge, but also regarding the nature of philosophy itself will continue to be misrepresented and misunderstood. Still, Whitehead’s confation of normative and descriptive responsibilities in philosophy creates rather than dissolves confusion about certain questions, I argue, mainly regarding the relevance of affrming certain doctrines for their ordinary exemplifcation. I question the relevance of causality for the intelligibility of perception and knowledge, for example, as well as the relevance of defning the ultimate nature of reality for ordinary cases of what is real and unreal, among other

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questions mentioned below. This issue of relevance is particularly important here because, for Whitehead, metaphysics needs to be exemplifed in the analysis of all experience and, therefore, in ordinary experience and ordinary ways of living and speaking. In chapter 2 I focus on the relevance of Whitehead’s notion of being as such for ordinary notions of being in the world, putting him in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, and the Presocratics to argue that his acceptance of the terms upon which they discussed the question of being creates tension with his own affrmations of ordinary ways of being in the world. The latter are mostly found in his autobiographical notes, which are philosophically oriented, but also in other parts of his work. I show that whereas his autobiographical notes are infused with substantial philosophical points and conclusions that have intelligible applications in life, it is not clear how these applications can be reconciled with his metaphysical notion of being as such. I also show that Whitehead’s discussions of ordinary cases of being in the world are undertaken from a descriptive viewpoint but without showing any distrust of their ordinariness. This demonstrates that Whitehead is not trustful of the ordinary only when he is normative, as is the case, for example, in his discussion of the humanitarian ideal. Discussing Whitehead’s views on the question of being in relation to ordinary ways of being in the world raises questions about his intellectual affliations with the ideal language philosophers. The latter fourished in the mid-to-late twentieth century and, generally speaking, they emphasize the need to construct an ideal- or a meta-language to solve the traditional problems of philosophy, including the problem of being as such. In chapter 3, I show the conceptual link Whitehead shares with the constructivist branch of the ideal language philosophers, in particular with Gustav Bergmann, against the pragmatists within that tradition. The latter sought to replace ordinary language with a formal, ideal language for both ordinary and philosophical uses, something that both Whitehead and Bergman rejected. Although Whitehead thought of ordinary language as a tool that originally developed to fulfll practical purposes, such as fnding one’s way about the world, and although he did not think of it as a reliable tool for theorizing about the world or for putting explanatory order onto it, I show that he, like Bergmann, did not think that philosophy needed an ideal language to do its job. Whitehead shares with all ideal-language philosophers the desire to solve the problem of being as such, but his aim is only to overcome the defciencies of ordinary language through coinage of new words, I argue, rather than to replace it with a formal language. The discussion of the relation between Whitehead and the ideal-­language philosophers is also important for clarifying his position on philosophy’s responsibility towards intelligibility. I argue that Whitehead’s acknowledgment

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of the need to consider the contextual use of ordinary ­discourse when searching for meaning is not the exception to a rule but a rule in itself. This is true even when Whitehead makes room in his understanding of language for unexpressed and nonlinguistic propositions that allow philosophers to go beyond the limits of verbal, expressed, and ordinary propositions. Whitehead would have agreed with the analytic philosopher J. L. Austin that stretching the meaning of words beyond intelligibility shows a lack of responsibility on the part of the philosopher. Thus, the literature on Whitehead’s view of ordinary language is one-sided when its focus is only on his distrust of ordinary ways of speaking and thinking, and it is an exaggeration to take his distrust of ordinary language when philosophizing about reality to be a proof that he sacrifced philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. Still, there is no absolute consistency in Whitehead on this issue in that, at certain points, he subjects the contextual use of language to a vague idea of a completed metaphysical knowledge. In chapter 3, I attribute this inconsistency to his going the bloody hard way when philosophizing about the ordinary. There are no short cuts in Whitehead’s thinking, even when he reacts negatively to the idea that the trust of analytic philosophers in the role of ordinary language in dissolving philosophical problems led them to distrust metaphysics, or at least speculative thinking, unjustifably (Whitehead 1938, 173). But although Whitehead is right to critique this distrust, I argue that his defensive response went too far. To argue that the philosophical trust in ordinary language is a habit of thought that needs refutation, as he does, is an exaggeration because this trust has proven itself in the works of some ordinary language philosophers. The truth is that, like other philosophers with new ideas, Whitehead’s creativity refects struggle, development, and sometimes understandable inconsistency, or at least oscillation, on various topics, including ordinary language. In chapter 4, I turn to Whitehead’s creativity in the context of what counts as an ordinary experience for him, and I draw the implications thereof for the intelligibility of what he claims about perception and knowledge. I argue that Whitehead’s critique of modern epistemology for focusing exclusively on sensory experience in treating the concepts of perception, knowledge, and skepticism is justifed. This modern focus led to a failure in philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility regarding the concepts of “perception” and “knowledge,” particularly in how causality was claimed to shed light on the meanings of these concepts. Whitehead’s expansion of what counts as ordinary perception through an inclusion of non-sensory forms of perception is the right move, I argue, but since he retains the epistemological framework used by the empiricists (namely, the necessity of causal reasoning when clarifying the concepts of perception and knowledge), he ends up ignoring the rule he took upon himself when discussing language. The rule here is the demand

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to look at the contextual use of words—in this case, “perception” and “knowledge”—to determine their nature. I conclude that Whitehead’s metaphysical epistemology does not demonstrate the needed responsibility to intelligibility. Had Whitehead utilized ideas from his account of symbolism to shed light on perception and knowledge, he would not have needed to resort to causality, the epistemological backbone of empiricism, for understanding nonsensory perception and knowledge, I argue. His discussion of symbolism contains the correct methodology because it allows for conceptual relations that are rooted in people’s primal and instinctive responses to the natural world, and to other human beings, to determine the sense that concepts have. On this point, I put Whitehead in dialogue with J. L. Austin to show the merits of leaving causal explanations out of any philosophical account of knowledge. Bringing Austin and Whitehead into dialogue about the nature of indirect perceptions should also shed light on how a price would have to be paid if skepticism about ordinary knowledge of the world becomes the norm and ordinary language is reduced to irrelevance. Thus, chapter 4 functions as a preparatory ground for a discussion of the diffcult question of realism and the role this discussion plays in being an antidote to skepticism. In chapter 5, I bring Wittgenstein, from whom I borrow the subtitle of my book, into the picture and argue that a discussion of his and Whitehead’s views on realism reaffrms philosophy’s commitment to sense and intelligibility in the fght against various forms of skepticism about knowledge and certainty. I show that both philosophers reject empiricism as a necessary foundation for a viable realism, and that although they differ in some ways on the kind of realism they affrm, both consider their forms of realism ordinary. The discussion of Whitehead and Wittgenstein should also dissuade anyone from treating either philosopher one-sidedly, in this case by simply contrasting them on how they perceive metaphysics—Wittgenstein supposedly rejecting it without a second thought on the matter and Whitehead supposedly endorsing it fully while rejecting the importance of ordinariness for philosophy. This narrow reading of these two philosophers glosses over the fact that their mutual affrmation of realism not only shows a solid similarity in their separate fghts against skepticism but also a similarity of commitment to intelligibility. It should be clear from the above that the task of evaluating Whitehead’s attitude regarding the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibilities is not a straightforward or a simple one, and that it cannot be undertaken solely on the basis of Whitehead’s critique of either ordinary language or analytic philosophy’s infatuation with the latter. Whitehead’s attention to the radical diversity of experience, perception, and knowledge is unparalleled within American philosophy, including pragmatism, and within analytic and continental philosophies, and it deserves serious attention. It is clear, however, that

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there is tension in Whitehead’s thinking between acknowledging the positive role that ordinary discourse and ordinary ways of being in the world provide for philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility, on the one hand, and his insistence, on the other hand, that these ordinary ways of speaking, thinking, and acting must be subjected for their veracity to a metaphysical way of explaining the universe. This tension is due, perhaps, to Whitehead’s idea that metaphysics itself could be arrived at independently of any particular experience in the world. I discuss this tension in relation to philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility in chapter 5 and build on it by considering its application for the questions of God and atheism in chapter 6. What I argue in chapter 6 is that Whitehead inverts the contexts that determine the conceptual relation between people’s ordinary experiences of God (or their absence thereof) and the reality of God. More specifcally, I argue that Whitehead gives the metaphysical context of God’s reality logical precedence for understanding God and atheism over the religious practices that speak of God and atheism. Atheism becomes a negative experience of God or a form of blindness to God’s existence when, in reality, it is simply living life without God playing any regulative role in it. Logical priority ought to be given to the context where both the belief in God and its absence are expressed. To continue the engagement between Whitehead and other thinkers in chapter 6, I juxtapose his views on God and atheism alongside those of Richard Dawkins and Anthony Flew. I argue that they, too, invert the logical relation between God and atheism, albeit differently from Whitehead, and that the true meaning of atheism is lost in these deliberations. What is true atheism? I can briefy say here that, consistently with my approach on other topics discussed in this book, the method of fguring out what atheism is requires looking frst at the ordinary sense of the term. I do not mean that a survey among atheists should be conducted to determine its meaning. If anything, I show in chapter 6 how certain ordinary rejections of the idea of God’s existence are confused and how sociological accounts of that kind of atheism do not shed light on its true meaning. I defne the ordinary sense of atheism to mean atheism, which suggests, etymologically speaking, living without God or the gods in the sense that this is how atheists live their lives. The idea that atheism should simply mean the denial of God’s existence is a confused reaction to theoretical accounts of God’s existence, I argue. When Flew notoriously remarked that he changed his mind on his atheism, for example, his follow-up writings, including There is a God, reveal that he spoke of an Einsteinian kind of God. This kind of God was taken by him to simply explain how the world exists, and it is the same God that the New Atheist Richard Dawkins claimed he did not mind believing in. But this is clearly not the God of religion, which is the reason that Dawkins supports it.

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Although there are major differences between Dawkins and Flew, both treat the reality of God as if it were a scientifcally evidential reality that could be either validated (Flew’s later perspective) or invalidated (Dawkins’s perspective) regardless of the experiential context, or the belief, that gives it its ordinary, religious sense. In subjecting the religious contexts of experience and belief in God to the evidential strength of the argument about the existence of God, they invert the contexts that give God and atheism their true meanings, I argue. Whitehead’s reasons for affrming God’s existence are different from those of Flew in that they are not scientifc but metaphysical. He asks about what must be the case in order for the world to be what it is, and his God is one of the formative elements of the world without which there would be no world. But, still, the logical priority he gives to God’s metaphysical reality over its religious manifestations reveals that he, too, inverts the logical relation between God and atheism. The picture of atheism as a form of metaphysical blindness to God’s existence fails the test of intelligibility. I shift the discussion in chapter 7 to Whitehead’s views on nonhuman animals while still focusing on the question of the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility in that context. There are two ways in which the discussion of non-human animals is relevant to my topic. First, Whitehead assigns the fallacy of misplaced concreteness regarding ordinary forms of knowledge to both humans and non-human animals—insofar as both species abstract the world through sense perception at the expense of a prehensive form of perception that mediates the world through causal effcacy. But since human beings have the capacity for “civilized” existence that is absent in nonhuman animals—for example, mathematical, philosophical, and advanced moral reasoning (Whitehead 1938, 3–4)—philosophy is commissioned by Whitehead to discover the fallacy and correct it, thus demonstrating its responsibility to clarifying the manner in which knowledge is acquired in both species. The second way in which a discussion of nonhuman animals is relevant to the topic of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility involves seeing how that responsibility is owed them in regard to the intelligibility of their lives vis-à-vis human lives. The specifc responsibility Whitehead affrms here, one that he shares with Jacques Derrida, involves showing the need to move away from reducing the radical diversity of animal life into something called ‘the animal’. Both Whitehead and Derrida argue that if we acknowledge the bias in philosophy that makes abstract reason, rather than embodied knowledge, the medium through which we come to know the world, we might then have a chance to correct previous confused philosophical treatments of nonhuman animals. I introduce Derrida’s important idea of limitrophy in this context to show that he shares with Whitehead, and with J. M. Coetzee, an interest in defusing the mistaken impression that the difference between humans

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and nonhuman animals is one of kind rather than of degree. Although not a philosopher, some of Coetzee’s literary works, including Disgrace and The Lives of Animals, depict strong tension between philosophy and literature on the question of how to understand non-human animals, and, similarly to Whitehead’s and Derrida’s philosophical works, they affrm ordinary, embodied forms of knowledge as the means to connect with reality. The synopsis of the chapters above expresses my attempt to engage with a wealth of ideas introduced by various philosophers dealing with the question of the ordinary, whether directly or indirectly. My aim is not expositional but dialogical, critical, and constructive. I hope the reader fnds something in this book that would push the conversation forward.

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Chapter 1

On Ordinariness and Philosophy’s Responsibility to Intelligibility

WHAT IS “THE ORDINARY”?

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Wittgenstein, Austin, and Socrates The question of “the ordinary” received more attention following the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin on the topic than ever before in the history of philosophy. These two philosophers contend, in somewhat similar ways, that philosophy’s main problems are rooted in acts of displacement. When meaningful uses of words are dislocated from their natural and ordinary homes of application, and then relocated into new contexts of application where the new uses are out of place, intelligibility is sacrifced. Whether it is the age-old problem of the nature of “all things”—the problem of being as such, as Aristotle called it—or a host of other philosophical problems related to claims of ordinary knowledge, belief, and truth, Wittgenstein and Austin maintain that most of these problems refect acts of ordinary-language displacement. They warn that forgetting the original, meaningful contexts in which ordinary claims are made leads to a possible breakdown of intelligible discourse, and, in ordinary life, of any real communication between people (Wittgenstein 1958, §§38, 65, 81, 155; 1967, §17; Austin 1962, 14–16). Restoring intelligibility to ordinary life is possible when the confused acts of displacement are dissolved, according to Wittgenstein and Austin, and one way in which the dissolution could occur is when reminders are set about any wrong turns that have been taken in the relocation of the original discourse. Thus, Austin suggests, it is intelligible to say under certain ordinary circumstances that we see an object or hear a musical performance “indirectly”—for example, when seeing the object through a mirror or hearing a musical performance while sitting outside a concert hall (1962, 15). But to appropriate 1

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this intelligible use of indirect perception to make a philosophical claim about how all physical objects in the world are perceived indirectly is an illegitimate displacement of the idea of “indirect perception” (Austin 1962, 15–16). The remedy that philosophy could offer in this case is the reminder that the term “indirectly” has a legitimate use in particular, ordinary examples—for example, those of the mirror and the musical performance—but that these examples cannot be generalized to speak of indirect perception as the rule for how perception always operates. The wrong turn was taken when the idea of indirect perception was displaced from its intelligible contexts. Similarly to Austin, Wittgenstein states that we can meaningfully say of a wiggling fy that it feels pain as a result of relocating the use of the ordinary concept of “pain” from a human context to a nonhuman animal context. But to develop a philosophical theory from this legitimate move and propose that stones could also feel pain is an act of displacement: the concept of pain is dislocated from its natural homes where it has sense—the human and insect contexts, in this case—and is relocated to a context where that sense is lost (Wittgenstein 1958, §§283–84, §390). The idea that objects such as stones could feel pain simply has no application in real life. Here, too, a remedy is possible by pointing out, frst, the wrong turn that was taken in the act of relocating the concept of pain from animate to inanimate contexts and, second, by providing a conceptual reminder of how people do not ordinarily attribute pain to stones when using them in building walls, houses, or roads. Of course, metaphorical uses of pain can be attributed to inanimate objects—for example, in poetry, children’s literature, or cartoons on television—but these metaphorical uses presuppose ordinary uses that cannot accommodate the new application nonmetaphorically. Wittgenstein and Austin differ on signifcant issues, but neither philosopher objects to legitimate appropriations and relocations of concepts when the new placements have meaningful applications. They simply give the original context “the frst word” on discovering meaningfulness, as Austin would put it (1956, 11). For him and Wittgenstein, ordinary words and concepts are not arbitrary since their meanings have been established through natural and mutual agreements that people fnd themselves developing in response to the world. Think of the common and natural responses of shock and fear that are generated in people in reaction to a natural disaster such as a tsunami or, in more ordinary cases, the aesthetic responses in reaction to seeing the sun setting. Wittgenstein compares these non-arbitrary agreements in reactions to styles of painting in that each phenomenon contains meaningful order and structure (1958, 230). The idea here is that the ordinary is the natural framework within which people come to feel, perceive, think, and say intelligible things. There is no other place to start the second-order processes of interpreting, explaining, and understanding the world except through these ordinary, frst-order contexts.

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On Ordinariness and Philosophy’s Responsibility

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Properly understood, both Wittgenstein and Austin claim that philosophy’s responsibility lies in recognizing the original meaning of the concepts used and in safeguarding meaningfulness in their new applications, whether these concepts are ordinary or philosophical. Philosophical uses are not ordinary uses but refective and analytic uses that explicate the ordinary meanings of words and concepts. But philosophical uses have to have meaningful applications if they are to take hold among philosophers. An example here would be Wittgenstein’s well-known “language-game,” a philosophical, second-order term (or a “grammatical” term, as he also describes it) that refers to any ordinary use (“game”) of language such as the use of it to tell a joke, to pray, or to instruct someone in how to perform a task (1958, §§7–23). Telling jokes, praying, and the practice of instruction are all language-games, and the grammatical term “language-game” gains a meaningful philosophical application here because it explicates the idea of specifc language-uses in everyday life. When intelligibility is compromised due to acts of displacement and skepticism about what is said in these displacements emerges, the responsibility of philosophy is to restore sense where sense has been lost. Obviously, this can only be done by checking in with the relevant ordinary discourse whose logical integrity has been violated. From the perspectives of Austin and Wittgenstein, this kind of restoration, called “therapy” by Wittgenstein (1958, §§113, 255; 1967, §452), not only dissolves traditional philosophical diffculties associated with the relevant loss, but also allows for authentic living without confusion, skepticism, or a communication meltdown between people. This fact should defy any attempt at caricaturing Austin and Wittgenstein as philosophers who only talk about words rather than the real world, a charge that Wittgenstein anticipated when writing his Philosophical Investigations (1958, §§370–71). The responsibility philosophy has toward sense and intelligibility in ­connection with the ordinary was recognized by Socrates and many other philosophers throughout the history of philosophy, but without the descriptive centrality given to it by Wittgenstein and Austin in their struggles against philosophical skepticism. Oswald Hanfing makes a good point when he states that Socrates’s questions about the defnitional nature of concepts such as courage, justice, and beauty embody a quest for, indeed a reminder of, the ordinary sense that these concepts have (2002, 15–25). Hanfing describes Socrates as an ordinary language philosopher in so far as he invokes the ordinary meaning of concepts when asking for defnitions and when correcting people’s misuses of that ordinary meaning. His reading of Socrates is not the typical interpretation one fnds in the literature, particularly when considering Socrates’s fght against the skeptical and relativistic claims to knowledge and truth endorsed by the Sophists. As A..E. Taylor states, “Socrates created the intellectual and moral tradition by which Europe has ever since lived”

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not only because he “created the conception of the soul which has ever since dominated European thinking,” but also because this conception refects his attempt “to attain the knowledge of existence as it really is” (1953, 132–40). The traditional reading of Socrates is that his ethics is rooted in a metaphysical vision of the world where values are objective, not relative. After all, the Sophists’ positions he rejected, different in nuance as they are from one another, still convey an agreement regarding ethics—namely, that moral values are not objective but relative to either individualistic or societal preferences. Still, Hanfing’s interpretation is not an extreme exception to a rule regarding interpretations of Socrates. Rush Rhees gives a similar reading of Socrates when discussing the latter’s views on the differences between knowledge and opinion. “In attempting to get people to see the difference between knowledge and opinion, to recognize and examine ignorance,” Rhees writes, “Socrates did think that we rely on ordinary language” and “he always relied on examples from everyday life” to make his point (2004, 83). In this, Rhees states, Socrates shared a similarity with the Sophist philosophers Protagoras and Prodicus, with whom he fought on the question of relativism (2004, 83). But Socrates was not a purely descriptive philosopher in the way Wittgenstein and Austin were since the centrality of the ordinary in his philosophy has a normative aspect to it that is absent from their philosophies. As Rhees rightly points out, in getting people to refect on what they were saying, Socrates wanted them not only “to see more clearly what the language they use means,” but also “to see more clearly how their use of it is bound up with a sense of good and evil, and bound up with an attitude towards those with whom we are living” (2004, 84). From this perspective, ordinary language is not something external to people’s lives but something by which they commit themselves on a moral level—“either to the degradation or to the purifcation of [their] soul” (Rhees 2004, 84). Socrates’s convictions, expressed in the Apology, that his doing philosophy is the command of the god, that no moral harm could come to good people no matter what happens to them physically, and that wickedness is harder to avoid than death (Grube 1981, 34–43) are a refection of the centrality of normative thinking in him. Stanley Rosen, a philosopher who gives the question of the ordinary special attention in his work and who fnds metaphysics desirably pertinent to this question (1995, 1999), gives a different reading of Socrates. I discuss his perspective on Socrates, metaphysics, and ordinariness in the next section. Rosen on the Ordinary, Extraordinary, and Philosophy’s Responsibilities Rosen appreciates the viewpoints of Wittgenstein and Austin on the question of the ordinary, and he agrees with Austin in particular that philosophy faces

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On Ordinariness and Philosophy’s Responsibility

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the threat of losing its subject matter if it becomes completely detached from ordinary life (1999, 218–39). But he advocates for a form of speculative metaphysics that he claims is not incompatible with the philosophical interest in the ordinary. As such, he does not frown upon the speculative ideas of Socrates and the Presocratics, and although he recognizes that Socrates did something different from them, he still thinks that Socrates looked up to the heavens, to metaphysical revelation, in order to explain philosophy’s interest in the workings of ordinary language. Rosen mentions, for example, that Parmenides and Heraclitus “devoted themselves to theoretical and speculative investigations of nature, paramount among which was the inquiry into being and becoming” (2002, 2). Unlike Socrates, however, these two philosophers “seem not to have been interested in, and even to have belittled, everyday life and the ordinary opinions of common sense” (Rosen 2002, 3). Although Rosen’s perspective on Socrates fts the traditional reading of him as a metaphysician who looks to the realm of the intelligible in order to decipher the ordinary workings of the sensible world, he does not endorse any belittling of the relevance of everyday life to philosophy. He simply argues that philosophy should not be reduced to ordinary refections about the world since it is itself the engagement in second-level refections on ordinary refections (Rosen 1968, 30; 1999, 226–31; 2002, 213). My interest here is not to adjudicate between different perspectives on how to interpret Socrates, but to portray the strong link between philosophy and ordinariness, on the one hand, and to elaborate on the idea of what ordinariness is all about. The differences between Rosen’s, Hanfing’s, and Rhees’s interpretations of Socrates do not show that the ordinary, whatever exactly it is, is irrelevant to philosophy’s role in offering hermeneutical analysis and clarifcation. On the contrary, it should be clear from the above that Rosen is in agreement with Austin and Wittgenstein on the importance of keeping philosophy closely tied to the ordinary, and that he fnds in Socrates an ally on this point. The difference between him and other descriptive philosophers is that he takes the success of philosophy in restoring the link with the ordinary to be argued for, and eventually undertaken, through metaphysical justifcation and explanation. The latter seems to be tied for him with the normative function he attributes to metaphysics, namely that it is good in itself—that is, that it is an activity that is meant to contribute to goodness. But Rosen is very particular about what belongs in the ordinary, and his position has important ramifcations for the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. An experience is ordinary, Rosen suggests, only if it is not unique or rare—or, in his words, if it is not extraordinary (2002, 290). A pianist could give either an ordinary or an extraordinary performance, he states, and the ordinary performance would be that which contains a correct application of a rule: “We can say that, wherever there is a rule or a law that governs some

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portion of experience, the ordinary is that which follows from the correct application of the rule” (Rosen 2002, 265). The rule here would be playing a musical piece according to a written note, but without uniqueness or rarity. An extraordinary performance (or an artifact, or a novel)—Joyce’s Ulysses being one example that Rosen discusses—goes beyond the ordinary in that it “distorts, exaggerates, adorns, and in countless ways transforms the ordinary original,” albeit without deviating entirely from it or replacing it “with something uniquely other or entirely unintelligible” (Rosen 1995, 42). One could say that, for Rosen, an extraordinary work of art, musical or otherwise, allows people to experience more than they would in ordinary circumstances. As can be seen, the ordinary here is “the horizon” or “the context within which the extraordinary” occurs (Rosen 1999, 223; 2002, 264). The performance just mentioned would not be extraordinary in the frst place unless it is juxtaposed with ordinary performances. But extraordinary acts extend beyond art and literature for Rosen. For example, science could also bring about extraordinary experiences in one’s life, he states, and philosophy is particularly and uniquely extraordinary because of its function as a discursive activity (Rosen 2002, 9). Here we fnd the major difference Rosen wants to assign to philosophy. “Art does not express discursively or conceptually its own function but instead fulflls it,” he argues (1995, 42), and the same could be said of science, one surmises on Rosen’s behalf. Furthermore, there is an element of arbitrariness about art (and presumably science), for him, but not philosophy. Philosophy is “extraordinary speech,” a second-order discourse that is not only non-arbitrary but also discursive in a way that is supposedly different from science and art (Rosen 1999, 227). The question to be raised here is the extent to which philosophy can rely on the ordinary when fulflling its responsibility toward intelligibility. If it is truly different from both science and art, as Wittgenstein and Austin would also say, would Rosen agree that philosophy shows the kind of responsibility to intelligibility they think it does, for example? It is interesting that Rosen claims “to grasp the ordinal nature of the ordinary from within”—that is, as speakers of everyday language grasp it, or as something motivated by the values of ordinary experience (1999, 219–20). As I mentioned above, he agrees with Austin and Wittgenstein that philosophy cannot be cut off from ordinary language without paying the price of losing its relevance to life. But Rosen does not seem to think that philosophy’s responsibility includes curing philosophical theories from potential confusion or detachment from life through ordinary discourse. Although the primary source of philosophy is ordinary experience for him—“the only reliable basis from which to begin our philosophical refections”—he concludes that philosophy is “the process of explaining how extraordinary modes of discourse are demanded for an adequate understanding of the ordinary” (Rosen 2002, 233). If I understood him correctly, Rosen is claiming that ordinary discourse

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is inaccessible except through the extraordinary languages of science and art, and perhaps the extraordinary speech that is philosophy as well. If so, his position on how philosophy dissolves its problems is different from those of Austin, Wittgenstein, and Socrates. But Rosen’s position is not straightforwardly clear, particularly when he claims that the criteria he uses to think about philosophy are to be found in Wittgenstein himself. He states, for example, that although some of Wittgenstein’s convictions about the nature of philosophy are “negative” (Rosen 1968, 3), Wittgenstein’s overall view of philosophy promotes a type of rationality that is consistent with the good. This is a very problematic description of Wittgenstein’s philosophy if Rosen understands Wittgenstein as a descriptive rather than a normative philosopher. Furthermore, there is no clear connection between the rationality of philosophy, on the one hand, and understanding the ordinary through the extraordinary, on the other hand. If science and art are extraordinary in the transformative effect they have on the ordinary—for example, the effects of an extraordinary musical performance on one’s spirits or the awesome effects of learning from science about intelligent life on other planets—why are they needed for an adequate understanding of the ordinary? Is understanding not a different kind of activity, even if it happens to introduce a transformative experience in the person achieving the understanding? More importantly, does philosophy not need the ordinary in order to explain the scientifcally and artistically extraordinary if it is the horizon within which extraordinariness exists, as Rosen himself admits? If anything, Rosen himself seems to firt with the idea of being a normative philosopher without coming out and stating it straightforwardly so, and it is therefore diffcult to appreciate his positive statements concerning the justifcatory and explanatory nature of philosophy. He clearly describes himself as a Platonist who “sees no difference between philosophy and the good life,” for example (1968, xviii). As with Socrates, the rational life is the good life for him: “I want to argue that the goodness of reason is directly visible at the level of ordinary experience” (Rosen 2002, 260). Unless reason is good, he adds, “Morality has no nature, but is mere conventionalism, or an arbitrary attribution of sense to nonsense” (1968, 27). This is clearly the kind of stance that a normative philosopher who wants to change the world would take. I believe that there is a better way to shed light on philosophy’s nature and its responsibilities, and I think the parameters offered by Wittgenstein and Austin, as well as Paul Ricoeur, as I briefy explain next, are the correct ones. A Ricoeurian Interlude Rosen’s point about the differences between ordinary and philosophical refections should have been his main focus, and it brings to mind Ricoeur’s

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distinction between philosophical and theological discourses, on the one hand, and “originary” types of discourse, on the other hand. For Ricoeur, philosophy and theology are refective, second-order activities that provide potential interpretations of frst-level practices in everyday life and everyday discourse—for example, in ethical, religious, political, scientifc, aesthetic, and other everyday contexts (Ricoeur 1995, 37–39). This means, strange as this may sound, that philosophy and theology are not ordinary activities, which is the point I fnd myself in agreement with Rosen about. The reasoning for this is simple: since philosophy and theology analyze, clarify, and elucidate ordinary practices in the lives of human beings, with a focus on ordinary religious practices by theology, they are not originary in the way ordinary practices are. If Rosen agrees to this, it is not clear what further justifcation is needed to elucidate the essential link between philosophy and the ordinary, and the former’s responsibility toward intelligibility with the help of the latter. Philosophy and theology are not the same, obviously, not even for Ricoeur, but both have a “therapeutic” role to play in his view insofar as they seek to replace distorted symbols with correct symbols. Here, the intended therapy is hermeneutical, not moral-spiritual, and it helps show the boundaries between the ordinary and the nonordinary since, unlike ordinary therapeutic activities—whether medical, homeopathic, or yogic—philosophical and theological elucidations are therapeutic in terms of the intelligibility they provide. I have some misgivings about the degree to which theology could be nonnormative and nonapologetic, in the way philosophy is meant to be, but Ricoeur’s analysis is commendable for not over-theorizing the ordinary and, thus, for treating all originary discourse, whether referring to things positive or negative, unique or mundane, transcendent or immanent, extraordinary or everyday, as ordinary discourse. It is vital to keep in mind, however, that the therapeutic task attributed to philosophy is not taken in the same way by the philosophers mentioned above. Whereas the therapy suggested in Socrates and Rosen is normative, aiming to produce ethical and spiritual transformation in individuals, the therapy offered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Ricoeur is logical or conceptual. Questions about meaning arise in both everyday conversations and in philosophical conversations, of course, but the ordinary describes only everyday circumstances, not philosophical conversations. Philosophical discussions are refections on what is said in both philosophical and ordinary circumstances, one could say, whereas ordinary discussions are only about what is said and done in ordinary contexts, not philosophical contexts. Historically, philosophical questions may have emerged from the desire to put an explanatory and hermeneutical order in a complex reality—in the sense of wanting to understand and explain it. But, philosophically, these questions are rooted

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in the need to analyze ordinary discourse and actions. This is the reason that philosophical questions are not ordinary questions, and why originary language matters to philosophy. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to turn philosophy into an extraordinary, theoretical practice that either aims to transform our experience of the world in the way science and art do or to mediate our understanding of the ordinary through the extraordinary. I have not given a specifc defnition of what “the ordinary” means as of yet, but this has been intentional on my part and, of course, the careful reader will realize that I touched upon it in almost every paragraph I have written so far. I wanted to avoid over-theorizing the concept of the ordinary with a defnition that runs the risk of essentializing it. I think this is precisely what happens, for example, in Michel de Certeau’s well-known idea of the ordinary, as I show next. De Certeau offers a one-sided picture of ordinariness that turns out to be normative rather than philosophical. His analysis might be valid from a socio-political viewpoint, but it cannot be relied upon to combat the kind of skepticism that questions the logical intelligibility of everyday, legitimate forms of living.

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De Certeau and Ordinariness In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau claims to show the poiesis—the rationale or operational logic—that lies behind people’s ordinary activities, whether the activity is one of walking, shopping, getting dressed, cooking, reading, watching television, or any other mundane and routine activity that engages people’s everyday lives. These activities are not simply natural or neutral for him, but are inevitably the product of people in power and authority, and their appropriation by the marginalized in society is that which defnes their logical status as ordinary (1984, xi–xiv). From this perspective, ordinariness is an idea that gets its sense from the fact that the above kinds of activities, as well as the consumed products associated with them—for example, shoes, books, food, clothes, and entertainment tools—are appropriated by the marginalized in society in a common, mundane, and routine fashion. I cannot give full justice to de Certeau’s complex interest in the everyday sociocultural practices he investigates in various societies, which were introduced in a two-volume proposal for “further research,” as he puts it (1984, xi). But his focus on the poiesis behind the mentioned ordinary practices and products has a socioeconomic and anthropological facet to it that one also encounters in the works of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. In fact, de Certeau himself states that he admires Foucault’s emphasis on the cultural and social mechanisms that reveal the power relations behind people’s social interactions, and

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he claims to be doing something similar in his analysis of the idea of ordinary “production” (1984, xiii–xiv). Unlike Foucault, however, at least from de Certeau’s own perspective, the focus of any analysis of culture should be put on the actions of the marginalized in society, not on the apparatuses privileging those in power (1984, xiv). He argues, for example, that the prevalent ethnographies describing the lives of everyday people in colonized and marginalized cultures erase parts of these cultures and, therefore, violate their logical integrity. The reason that this occurs, he suggests, is that these ethnographies are not written from the perspective of the marginalized or in relation to how the marginalized appropriate the apparatuses of power imposed on them. De Certeau does not think that Foucault’s analysis of the idea of power is wedded enough to what the punished in society do with the power imposed on them—that is, Foucault does not address the kind of authority the marginalized and punished manifest in their use, or consumption, of what is produced for them (1984, xiii–xiv). Drawing attention to the need to look at how the marginalized defne the meaning of the activities and products they consume is a valid move. No analysis should be one-sided when it comes to clarifying the meaning of what is said. In separating power from authority and looking at the presence of the former not only in the hands of the powerful elite and the institutions legalizing and enforcing power but also in the actions taken by the marginalized in their everyday forms of consumption, de Certeau does intelligibility a great service. But, as it turns out, his analysis is not philosophical and comprehensive. He seems to insist that the only valid perspective regarding the poiesis of the ordinary life is the one addressing the actions of the marginalized, and he ends up excluding the ordinary actions of the elite he criticizes. Instead of including the kind of analysis Foucault provided into a larger analysis that includes his focus, he opts to leave the ordinariness Foucault discusses out of the picture. My aim here is not to provide an in-depth discussion of de Certeau’s analysis of the questions of power and authority in society. Focusing on the grammar, or the logic, of the idea of the ordinary in relation to philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility, my more modest aim is to distill from what de Certeau claims about the ordinary whether or not, frst, this idea is representative in any way of the grammar of “the ordinary” and, second, whether or not his analysis is truly descriptive in the way philosophical analyses should be. The conclusion I draw from de Certeau’s analysis is that he produces a selective interpretation of the idea of the ordinary, one that could be justifed on moral grounds but not on philosophical grounds. His deconstruction and inversion of the components of the operational logic behind ordinary production are both interesting and noble, but his giving the marginalized activities a central place in defning the idea of ordinariness is

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a one-sided representation of what the ordinary is—again, if the intention is to be philosophical and neutral about what the ordinary means, rather than normative. The poiesis suggested in what both the colonizer and colonized, the elite and marginalized, say and do in everyday life is that which constitutes the logic of the ordinary in socio-political forms of analysis. Why should Foucault’s analysis of the relations of power in society, with the focus he has on institutions that discipline, not also be ordinary simply because it is not focused on the activities of the marginalized? From a philosophical perspective that seeks to analyze and understand all things ordinary, both the elite and marginalized should be seen as engaged in ordinary activities, albeit in different ways as de Certeau rightly shows. When de Certeau mentions Wittgenstein in The Practice of Everyday Life, he commends his aim of wanting to restore words back from their illegitimate, wrongly reappropriated use to their everyday use, even though, ironically, he thinks Wittgenstein polices what counts as an ordinary use. De Certeau describes his ultimate aim in a similar fashion to Wittgenstein’s aim of restoring sense where it belongs, and he claims that he seeks to do what Chomsky tries to do with the oral uses of language, namely “to restore to everyday practices their logical and cultural legitimacy, at least in the sectors—still very limited—in which we have at our disposal the instruments necessary to account for them” (1984, xvi). But, as I have shown, de Certeau’s idea of the ordinary is one-sided and is clearly rooted is his adoption of a normative stance on the question of the ordinary, one where the latter is limited to particular marginalized practices in societies that maintain unequal relations of power and authority among their members. De Certeau may not have intended his essentialist and biased view, but it is the outcome of his analysis. De Certeau’s one-sidedness makes its appearance also in Rosen’s metaphysical view concerning the extraordinary. But, as I show next, not every metaphysical support of the ordinary and extraordinary needs to be biased and one-sided, even when the normative aspect of metaphysics is included in one’s thinking. WHITEHEAD AND THE QUESTION OF ORDINARINESS In the Introduction, I mentioned that I have three reasons for wanting to discuss Whitehead in the context of the question of the ordinary, not the least of which is the fact that the centrality of this question in his thinking has not been brought into any focused discussion by either his followers or his critics. Whitehead’s views on the ordinary have been unjustifably limited to his critique of analytic and ordinary language philosophies, and to the limitations

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of ordinary language in offering metaphysical theories about the ultimate nature of reality. Correcting this one-sided reading of Whitehead should help in shedding a better light on his understanding of the nature and tasks of philosophy, including its responsibility to intelligibility and sense. What I show next and throughout the book is that the importance of the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility in the context of ordinariness is never lost on Whitehead albeit, like other philosophers who struggle with new ideas, he oscillates in his thinking about ordinariness through moments of trust and distrust.

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Beyond Whitehead’s Views on Ordinary Language Whitehead could be easily read as a philosopher antagonistic to ordinary forms of thinking and speaking when tackling the problems of philosophy, in particular the problem of ultimate reality. It is a well-known fact, for example, that he diagnoses analytic philosophy as suffering from the fallacy of the perfect dictionary, which is the fallacy of thinking that ordinary language is fully adequate to describe and explain the nature of knowledge and the nature of reality as such (Whitehead 1938, 173). In fact, he believed that the beginnings of philosophy itself are rooted in responses to perplexities “arising from the common obviousness of speech” (1933, 222). And since ordinary language is limited, as Whitehead states in various places, the solution to these perplexities would have to be sought elsewhere. Where? Whitehead suggests that the philosopher who has the skill of imaginative thinking and the tool of speculative analysis could overcome these limitations (1929b, 4–5). To think therefore that the analysis of ordinary language is the means to achieving clarity and understanding about nature and reality as such, as analytic philosophers do, is to display unjustifed trust in ordinary language, Whitehead suggests, particularly since ordinary language is closely aligned with sensory perception and traditional science, both of which he fnds problematic for speculative thinking (1927, 1–2; 1938, 174; 1947, 122). But this traditional reading of Whitehead offers a limited understanding of his views on ordinariness. The centrality of the question of the ordinary for him should not be limited to his direct discussions of ordinary language and analytic philosophy since it is what counts as ordinary in his overall thinking that should disclose his views on ordinariness. As I show throughout the book, Whitehead uses the language of “the ordinary” more frequently than simply in references to ordinary language when critiquing analytic philosophy or when he considers the overall role of language in the philosopher’s metaphysical thinking. The ordinary for him includes not only ordinary language, I argue, but also sensory and non-sensory forms of perception,

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symbolic experience, scientifc knowledge, and embodied forms of knowledge that include both human and animalistic knowledge. An additional factor of relevance here is Whitehead’s conceptual affliation with the now-forgotten philosophical movement known as ideal-language philosophy, a topic I fully pursue in chapter 3. I can say here that the main desire among ideal-language philosophers was to develop an ideal language when philosophizing and, in spite of the differences between them, they all took Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica as a blueprint for developing their respective versions of that ideal language. But, as I show in chapter 3, Whitehead does not share with these philosophers the view that an ideal language is needed to account for the philosopher’s knowledge of reality beyond its common understanding by the ordinary person. It is true that Whitehead does not fnd ordinary language fully adequate for philosophy’s metaphysical tasks, but he does not abandon ordinary language for that purpose. Symbolic logic might be the foundation of any ideal language, and it was Whitehead’s frst philosophical love as he states at one point (1961, 213), but his emphasis throughout his various discussions of ordinary language is on stretching certain words beyond their commonsensical, marketplace meaning, and in no place does he argue that the entirety of ordinary language is inadequate. There are also good reasons to count non-sensory forms of perception, whether feelings, emotions, intuitions, memories, or direct perceptions of causal effects on the human body as ordinary forms of experience for Whitehead. He never disclaims the ordinariness of these forms of experience in his critique of the modern epistemologists’ heavy emphasis on sense perception as the medium of all knowledge. As I argue in chapter 5, nonsensory perceptions are natural, organic activities that function as frst-order experiences, and their naturalness makes them ordinary for Whitehead. The natural is not always commonsensical, of course, because it is not always identifed and spoken of through everyday, commonsensical language. Gravity is natural, as electromagnetism is, for example, but neither became commonsensical until the scientifc language explaining and expressing them became common. Unlike Rosen’s views on the extraordinary, which defne the latter in terms of the rarity or uniqueness of events expressing it, there is no reason to think that Whitehead treats so-called extraordinary forms of perception as nonordinary—if the reference to non-sensory perception should be considered extraordinary, that is. One could say that the natural for him is inclusive of both the typically ordinary and the typically extraordinary, and he treats both as ordinary on a philosophical level. As I suggested above, nonordinary practices such as philosophy and theology are so because they are second-order refections on natural, ordinary ways of thinking and speaking, a viewpoint

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confrmed by Whitehead. They involve analysis, critique, and, for Whitehead, imaginative thinking that transcends the imaginative thoughts found in literature and the arts. When the above-mentioned forms of ordinariness are investigated in Whitehead’s philosophy, a complex picture of his position regarding the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibilities to life and intelligibility emerges. His position, as I briefy explain in the next section, is a mixture of trusting and distrusting ordinariness without seeming consistency on the matter. Typically, Whitehead shows trust in ordinariness when he uses philosophy in a normative rather than a descriptive fashion, but not always. In the Introduction, I attributed this oscillation in Whitehead to his going the bloody hard way when doing philosophy, and my discussion of the humanitarian ideal below should demonstrate and clarify this fact.

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Whitehead on Trusting and Distrusting the Ordinary So far I made several points regarding Whitehead: (1) that he pays suffcient attention to the difference between second-order philosophical jargon and frst-order originary discourse, (2) that he considers non-sensory forms of perception to be ordinary, so that (3) we should not limit his views on the ordinary to what he offcially claims about ordinary language, and (4) his going the bloody hard way on the questions of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility and trusting the ordinary should dissuade us from fnding full consistency in him. The fourth point is particularly important because Whitehead considers consistency to be one of the criteria for proper philosophical thinking (1929b, xiii, 51, 73–74, 158–59). Here, I can add a ffth point, namely that as frustrating as Whitehead’s inconsistency might be, it is a better alternative to the one-sided and short-sighted readings of him as a philosopher opposed to the relevance of ordinary forms of thinking and speaking to philosophical thinking. Regarding the issue of trusting the ordinary, I show in chapter 2 that although Whitehead rightly trusts how the ordinary sense of “being in the world” is philosophically relevant to making descriptive claims about the question of being as such—which is exemplifed mainly in his autobiographical notes (Whitehead 1947, 3–14)—he nonetheless accepts the philosophical context in which Plato and Aristotle discuss that question. The latter fact is unfortunate, I argue, because it entails a certain distrust of ordinary ways of being in the world. Still, when Whitehead’s two attitudes toward the ordinary are juxtaposed and his oscillation between trusting and distrusting the relevance of the ordinary for philosophical refection is revealed for what it is, the complexity of his position on the ordinary cannot be overlooked. This complexity cannot be resolved by simply claiming that Whitehead trusts

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ordinary language when it corroborates his correct metaphysical thinking and distrusts it when it does not. The circumstances of Whitehead’s trust and distrust of the ordinary are also important for a correct judgment of his position on ordinariness as such and, by implication, on philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. Thus, it is important to mention here that Whitehead’s suspicions about the full adequacy of ordinary language for making the metaphysical nature of reality intelligible precede his actual treatment of the Greek problem of the ultimate nature of reality. This is clear from his early discussions on the nature of science where he wonders not only about whether or not the new discoveries in quantum mechanics and relativity theory truly represent the world as it is in itself but also about whether the scientifc discourse needed to make the new ideas clear could be had by means of ordinary, commonsensical language. There is no indication that Whitehead’s early distrust of ordinary language— that is, prior to his full metaphysical and systematic stage of thinking about reality as such—is the reason he was led to dealing with the metaphysical problem of being as such. This fact, as well as his inclusion of normative thinking in his metaphysics, are crucial, as I explain next. The early cosmological thinking Whitehead displays prior to addressing the question of being as such is undertaken at the level of philosophy of science, not the full metaphysical thinking he develops later. At this stage, Whitehead’s early speculations about scientifc discourse illustrate not only the centrality of the question of the ordinary in his thinking but also the fact that he did not take the new sciences at the time as ordinary practices. In An Enquiry Concerning Natural Knowledge, for example, written in 1919, Whitehead claims that the new science at the time—the so-called old or frst-version-of quantum mechanics, albeit not Newtonian modern science—describes truths about the world that are more ultimate than the commonsensical truths of everyday life (1919, 4–6, 14–15). The latter are tied up with sensory perception and with a mechanistic understanding of nature, Whitehead argues, and accepting them turns nature falsely into a passive world of objects vis-à-vis the active human agents of perception (1919, 14–15). Whitehead wanted to show otherwise, and his discussion of quantum mechanics and relativity theory shows that he did not take them as ordinary human practices. Whitehead seems to have regarded only Newtonian discourse as ordinary—in the sense that he took it to be intuitive and commonsensical for both the average person and the traditional scientist. When investigating the ideas of space and time in The Concept of Nature, for example, he declares his intention “to consider how the ordinary views of time and space help, or fail to help, in unifying our conception of nature,” reaching the conclusion that both time and space are abstractions from ultimate events in the world

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that the ordinary usage of Newtonian physics, as well as of everyday life, cannot express properly (Whitehead 1920, 33–37). Whitehead thought there was a need for a new philosophy of science that is not ordinary in itself, even if he did not see the then newly developed quantum mechanics and relativity theory as ordinary. As Michael Epperson rightly states, Whitehead sought to create a philosophy that would supply “a suitable ontological framework” for the new sciences, seeing their emergence as an opportunity to provide his philosophy with empirical exemplifcation (Epperson 2004, 105). In thinking that Newtonian science is ordinary while quantum mechanics and relativity theory are not, Whitehead would have agreed with Stanley Rosen that what is extraordinary is that which goes beyond ordinary expectations. But he must have changed his mind on this issue later, albeit intuitively, when he treated the ordinary as that which is natural. After all, Whitehead does not reject the ordinariness of the natural, ultimate units of existence studied by quantum mechanics but only the ordinariness of the science itself. Although Whitehead does not put it in the following way, it makes sense to think of him as someone who saw quantum mechanics as a kind of philosophy of science rather than as science in the traditional sense of the term. I think that he saw himself to be offering a better philosophy of science than quantum physics and, from this perspective, neither his refections nor the investigations of quantum physics are ordinary, whether in terms of analysis or terminology. My own perspective is that we should treat all the sciences as ordinary activities, whether Newtonian, Einsteinian, or quantum-based. My reasoning here is that science as such deals with the behavior of natural phenomena, whether they behave mechanistically or otherwise. If, as Epperson states, conceptual paradoxes arise when scientists interpret the quantum world on the basis of classical ontologies (e.g., mechanistic materialism) and, therefore, a new language is seen to be required to account for the behavior of the sub-atomic world (2004, 1–2), this should not make the quantum world and the study of it nonordinary. As I suggested above, only second-order activities, ones that refect on and explicate the meaning of what is said at the frstorder level are nonordinary. Of course, the scientifc inquiry may take a philosophical turn when it raises clarifcatory questions about its subject matters, including the ultimate nature of the universe. When this happens, the scientifc ideas and truths promoted are grammatical, not ordinary, because of the elucidatory role they play when examining and explaining the world. One could say that science makes philosophical gestures when it employs philosophical analysis in its scientifc methodology. It is not philosophical in itself but it could employ philosophical analysis before reaching its scientifc conclusions. To give an example of what I have in mind here, think of the various discussions

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regarding the nature of electronic behavior at the subatomic level, and the relation between reality and observation in this regard. In 1926, the mathematician and theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl observed in regard to this topic that “the meaning of quantum physics, in spite of all its achievements, is not yet clarifed as thoroughly as, for instance, the ideas underlying relativity theory” (Colodny 1972, xiii). He noted that the relation of observation to reality is “the central problem” of quantum physics, and that it requires “a deeper epistemological analysis of what constitutes an experiment, a measurement, and what sort of language is used to communicate its results” (1972, xiii). When he fnally reaches a conclusion about the language to be used to communicate the intelligible results of analyzing the observation-reality problem, Weyl decides that it should be either the language of classical physics, which he thinks Niels Bohr favored, or the “natural language” of everyday life (Colodny 1972, xiii). It is clear, however, that he enlisted the help of philosophy to clarify complex scientifc data. In Whitehead’s case, he wondered in his early refections on how to express the difference between the kinds of intelligibility and truths offered by quantum physics and Einstein’s general and special relativity theories, on the one hand, and the kinds of intelligibility and truths believed in everyday life outside of science, on the other hand. Like Weyl, he realized that the new sciences needed to venture outside the confnes of their disciplines to offer clarity of expression. When he later took the next step of linking his thoughts about nature with the problem of perception and the latter’s relation to causality and language, he entered the realm of metaphysical thinking. Demarcating the difference between science and philosophy in Whitehead is not as crucial as pointing out the levels of generality he endorses as he moves from ordinary scientifc and mathematical speculations toward relating these speculations to all experience, including ordinary people’s religious, ethical, political, and aesthetic experience. Whitehead’s aim expanded from understanding the universe as such, one might say, to reality as such. In this, Whitehead is entirely Aristotelian. As I show in the next chapter, Whitehead’s later desire to solve the ultimate metaphysical problem he fnds in Plato and Aristotle is one of the reasons he was led to the philosophical position of distrusting common language when philosophizing about the nature of reality as such. The earlier distrust in ordinary language, the one rooted in philosophical refections on scientifc data, was reawakened in Whitehead when he shifted his thinking to the Greeks. But, as should also become clear from chapter 2, I do not think that his distrustful position when dealing with the question of being as such should be taken to represent the full metaphysical picture he developed regarding questions of knowledge and skepticism. It is crucial to repeat here that there is no evidence to suggest that Whitehead’s interest in the nature of language is that which led him to study

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the problem of being in Greek philosophy. Rather, it is most likely the latter that led him to delve further into the problem of ordinary language. This is important for the simple reason that his views on ordinary language, trusting it in one context but not in another, do not refect a predetermined view concerning ordinary language as something that cannot be trusted at all. In his later philosophy, Whitehead connects his trust in ordinary language with his response to the analytic distrust of speculative thinking, stating that he wanted to show otherwise. His perspective is therefore reactionary: the trust in speculative thinking, particularly when dealing with the age-old problem of being as such, suggests that ordinary language cannot be trusted. If so, this cannot be the full context for unpacking Whitehead’s views on ordinariness. When Whitehead’s views on the ordinary are extended to include that which counts as natural for him—for example, both sensory and non-sensory perceptions, ordinary scientifc and commonsensical knowledge, and, as I show in chapter 4, both natural and artifcial forms of symbolism—his understanding of the nature of philosophy and his actual practicing of it become relevant for the question of how to fully understand his views on the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibility toward intelligibility. My argument in this context is that Whitehead oscillates unwittingly in his practice of philosophy between treating it as a descriptive activity, on the one hand, and as a normative activity, on the other hand. In the next section I explain the differences between these two kinds of activity in Whitehead with the help of Kierkegaard, touching simultaneously on the relevance of this difference for the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility.

KIERKEGAARD, WHITEHEAD, AND THE QUEST FOR PHILOSOPHY’S RESPONSIBILITIES

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Kierkegaard on Philosophy and the Monstrous Illusion In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard points out that many of his contemporary Danes suffered from a “dreadful” and “monstrous” illusion, one that he connected with what it means to be a Christian (1998, 41–56). There are two dimensions to this illusion, one of which is conceptual and pertains explicitly to confusion regarding the meaning of certain Christian concepts—for example, the concept of “eternal life”—and another dimension that is practical, pertaining to accepting one’s Christian customs and practices simply because one is born into a Christian family and thinking this is suffcient to make one truly Christian. Since the frst dimension involves confusion about the meaning of concepts, it is properly described by Kierkegaard as an illusion,

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but the second dimension has less to do with conceptual confusion and Kierkegaard rightly describes it as a delusion. One example where the delusional aspect of being Christian is evident for Kierkegaard involves attending church. If so-called Christians “never once go to church, never think about God, never name his name except when they curse!,” something of which Kierkegaard accused his fellow Danes, then they are not really Christian, he states (1998, 41). When they do bother to attend church at all, he suggests, but do not take Christian discourse and worship seriously after they depart the church’s doors— for example, by not implementing what they heard and said during the Sunday service—they would be delusional if they still thought they are Christians. For Kierkegaard, true Christians are those who worship and remember God throughout the whole week, so to speak, in their daily actions and interactions with others, and not only during services in the church. Continuing to use the language heard during the sermons without feeling any duty to implement its meaning is irresponsible, and this kind of action is not Christian. The illusional aspect of thinking one is Christian when one is not has a different focus about it than the delusional aspect. Those who typically suffer from the illusion of thinking they are Christian divide life into two ages, Kierkegaard states. The frst age is the younger age of aesthetic enjoyment which, it is believed, ought to be fully lived until one gets older and whereupon the second age is opened for that person to turn to religion and prepare for the reception of the eternal life (Kierkegaard 1998, 48). There is a delusional side to this thinking, in that so-called Christians think they may receive the eternal life due to the sheer fact that they are born into a Christian family. But this kind of thinking also displays the “pernicious error,” as Kierkegaard puts it, of “confusing becoming older in the sense of time with becoming older in the sense of eternity” (1998, 48). This aspect of the illusion involves conceptual confusion. The eternal life is not something to be postponed until one is old in age and because one could not remain in the young, aesthetic stage of existence longer than is possible, Kierkegaard states. Rather, the eternal life has an ethical-religious sense to it, one linked to the presence of the divine in one’s life, both young and old, and where the teachings of Jesus are appropriated. Kierkegaard gauges the temporal expectation his contemporaries held in regard to eternity to be confused, an illusion. But, as I explain below, Kierkegaard’s ultimate aim is not simply to point out conceptual confusion. He took the commitment to genuine Christian beliefs and values one step further and argued that Christians are required to die to their aesthetic and ethical selves. What he meant by this is that true Christians need to abandon lives that are centered on selfsh and sheer aesthetic thinking, and to

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become religious selves, centering their lives around God (Kierkegaard 1998, 43). In promoting this aim, Kierkegaard acts as a normative thinker, not a philosopher. Nothing in what Kierkegaard states about the illusional and delusional aspects of being Christian suggests that there is a causal link between them, however. People could easily be delusional about certain aspects of Christianity—for example, inheriting the eternal life—without having been led there through conceptual confusion, for example by not living out what is expected of them regarding the ethics of inheriting the eternal life. Similarly, people could be confused about how to conceptualize the meaning of the eternal life and yet live their lives on ethical and religious levels that correctly exemplify that meaning. Still, Kierkegaard suggests that the two dimensions are connected since the illusion could arise, and even get worse, as a result of being delusional. As he puts it, although the illusion about what it means to be Christian is “very common,” it “is worsened by the very delusion that one is a Christian” (1998, 48). How could this be if there is no necessary causal link between illusions and delusions? The answer to this question is tied up with the answer to the question about philosophy’s responsibility toward explicating the intelligibility of the ordinary life. The illusion Kierkegaard accentuates refects a loss of intelligibility from which any Christian could suffer if the ordinary meaning of Christian concepts is lost. To prevent this loss from continuing and to prevent skeptics from denying intelligibility to Christian discourse, Kierkegaard surmises that philosophy can help, but he thinks the philosopher needs to be patient and to avoid communicating about the illusion and the true meaning of Christian life in a direct, religious way. “No, an illusion can never be removed directly,” he writes, “and if something is to be done, it must be done indirectly, not by someone who loudly declares himself to be an extraordinary Christian, but by someone who, better informed, even declares himself not to be a Christian” (Kierkegaard 1998, 43). This “someone” is the religious author acting as a philosopher, according to Kierkegaard, one “whose total thought is what it means to be a Christian” and who is able to fght the skepticism about the intelligibility of Christian discourse and to assist in ending the delusions and illusions from which Christians suffer, “from behind” so to speak, by showing Christians how they arrived at them (1998, 43). From this perspective, the religious author “starts out with being an aesthetic author,” aiming to bring Christians to a true sense of Christianity without antagonizing them through either direct attacks or direct preaching (Kierkegaard 1998, 43, 47–49). There is a need for that author to use philosophical thinking, to entice the people in need of conversion to learn for themselves where they got Christianity wrong. Kierkegaard’s ultimate objective in all of this is not simply to describe the loss of intelligibility in regard to

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how the ordinary Christian life ought to be understood, but to lead people out of the aesthetic and ethical stages of life into a religious stage refective of the true Christian values he associates with it. The indirect approach he adopts to bring Christians to see their confusion about their faith and the eternal life has a normative objective, one might say, which is to bring people back to a true sense of faith that they can adopt. It is true that there is something about the descriptive task of philosophy that cannot be emulated religiously or ethically, namely its ability to respond logically to the kind of skepticism that denies sense where sense exists. Should those who commit the monstrous illusion deny that they were confused about what it means to be Christian and claim that Kierkegaard’s elucidations of the true Christian life are mistaken, for example, they would then be skeptics who deny the sense and intelligibility he attributes to Christian concepts, regardless of whether or not they are right about their perspective. Kierkegaard’s indirect method of showing how they arrived at their perspective, seen by him as a form of confusion, would be a philosophical attempt to deal with their skepticism. And had he stopped at this point in his analysis, Kierkegaard would have acted as a descriptive philosopher, but he does not. He is intellectually invested in clarifying Christian discourse for the normative aim of making it effective on a religious level. In this, he carries a strong affnity with Socrates who also used philosophy to advocate normative objectives—in his case, the moral objective of promoting an authentic, decent life without focus on economic proft that is rooted in selfshness. A similar affnity exists with Whitehead as well, as I show below. An actual reinstatement of intelligible discourse in Christians who lost, or lacked, the needed intelligibility requires a transforming change in their lives to refect the values they endorse, but this cannot happen unless the skepticism and lack of intelligibility are traced back to their sources, Kierkegaard suggests. This is the same suggestion one fnds in Wittgenstein’s critique of James Frazer in regard to how to understand the practices and rituals in primal cultures (Wittgenstein 1993, 119ff.). In both cases, ordinary practices are the context within which philosophy needs to operate in order to discover what makes and does not make sense, and in order to determine the truth about whether or not people mean what they say. Thus, there is a strong link between intelligibility and the ordinary life in that intelligibility is rooted in how the ordinary life, including ordinary discourse, functions, which is to say in how the ordinary life is real and actual. My use of Kierkegaard in this section is meant to serve as one of several potential examples in regard to how philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility makes its appearance and what aspects it takes. Regardless of whether or not Kierkegaard is correct in his hermeneutical approach to the Christian life and in promoting an indirect way of dealing with the illusions and

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delusions from which some of his contemporary Danes suffered, it is clear that he assigns philosophy a responsibility that has a therapeutic, practical function. As I suggested, this fact gives his philosophical thinking a normative aspect beyond its descriptive analysis of concepts. When philosophy elucidates certain confusions in people’s thinking about life by focusing on how the concepts they employ are understood and appropriated in that particular life, it acts descriptively and this is true of Kierkegaard’s method of thinking and analysis. But the elucidations of the monstrous illusion he provides, descriptive as they are of the sense and intelligibility that the Christian faith has and does not have, are accompanied by a normative interest. As mentioned, the illusional and delusional dimensions of the existential problem Kierkegaard ascribes to his contemporary Danes go hand in hand, without a causal link. Although the idea of giving philosophy a normative side could be explained by his being a religious thinker who is focused on turning people into God-oriented Christians, the point I am stressing is that philosophy for him is rooted in a normative outlook, a fact that links him intellectually to Whitehead. As I show next, the mixture of descriptive and normative aspects in philosophy is also characteristic of the philosophical approach Whitehead adopts. The Kierkegaardian prelude should be helpful in demonstrating that Whitehead does not give up on philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility and the fght against skepticism, whether in regard to perception, knowledge, language, or God.

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Whitehead and the Humanitarian Ideal The following well-known formulations about metaphysics, speculative philosophy, and philosophic method reveal the heavy emphasis Whitehead puts on the descriptive, disinterested nature of philosophy: “The main method of philosophy in dealing with its evidence is that of descriptive generalization” (Whitehead 1933, 234); “Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities which apply to all the details of practice” (1929b, 13) or “By ‘metaphysics’ I mean the science which seeks to discover the general ideas which are indispensably relevant to the analysis of everything that happens” (1926, 84); and “Speculative philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (1929b, 3). Aristotle gains Whitehead’s admiration mainly because Whitehead sees him as a disinterested philosopher, “the last European metaphysician of frst rate importance” for whom the claim that “he was entirely dispassionate” can be made when it comes to the ultimate foundations of reality (1925, 173). Biases seep into the thinker’s mind when refections go beyond description, as they did after Aristotle—“After Aristotle, ethical and religious interests began to infuence

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metaphysical conclusions” (1925, 173)—and dispassionate philosophy is the cure. Avoiding the mentioned biases is one of the reasons I advocate for away from normative thinking in philosophy. But after reading Whitehead’s thinking about metaphysics and its methods of analysis, how can I or anyone else make the case that there is an element of normative thinking in his philosophy? My contention here is that although signifcant references to the duty of the philosopher to understand, interpret, and analyze are scattered throughout Whitehead’s works, there is a complementary, normative side to this hermeneutical-descriptive part of his philosophy. As with Kierkegaard, this normative side is as important to Whitehead as the descriptive side, even if it is not dominant in his explicit references to the nature and tasks of philosophy. This is evident, for example, in his treatment of the humanitarian ideal, even when Whitehead remains somewhat descriptive in discussing it. Whitehead introduces the idea of the humanitarian ideal in Adventures of Ideas, describing it as “a certain ideal for life on this earth” that, if fulflled, would constitute a “civilized” form of democratic existence (1933, 273). The latter means for Whitehead that people would be able to express their freedom and to live in a harmonious kinship, both as individuals and in communities (1933, 28–56). The particular kinship Whitehead has in mind entails living according to values that endorse “the essential rights of human beings, arising from their sheer humanity,” and these values include tolerance, friendship, freedom, equality, and the possibility of growth in moral understanding (1933, 13, 28–56). In making these judgments about civilization, freedom, and ethics, Whitehead is somewhat descriptive in his approach. He looks at history to see where the specifc idea of ethical freedom had its origins and concludes that the humanitarian ideal suggesting it has its origins and inspiration in Platonic-Stoic-Christian thinking. His diagnosis of this form of thinking as one that emphasizes the presence of ethical freedom in history, as well as the intuition that there is something divine and changeless in the changing world, is also a descriptive move on Whitehead’s part. Civilization would not have come about without freedom, he reasons, particularly the kind of ethical freedom that transcends “thoughtless customs” (1933, 10–14, 49). He concludes that a harmonious kinship is possible in this world, as for instance when individuals within communities use discourse to persuade one another about the importance of certain issues related to morality and civic coexistence—for example, social tolerance and fair economic, political, and legal systems of governance. This conclusion is partially descriptive and partially normative in orientation, and it seems to be rooted in Whitehead’s judgment that when people grow in their ethical understanding of themselves and the

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world surrounding them, communities in the world could achieve the desired harmonious kinship. If Whitehead’s conclusions regarding the growth of moral understanding are partially normative, his tone of voice when describing the humanitarian ideal is very normative. He clearly favors the development of democratic principles over “thoughtless customs,” for example, and his admiration for the ethical freedom suggested in the Platonic-Stoic-Christian way of thinking is not neutral. Whitehead is aware of the facet that Plato’s Republic is an expression of the normative relevance of philosophy to life—promoting civic virtues that allow people to fulfll their social functions in a happy, harmonious society—and he acknowledges that, at their best, Stoicism and Christianity promote the common good. Whitehead also pays particular attention to slavery when considering the humanitarian ideal, and he does so on both descriptive and normative grounds. In contrast to ancient political theorists who presupposed the need for slavery in order for civilized existence to have come about, and to continue to sustain itself, he states, modern political theorists were right to reject this presupposition and to replace it with an emphasis on ethical freedom (1933, 13). But even if the ancient theorists felt morally uncomfortable about the necessity of slavery for civilized existence, Whitehead further suggests, they could not think otherwise, and this fact makes their idea of civilization lacking in what he takes to be the humanitarian ideal. In the latter form of ideal existence, an intrinsic, normative form of human rights is emphasized:

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This growth of the idea of the essential rights of human beings, arising from their sheer humanity, affords a striking example in the history of ideas. Its formation and its effective diffusion can be reckoned as a triumph—a chequered triumph—of the later phase of civilization. (Whitehead 1933, 13–14)

I think this short paragraph should make it clear that Whitehead is not completely neutral, or descriptive, in his thinking about freedom, slavery, and the humanitarian ideal. The reference to the “chequered triumph” of freedom over slavery in civilized existence, properly understood, is not a descriptive reference to something that happened in history but a normative reference. It expresses that which Whitehead fnds positive in the growth of civilized existence: more emphasis on ethical freedom and less use of force to create harmonious co-existence within and between human societies (1933, 56, 85). The same goes for his claim that it is better to have human existence with civilization and slavery in it if the only alternative is no civilization at all. Whitehead is a realist in this matter, acknowledging that the harmony needed for human existence will always require the use of a certain amount of force.

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His moral realism is also shown in his acknowledgment that, most likely, Plato owned slaves when he wrote his political theory about the soul and human freedom (1933, 14). If Whitehead’s analysis of what a desirable civilization looks like suggests that he thinks of philosophy as a discipline that could make normative claims about the humanitarian ideal, this impression can also be drawn, as I explain next, from his analysis of the fve qualities he associates with a desirable civilization: beauty, adventure, art, truth, and peace. These fve qualities are not simply Whitehead’s own desirable qualities for what civilization should look like, but there is certainly a normative favor in choosing them over other qualities. The reference to peace as a gift (1933, 285) is certainly a normative claim, for example, particularly when it is juxtaposed with Whitehead’s claim about the value of goodness in the history of humanity. Whitehead sees beauty as a metaphysical necessity, one rooted in the immanence of a metaphysical God in the physical universe. This is beauty discovered, one might say, even when it is said to be infused with adventure, art, and truth (1933, 265–76). In linking beauty with the idea of adventure, Whitehead defnes non-static adventure as the essence of the universe (1933, 275), and beauty, further, as “the mutual adaptation of the several factors” constituting adventurous experience (1933, 252). He uses the words “adventure” and “beauty” here in a grammatical, analytic fashion, not normative, in that he analyzes the meanings of these terms based on how they are applied in real life. This grammatical move might also be true of his suggestion that when truth contributes to the realization of beauty, or harmony, it gains an ethical level of goodness. As Whitehead boldly states: “The real world is good when it is beautiful” (1933, 268). As for peace, Whitehead sees it as something that is granted to humanity as a divine gesture of grace, a gift that allows humanity to bind together truth, beauty, adventure, and art into a harmony of harmonies (1933, 274–86). Whitehead expresses his personal, moral preference for a desirable civilization in various ways, including the belief that philosophy should promote it. In addition to arguing that metaphysical analysis demonstrates the necessity of beauty, adventure, art, and peace in the world, for example, his reference to the role of philosophy in explicating the humanitarian ideal reveals how he thinks there are philosophical grounds to show that slavery is unjustifable. This is evident in his view that philosophy has the responsibility of creating a “philosophy of life,” as he puts it, where the ideal of a humanitarian form of existence could emerge (1933, 98). One way in which philosophy could do that is by providing justifcation for the pursuit of an ethical golden mean that avoids the extremes of the unrestricted use of freedom, on the one hand, and complete determinism, on the other hand (1933, 109). This Aristotelian move is normative.

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What should be clear from the above is that the language of philosophical justifcation is mixed in Whitehead’s thinking with personal moral judgments. On the one hand, people “are driven by their thoughts as well as by the molecules in their bodies, by intelligence and by senseless forces,” he writes, and, in most cases, they “cannot escape habits of mind which cling closely to habits of body” (1933, 46). But, on the other hand, the intelligence that includes philosophical reasoning is seen as something that allows humanity to rise above bad habits of the mind. Whitehead acknowledges that excessiveness is sometimes necessary for human greatness, and that foresight, by which I think he means philosophical, or at least intellectual, foresight, promotes the humanitarian ideal (1933, 109, 98). If my analysis is correct, we need to go beyond a one-sided, surface reading of Adventure of Ideas as a text in which Whitehead simply describes the humanitarian ideal and points out where, when, and how human rights and anti-slavery positions developed. Yes, Whitehead explains that the term “Ideas” in the title of the book refers to the sociological and scientifc ideas that promoted the slow drift of humanity toward an ethical and intellectual civilization, whether in religion, politics, science, law, morality, or philosophy. He wanted to understand and show how civilized people came about, and his analysis is often descriptive and analytic—seeking to show not only what led to the envisagement of the humanitarian ideal in human history but also the implicit presuppositions regarding it within human reasoning (1933, 295). He is also descriptive when he states that ethical freedom is something discovered by humans, not something they are born with, and he gives the examples of Akhenaton and the Hebrews as agents of action that exercised freedom without conceiving it theoretically (1933, 49ff.). This descriptive orientation is also true of referencing Pericles’s explicit defense of social tolerance as the reason for a moral stance to develop on ethical freedom. All of these gestures are descriptive and interpretive even when Whitehead stipulates that ethical freedom needs to include tolerance. But when Whitehead rejects certain types of ethical freedom because they do not include tolerance, and when he shows partiality toward particular types of tolerant freedom—as the above reference to the triumph of a later phase of civilization in promoting the free, essential rights of human beings, albeit checkered, demonstrates—how can he be seen as only descriptive and disinterested in his approach? Whitehead’s linking ethical freedom with God’s grace, albeit indirectly, is also the result of normative thinking, it seems to me. If one takes a deeper look not only at Whitehead’s language when discussing the humanitarian ideal and the place of slavery in it, but also at the role of philosophy in explicating the humanitarian ideal, the normative aim in his thinking as a philosopher clearly comes to the surface. This should also be clear from the similarity he shares with Socrates and Kierkegaard on this

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point, a similarity that is also present in the following statement from 1932: “Philosophy should now perform its fnal service. It should seek the insight, dim though it be, to escape the wide wreckage of a race of beings sensitive to values beyond those of mere animal enjoyment” (Whitehead 1933, 159). The parallel to Socrates and Kierkegaard is clear from the call of the latter two to move beyond an aesthetic stage of human existence toward an ethical stage and, in Kierkegaard’s case, toward a religious stage that has the Christian God at its center. There is also a religious aspect to Whitehead’s normative thinking, albeit in a more general way than Kierkegaard’s Christian thinking. In Religion in the Making, for example, he promotes a purifed version of religion where humanity is asked to attempt to imitate the goodness of God (Whitehead 1926, 40). Like Kierkegaard, Whitehead thinks that it is ethically dangerous to worship the wrong God and, therefore, to have the wrong conception of what worship means. But, as I show in chapter 6, Whitehead’s God is frst and foremost a metaphysical reality, one that provides relevant possibilities of fulfllment for people in the form of initial aims towards novelty, creativity, adventure, and intensity of experience. Nonetheless, Whitehead gives philosophy a conceptual role that, interestingly, holds strong normative similarities to God’s metaphysical role in the world. In both contexts, there is normative guidance through “persuasive intercourse” that could lead to harmonious existence between different communities (1933, 11, 69). Finally, the mixture of descriptive and normative aspects to philosophy in Whitehead has additional presence in his promotion of the common good in Symbolism. I discuss this point in chapter 3, demonstrating, among other things, Whitehead’s view that limiting oneself to instinct and non-symbolic reactions to the world results in destructive outcomes. Philosophy’s normativity here resides in its responsibility to show how the “enveloping suggestiveness” and “emotional effcacy” of ordinary language could be utilized in “symbolically conditioned actions,” as Whitehead puts it, that lead to the common good (1927, 67, 78–81). The humanitarian ideal is, of course, an ideal toward the common good. Whitehead’s interest in language beyond its mere indication of meaning puts him in line not only with Socrates and Kierkegaard but also with a host of thinkers who believe that the intellectual’s role in society includes the responsibility of reforming it for a common good. John Dewey, a normative philosopher admired by Whitehead, comes immediately to mind, but also Judith Butler, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Each one of these thinkers proclaims a different way of showing the relevance of philosophy for the ordinary notion of the common good, whether on the small scale of a particular community or the larger scale of humanity as such. But they all promote the common good with the help of philosophy, directly or indirectly,

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and in the cases of Whitehead, Socrates, and Kierkegaard, there is a shared interest in combatting skepticism, the brief subject matter of the next section.

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THINKING FORWARD: SKEPTICISM AND PHILOSOPHY’S RESPONSIBILITY TO INTELLIGIBILITY I argued so far that Whitehead’s descriptive metaphysics incorporates the responsibility of normativizing a particular, ethical way of seeing the world beyond simply portraying it as it is. I also argued that his trust and distrust of the ordinary arise in both contexts, the normative and descriptive, but that Whitehead seems to show more trust in the ordinary when he engages in normative thinking than in descriptive analysis. This is clear, I suggested, from his promotion of the humanitarian ideal. Whitehead not only describes how the ideal came about and what it entails but, as the language he uses demonstrates, he also promotes developing the humanitarian ideal for the future of humanity. How else should one understand Whitehead’s use of religious and aesthetic judgments when he is being descriptive, I asked—for example, the benefts that could develop due to the emergence of religion and the humanitarian ideal? In these normative judgments, philosophy gains a normative responsibility toward life and the common good, expressed in aesthetic and socio-ethical responsibilities. It is not clear, however, that Whitehead intended to provide philosophical justifcation for how and why the descriptive task of philosophy should be normative. He does not explicitly argue for this crossover in philosophy’s responsibilities, although he clearly provides an argument as to why philosophy should be descriptive. Still, Whitehead certainly employs both tasks in his work and one question to ask here is whether he can sustain coherence and avoid reducing philosophy to a therapeutic discipline when he engages in normative philosophizing about the world? In other words, is it possible at all to reconcile the descriptive and normative in Whitehead’s thinking regarding the various issues on which he combines them? Another question to ask is whether his practice of philosophy in a normative-descriptive fashion allows him to avoid skepticism regarding sense? Regarding the potential of Whitehead’s reducing of philosophy into a therapeutic activity, this threat cannot be taken seriously. After all, even when he engages in normative recommendations about ideal forms of existence, he does not lose sight of the importance of continuing to engage in description and explanation. But the threats of skepticism and incoherence loom large because of the tension between the normative and descriptive ways of conducting a philosophical inquiry. I delve into these threats in the chapters to follow. Here, toward the end of this chapter, I want to emphasize that I am sympathetic

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to the idea that philosophy should not be divorced from real life, and that I think it could provide a successful response to skepticism. I agree with Mary Warnock’s critique of moral philosophy in her small but important book Ethics since 1900, where she argues, against the logical positivists, that we should not put a gap between moral philosophy and moral action in the way they suggest. As she rightly states, philosophers trivialize ethics if they make its focus on the analysis of moral language irrelevant to life (Warnock 1969, 144). Still, in my view, philosophy cannot show that one moral perspective is better than another on neutral grounds, and I think Warnock goes too far in making the relevance of moral philosophy to life one of telling people how they ought to live their lives. I believe that the outcome of actualizing philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility leads to clarity in regard to the values people actually hold, or should hold, in their daily lives. Certainly, as Warnock states, we make our impact on the world through forms of interaction in which we evaluate, deliberate, love, hate, and wish things for others (1969, 144), but how could the philosophical guidance to life be justifed on normative grounds when normativity is many rather than one or, put differently, when normative rationality is many? Warnock is not against the method of linguistic analysis itself, but only against how this method has been applied to ethics (1969, 144). She thinks the irrational refusal of some British moral philosophers in the twentieth century to state moral opinions has trivialized the subject matter of ethics (Warnock 1969, 144–45). But what she does not state explicitly is that these philosophers—G. E. Moore being her primary example—do not express moral opinions when philosophizing, not that they do not do so in everyday life. My point, again, is not that philosophy is irrelevant to real life, but that we need to consider how the relevance ought to take place. If philosophy becomes a guide to ordinary life, a normatively responsible guide, what philosophical justifcation could philosophers provide for this guidance? To whom will the task of being just towards all perspectives, good and evil, fall if a particular normative outlook is the framework from which philosophy will operate? Put differently, how is philosophy different from other disciplines that advocate particular forms of human fourishing? Warnock trivializes the importance of the distinction between the evaluative and descriptive tasks of moral philosophy when she ignores this question. I think that philosophers ought to leave the normativizing task to disciplines that try to persuade people to adopt particular norms, be it politics, practical theology, normative ethics, religion, aesthetics, or other normative contexts such as literature. In these contexts, people can have healthy debates about the merits of their particularized reasons and viewpoints, and can strive to persuade one another regarding these merits. The persuasion, if it works, will be based on different rationales, not a neutral ground, as the latter ground does not make sense in normative practices.

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Chapter 2

Speculating on Being in the World with Plato and Aristotle

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INTRODUCTORY REMARKS In chapter 1, I suggested that Whitehead’s assignment of normative functions to philosophy is one reason for his hermeneutical oscillation between trusting and distrusting the ordinary for philosophizing about the world. His discussion of the humanitarian ideal demonstrates that his philosophical intentions are not limited to describing and analyzing human knowledge or the world, but that he is also a reformer at heart. Furthermore, Whitehead clearly trusts the intelligibility that ordinary concepts provide when focusing on philosophy’s moral responsibility toward human fourishing. His distrust of the ordinary emerges, I suggested, when he begins thinking about philosophy’s need to appropriate new scientifc discoveries to explain the world as it is in itself and, aslo, when he criticizes the tendency among some analytic philosophers to distrust speculative thinking. But I also suggested not to make a sharp divide in Whitehead between trusting the ordinary only when philosophizing normatively and distrusting it when philosophizing metaphysically and descriptively. There are many places in his writings where Whitehead demonstrates trust in the ordinary when he is engaged in description and analysis. In this chapter I explore this trust in his philosophically oriented autobiographical notes, written late in his life (in 1941), and I discuss them in the context of his engagement with the big question about the ultimate nature of reality. I introduce the latter topic before I turn to his autobiographical notes, but I argue that these notes refect a combination of normative and descriptive forms of analysis, and that they reveal his trust in ordinariness when describing the aims of existence and the nature of reality. In regard to the latter, I argue that Whitehead’s early hesitation about the suitability of ordinary language for describing the world 31

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of quantum physics and relativity theory receives a boost from his engagement with Greek thought on the question of the ultimate nature of reality. More specifcally, I argue that Whitehead’s acceptance of the terms that the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle set for discussing the question of reality led to the full development in him of a distrustful stance regarding the relevance of the ordinary for an accurate understanding of the nature of reality as such. In chapter 1, I focused on Whitehead’s remarks from An Enquiry Concerning Natural Knowledge, written in 1919, when mentioning his early suspicions about the adequacy of ordinary language for scientifc and philosophical refections on how things are. I want to add here that Whitehead’s skepticism about this issue goes back even further, and his 1916 presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences, titled “The Organization of Thought,” gives us a good idea about his frst published thoughts on the question of the ordinary (Whitehead 1917). Whitehead argues in that lecture that “science” need not wait for metaphysics to have a topic of its own, and that its “homely starting ground” is rooted in “the discovery of the relations which exist within that fux of perceptions, sensations, and emotions which forms our experience of life” (1917, 411). Focusing on “the theoretical side of science,” as he puts it, Whitehead includes in his defnition of “science” all the disciplines that organize human understanding: logic, geometry, algebra, and mathematics as such (1917, 410–12). All of these organizing activities work to put order into a fragmented and disorderly human experience, either singularly or collectively, but when ordinary language is commissioned for the task, Whitehead states, its exactness fails the task of the needed organization and it ends up concealing the nuanced complexity of the actual world. He writes: I insist on the radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of the felds of actual experience from which science starts. To grasp this fundamental truth is the frst step in wisdom, when constructing a philosophy of science. This fact is concealed by the infuence of language, moulded by science, which foists on us exact concepts as though they represented the immediate deliverances of experience. (Whitehead 1917, 411)

Whitehead gives several examples in his address that are aimed at demonstrating the diffculty of using ordinary language for assisting in the organization of thought. When considering the notion of a “point” and how points compose space, he argues, the question arises as to how the scientifc notion of a “point” could derive from the everyday, sensory-based language of “space” and its relation to the physical objects occupying it (1917, 418). After all, “points are not direct deliverances of the senses,” he states, and “[o]ur knowledge of space properties is not based on any observations of relations

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between points” but “arise from experience of relations between bodies” (1917, 418). Furthermore, if we use the ordinary language of “whole and part” to explain “relations between points” when the latter points are within bodies that are parts of other bodies, we fnd ourselves engaged in circular reasoning since, in ordinary language, wholes and parts are more fundamental than points (Whitehead 1917, 418). Whatever we think about the example of points and their relation to space, it should be clear that Whitehead’s early endeavors in philosophy of science contain distrustful references to the suitability of ordinary language for assisting in making sense of the nature of reality. These references preceded, and perhaps shaped, Whitehead’s reading of the Greek literature on the question of being, and I show in what follows that his distrust of the ordinary intensifed when he delved into the Greek literature on the question of being as such. I shall argue that this specifc distrust is problematic, however, because it entails a commitment to a one-sided way of thinking about reality, one that contradicts Whitehead’s philosophical commitment to all forms of experience, ordinary and non-ordinary. If my analysis is accurate, then Whitehead’s relation to the ordinary cannot be reduced to simply an either-or situation: either rejecting the relevance of the ordinary for philosophical refection or accepting it without criticism. When philosophizing, Whitehead mostly separates the philosopher’s hat from the ordinary Whitehead’s hat but he also confates them on occasions, and when he does the latter, the borderlines for the sharp divide between trusting and distrusting the ordinary become fuid. Ironically, it is Whitehead’s normative-reformist attitude in his autobiographical notes and, to a certain extent, on the humanitarian ideal, that saves him from losing the intelligibility of the concept of being. The irony here resides in the fact that the descriptive aspect of philosophy is that which is meant to guarantee intelligibility. I do think that Whitehead would have been better off, as a philosopher, had he avoided the normative at all in his philosophy. But, as I suggested in the Introduction, Whitehead’s laudable appreciation for the diffculties of philosophy is partially responsible for his oscillation between trusting and distrusting the ordinary. In trying to be responsible to the metaphysical framework he inherited from the Greeks, Whitehead opens up his philosophy to legitimate skepticism regarding what it means to be in the world, whether on ordinary or philosophical levels. What I have in mind here is the kind of skepticism that doubts whether any explanatory account of reality is relevant to how people live and express themselves in everyday life. I discuss this issue later in the chapter and also in chapter 5. If the mentioned skepticism is valid, it raises challenges for how to make philosophy relevant to life even if the theories it generates are applicable to life on an explanatory level. My basic assumption here,

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which I explained in the Introduction and will elaborate on in later chapters, is that the ordinary life has to be the starting point for philosophizing about the nature of what is real. Otherwise, philosophy risks being irrelevant to life and it could fail in fulflling its responsibility to the intelligibility of that life.

WHITEHEAD AND THE GREEK INTEREST IN THE QUESTION OF BEING

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Whitehead on the Early Greek Interest in the Question of Being That Whitehead had an invested interest in Greek philosophy and literature is very clear from his various discussions of Plato, Aristotle, the Presocratics, and the Greek tragedians. I focus mainly on the Presocratics in this section, but since Whitehead fnds an interestingly connotative link between modern science and Greek tragedies, a few comments here on this link would be appropriate, particularly in relation to the question of being as such. Whitehead states that “[t]he pilgrim fathers of the scientifc imagination as it exists today are the great tragedians of ancient Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides” (1925, 10). More specifcally, he thought the dramatic art of the early Greek tragedians provides a vision of fate that had an explanatory role in the lives of the Greeks similarly to the role that the idea of order played in early modern science. “Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought,” Whitehead suggests, because independent laws of action are at work in both contexts—the laws of nature for science and the laws of fate for the Greeks (1925, 10–11).1 But, having already developed his critique of the restricting infuence that ordinary language exerts on science, Whitehead reaches the conclusion that the intuitions of the early Greeks are better than those of the modern scientists on the nature of how things are. This conclusion is interesting and understandable considering his overall metaphysical orientation. Under the infuence of ordinary language, he states, the mechanistic attitude of modern science describes only the abstract nature of reality—that is, the abstract entities constituting the physical objects of the world—while overlooking its ultimate and concrete nature (Whitehead 1925, 75–79). In contrast, the early Greek poets were able to experience nature as something alive and organismic, and so they went beyond mechanistic causation and accepted fnal causation, or purpose, in the idea of fate (Whitehead 1925, 80). What is important about the organismic intuition that Whitehead endorses, one he thought to exist also in Wordsworth and Shelley, is that it is a natural, ordinary form of intuition. Whitehead believed that it gives people access to

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something true about the world beyond what science was capable of at the time (1925, 10, 76, 83–85). It is in this context that he sees modern science to have “started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle’s successors” (Whitehead 1925, 16), namely their focus on effcient causality and materialistic thinking to explain the world. But Whitehead is not one-sided on this issue. The ultimate mission of philosophy, he states, is “to transcend the existing analysis of facts” without excluding them, and this should be possible when nature is seen as both mechanistic and organismic (Whitehead 1929b, 68). He himself combines these two ways of explaining nature in his metaphysics, describing his position as one of “organic mechanism” and explaining that the mechanistic part refects the exterior manifestation of nature’s ultimate, organismic nature (Whitehead 1925, 80). Organic mechanism refects nature as a whole. Whitehead credits Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and William Whewell for noticing a certain weakness in the early Greek thinkers’ usage of ordinary Greek language (1929b, 12–13). He now has the Presocratics in mind, not the Greek tragedians, which is clear from his judgment that “[w]hen the Greeks required terms for the ultimate characters of the actualities in nature they had to use terms such as water, air, fre, wood” (Whitehead 1938, 49). Although to my knowledge none of the Presocratic philosophers used the term “wood” to characterize the nature of ultimate reality, it was Thales who designated water as the ultimate nature of reality, Anaximenes who chose air for that role, and Heraclitus who preferred fre (Guthrie 1975, 25–37). But Whitehead admired the Presocratics, and not only for asking about the ultimate nature of all things but also for being speculative and for asking about the conditions for the possibility of various phenomena, including beauty. Even when Plato and Aristotle took the rank of chief proponents of systematization in his mind, two dispassionate thinkers without whom Western philosophy could not be what it is today, as he puts it, Whitehead still considered the Presocratics to be the frst philosophical systematizers, having discovered mathematics and logic prior to Plato and Aristotle (1929b, 32). W. E. Hocking reports that Whitehead expressed similar remarks on the topic in the joint seminars they co-taught on metaphysics at Harvard (Hocking 1963, 13).2 Whitehead clearly believed that one of philosophy’s responsibilities is to deduce the categories of the necessary conditions of existence through systematization (1933, 149). In one generous mode, he credits Heraclitus for introducing the topic of permanence and change into philosophy, stating that the elucidation of the phrase panta rhei, or “all things fow,” is one of the chief tasks of philosophy (Whitehead 1929b, 208). This phrase raises questions that touch on the question of the ultimate nature of reality, which is a topic that preoccupied all of the Presocratics in their dealings with the question of change.3 But, as I already suggested, Whitehead claims that the

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Presocratics were ultimately trapped in a language that did not allow them to see reality, or to express its ultimate nature, nonsubstantially—that is, as anything but substances carrying properties.4 When writing in a less generous mode than the one I mentioned regarding Heraclitus, Whitehead states that these philosophers “thought that by determining the meaning of words they could become acquainted with facts” but, as with their followers in the Middle Ages, they produced “little more than a mere sifting and analysing of the notions attached to common language” (1929b, 12). Whitehead’s distrust of ordinary language when discussing the Presocratics is undeniable, and he extends this judgment to any medieval thinker who followed their line of thinking: “The excessive trust in linguistic phrases has been the well-known reason vitiating so much of the philosophy and physics among the Greeks and among the mediaeval thinkers who continued the Greek traditions” (1929b, 12). The reliance on ordinary language led the Presocratics completely astray in dealing with the nature of all things, Whitehead adds, because they ended up proposing scientifc and empirical ways of looking at the world rather than doing philosophy proper (1925, 7). From this perspective, to say that fre, air, earth, water, or some combination of these elements is an answer to a philosophical problem, particularly the problem of the nature of all things, is to confuse philosophical questions for empirical ones. It is true that Whitehead considers both science and philosophy as explanatory disciplines in their descriptive endeavors, but he rightly sees that philosophy does not answer questions such as “How can we use the wind to our advantage in the war against Troy?” or “Will we have enough water to survive the journey in the desert?” Still, it is crucial to mention here that the problem of being would not have existed in Western philosophy if it were not for the Presocratics who wondered about how ordinary things that exist in different forms—earth, water, fre, air, humans, nonhuman animals, planets, and many other things—are somehow connected in the sheer fact that they all exist. Perhaps the Presocratics should have paid more attention to the workings—the grammar—of ordinary language but, interestingly, what this lack of attention shows is that they share with Whitehead an interest in the search for a metaphysical truth beyond ordinary intelligibility. As I show in what follows, although Whitehead’s interest in the nature of all things is descriptive and speculative at this stage, not normative, his focus is not on philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. His main interest at this stage is in the question of metaphysical truth and in whether or not the Greeks, and modern science for that matter, were producing adequate hypotheses to account for a general notion of being as such. He certainly thought that Plato and Aristotle were on the right track toward providing this account.

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Whitehead on Aristotle, Plato, and the Question of Being

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Whitehead’s Appreciation of Aristotle The Presocratic interest in the nature of all things, which later received full attention from Aristotle, preoccupied Whitehead to the fullest. According to Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead considered the nature of all things to be the ultimate metaphysical problem (1975, 21–22), and his interest refects a desire to understand and explain the world not only in light of the recent scientifc discoveries during his lifetime—quantum mechanics and relativity theory—but also in light of the philosophical insights he acquired from Plato and Aristotle. As Whitehead explicitly states at one point, the cosmology he ultimately developed fuses infuences from Plato’s Timaeus and seventeenthcentury physics, on the one hand, and from metaphysical modifcations he made to early twentieth-century mathematical physics (1929b, xiv). But Aristotle’s philosophy had a special place in his speculations and, as I show in this chapter, Whitehead’s notion of ultimate reality is deeply indebted to a fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian infuences. Prior to Aristotle’s method of classifcation, Whitehead writes, the literature on the question of being was an “uninterpreted swamp, pestilential with mystery and magic” (1933, 142). To clarify, Whitehead does not mean to include Plato and the Presocratics under this description. But his adoption of the metaphysical idea that philosophy must seek explanatory generalizations beyond those found in the particular sciences, and his allowing room for multiple forms of causality in his metaphysical system, something that Aristotle insisted upon, brings him closer to Aristotle than other Greek philosophers. His particular admiration for Aristotle’s dispassionate approach to philosophy, especially Aristotle’s allowing of his “metaphysical train of thought whithersoever it led him,” including the incorporation of the idea of God into his metaphysical system (Whitehead 1925, 173), is unparalleled in his writings. The praise for Aristotle continues in Whitehead’s various writings. In Adventures of Ideas, he describes Aristotle’s metaphysical system as a “majestic, coordinated scheme, lucid to the understanding and based upon the obvious, persistent facts of our experience” (1933, 142). In Science and the Modern World, he contrasts Aristotle with medieval and modern thinkers who were “anxious to establish the religious signifcance of God,” as he puts it, and, as a result, paid God a false compliment by grounding metaphysics and its principles in God’s nature (1925, 173, 179).5 Furthermore, Whitehead’s description of his philosophical method in Process and Reality as a discipline that is disinterested and that seeks generalizations—“nothing but the description of the generalities which apply to all the details of practice” (1929b, 13)—is akin to Aristotle’s defnition of “frst philosophy” and its differences from the special sciences.

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Aristotle’s defnition of frst philosophy emerges from the same ­question that the Presocratics asked: “What is the nature of ‘all things’?” I mentioned in the Introduction that Aristotle was unhappy with the answers the Presocratics proposed for this question because these answers did not include all of the four causes needed to account for the nature of all things. For the exception of Parmenides, Plato, and the Pythagoreans, he writes, his predecessors “recognize only material principles underlying everything” in their attempts to answer the question about all things, explaining a material principle, or cause, to mean “[t]hat of which they believed all things to consist, from which they believed all things to be generated, and into which they believed all things to be resolved when destroyed” (Ross 1964, 57).6 Aristotle’s point here is not to reject the role of material causes in explaining the existence of certain objects in the world, but to emphasize, rather, that the explanation would be incomplete if other causes are excluded—in this case, effcient, fnal, and formal causes—particularly in combination (Ross 1964, 69, 84; Aristotle, Metaphysics chs.3–5).7 The point to make here is that the idea of a frst philosophy is aimed at being comprehensive: it develops frst principles that describe and explain the general nature of reality and the different kinds of existence that exemplify that reality, whether physical, mathematical, emotional, or otherwise. Aristotle stipulates that any philosophical investigation of being as such and its essential attributes, or of “beings qua being,” as he also puts it, requires searching for frst principles that differ in kind from the secondary or contingent causes found in various empirical approaches to the question of reality (Ross 1964, 115).8 There is a sense of generality about frst philosophy that is absent from the special sciences, Aristotle claims, and Whitehead would undoubtedly agree with him that physics and mathematics “single out some particular thing or class of things, and concern themselves with that” (for example, the general principles, causes, and laws that govern the operations of objects, numbers and shapes), whereas frst philosophy studies the universal laws that apply to “unqualifed being, i.e. being as such” (Ross 1964, 153).9 From this perspective, frst philosophy must distinguish itself from other sciences that are limited to the study of one kind of existence over another and that provide contingent rather than ultimate explanations. Furthermore, it must also be inclusive in its appropriation of all the relevant causes of explanation. It is important to emphasize that Whitehead would not have found Aristotle interesting if he thought of frst philosophy as a more general science than the other sciences in the way that, say, physics might be more general than astrophysics and quantum mechanics, or in the way that mathematics is more general than arithmetic. There is a linguistic element to Whitehead’s interest. To agree with Aristotle that frst philosophy arrives at the generality of

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the notion of being itself (in terms of the ultimate causes of all aspects of being) is to also agree that the resultant, generic notion of being has intelligible (linguistic) applications in regards to anything that could be said to exist (Whitehead 1929b, 116). After all, even when Aristotle refers to being itself as ousia—meaning by this an ultimate, primary, and independent mode of existence that cannot be further predicated of any other mode of existence but to which all the other forms of being imply an ontological reference (for example, quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, place, and time) (Ross 1964, 16–18)10—he recognizes the pluralistic nature of existence, both in terms of the variety of ways in which individual things are said to exist and in terms of the variety of kinds of existence. The point, as A. E. Taylor rightly states, is that Aristotle came to see that “being” is a general category of existence that requires the kind of conceptual elucidation that reveals its intelligible applications in the various uses of the term “being” (1955, 42–43). As Aristotle himself puts it, the conceptual generality of being as such is an inclusive generality, one that refects the sense that each category of existence has—substances, qualities, quantities, activities, and so on—because they all exist (Ross 1964, 118).11 I think Whitehead found this generality appealing and, as I show below, his idea of being, properly understood, should be read in a similar fashion. The word ousia has been translated as “substance,” “being,” and “essence,” and whereas some scholars of Aristotle argue that “being” captures what Aristotle had in mind because the term suggests conceptual unity of its various linguistic manifestations (“is,” “exists,” “to be,” “to become,” etc.) (Bambrough 1963, 33), other scholars disagree. Both Jonathan Barnes and Mary Louise Gill argue, for example, that Aristotle allocates a primary use to the concept of “being” that centers on “substantial” forms of existence—that is, that ousia means primarily “substance” and that its secondary or derivative meanings are somehow dependent for their existence on that meaning (Barnes 1995, 72–77; Gill 1989, 3, 13n.2). The derivative meanings are things such as the being of a quality, of a quantity, or of a relation. These things exist but in a derivative way, so to speak, not in a substantial way, and their existence depends on the existence of actual substances so the being of the latter is more primary. There is something uncomfortable about the idea that the derivative cases of “being” are somehow ontologically dependent for their sense on substantial forms of being. Certainly, the color red needs a medium of some sort in order to appear to the senses as red, but this material dependence is not crucial for the meaning of the word “red.” To ground sense in an ontological relation is not intelligible and, clearly, Whitehead would not be Aristotelian on this point because he affrms the existence of eternal possibilities (eternal objects) that have their independent meanings on a metaphysical level.12

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More importantly regarding Whitehead’s relation to Aristotle, his q­ ualifying of his own metaphysical project as a speculative project means that, in contrast to Aristotle, he aspired to arrive at the ultimate principles that render all experience, and all types of reality, intelligible without professing certainty regarding the fnal principles at which he arrived. Whitehead is fallibilistic on this issue, exemplifying metaphysical humility, and he seems to have attributed to Aristotle the fallacy of thinking that fnality is possible in metaphysics.13 Whitehead shares with Aristotle the belief that science suffers when it excludes metaphysical thinking in its empirical investigations, but he goes beyond Aristotle in accepting metaphysical fallibilism. Under the infuence of the new scientifc discoveries of his time, Whitehead developed an organismic conception of nature that postulated the existence of ultimate organisms beyond modern science’s assumption of a materialistic fnality (1925, 152, 64, 75, 103, 114). This is the conception of nature he also found in the Romantics and the early Greek poets. As with Russell, philosophy for Whitehead must rely on science for its understanding of the world and it must develop a cosmology that refects the behavior of the ultimate organismic facts of existence (1925, 3, 35). But can philosophy fulfll its responsibility to intelligibility without asking questions about the ordinary meaning of what is said about existence? Does science have the last word on how things are and what they mean? Can philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility, if rooted in ordinary contexts, be divorced from its responsibility to an ultimate metaphysical way of looking at the world? Whitehead acknowledges the importance of intelligibility when he recognizes the need to look at the context in which things are said and done. Thus, in the case of scientifc investigations, he writes the following: “In scientifc investigations the question, True or False?, is usually irrelevant. The question is, In what circumstances is this formula true, and in what circumstances is it false?” (Whitehead 1929b, 43). This is the attitude he brought to his reading of Aristotle and, from this perspective, the highest generality sought in philosophy and science has to be regarded from the perspective of its relevance to circumstances, including ordinary circumstances. Where does Whitehead ft the ordinary circumstances of everyday life in his understanding of the problem of being as such, and how far does his recognition of the importance of intelligibility go in his discussion of this problem? I turn to these questions after discussing his appropriation of some of Plato’s ideas regarding the concept of being as such, at least in the way he understood it. Whitehead’s Appreciation of Plato’s Idea of Being I mentioned that, like Aristotle, Whitehead seeks a dispassionate investigation of the question of being, and that, also like Aristotle, he admits that being comes

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in various forms, not one form, so that philosophers need to employ a variety of causal explanations to make sense of the various ways in which things exist. Whitehead is critical of some aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy, as I also indicated, but his admiration for Aristotle is clear. Still, Whitehead’s admiration of Aristotle does not come at the expense of his appreciation of Plato. When Whitehead praises Aristotle for seeking generalities beyond those found in the particular sciences, for example, he includes Plato in this praise, stating that both harbor a universality of interest, aim, systematic exactness, and thinking (1929b, 68). Also, in Modes of Thought, Whitehead credits Plato and Aristotle, alongside Leibniz and James, for having contributed to humanity’s general understanding of reality through the unending process of assembling philosophical ideas (1938, 2–4). It is not clear, however, whether or not Whitehead would have agreed with W. C. K. Guthrie that it was Plato, rather than Aristotle, who frst illustrated the various uses of the term “being,” employing the Sophist to clarify that the philosopher Parmenides, and the philosophers against whom he was arguing, meant different things by the word “to be” (Guthrie 1971, 47–50, 132–33). Plato’s genius as a metaphysician, Whitehead states, is shown in his ­wrestling “with the diffculty of making language express anything beyond the familiarities of daily life” (1933, 120). There is no disregard for the importance of everyday language here. It is simply a statement about Whitehead’s and Plato’s larger interest in the question of being as such. Plato was critical of the Sophists because he found their reliance on the logic of common speech limited and problematic. In particular, he wanted to account for the reality of the Ideas, which for him are ultimate reality, when thinking of the link between language and reality, something that he thought was absent in the Sophists’ thinking about the world. Plato’s conclusion that language is dependent on the reality of the Ideas, which are independent of language, is an indication that he perceived ordinary language to be problematic, or at least imperfect, for doing philosophical work. I do not think this necessarily means that Plato found ordinary language unsuitable for doing philosophy, but only that it is imperfect. Regarding the question of being as such, Whitehead accepts Plato’s defnition of ‘being’ as the power of one actuality to exert infuence on other actualities, or to be a potential for, or a factor in, their existence (Whitehead 1933, 120). In a reference to Plato’s defnition of “existence,” he writes: The actualities of the Universe are processes of experience, each process an individual fact. The whole Universe is the advancing assemblage of these processes. The Aristotelian doctrine, that all agency is confned to actuality, is accepted. So also is the Platonic dictum that the very meaning of existence is “to be a factor in agency,” or in other words “to make a difference.” Thus, “to

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be something” is to be discoverable as a factor in the analysis of some actuality. (1933, 197)

Here, Whitehead accepts Aristotle’s idea of agency as something that is ­exercised only by actual beings, but this does not limit being itself to actualities. Yes, in most cases “to be something” is dependent for its discovery on having been realized in an actuality of some sort where an agency of some sort is at work, but the reality itself of that form of being is not limited to actualized existence. After all, Whitehead states that “in one sense everything is ‘real,’ according to its own category of being,” so that although “everything is real, it is not necessarily realized in some particular set of actual occasions,” even if “it is necessary that it be discoverable somewhere, realized in some actual entity” (1933, 197). At one point Whitehead states that even to speak of “not-being” is to speak of “something,” of a component in experience, or of an existent thing (1933, 223). This is somewhat ambiguous but, regardless, the point I am making here is that, for Whitehead, all “things,” actual and potential, are real, which should suggest that all real things are of equal metaphysical value. It is in this context that he denies the claims of Augustine and Aquinas that the more important the thing is the more actual it is (Johnson 1952, 223). Importance is not limited to what is realized but is ascribed to what is real as such. This means that even God, an actuality for Whitehead, Aristotle, and Plato, does not have logical superiority over the concept of “being” in Whitehead’s thinking. Plato grounds the intelligibility of this world in the permanent world of the Ideas, but this is not the viewpoint that Aristotle eventually adopted. Aristotle’s attack on the theory of the forms in Concerning Philosophy, a dialogue that survived as a fragment and in which Aristotle denies that the ideal forms, including mathematical forms, could exist apart from the sensible world, is a refection of his later move away from Plato.14 Whitehead seems to side with Aristotle against the Platonic idea that the eternal forms are independent actual “beings,” with their own causal effcacy in the temporal world (1929b, 209). He agrees with Aristotle that a mediating agent, God in Whitehead’s case, is needed for the eternal objects, or Ideas, in order to be relevant to the world. The being of the eternal objects is not causal, one might say. There is a sense of humility about Whitehead in suggesting that the concept of God does not have a metaphysical, or a logical, superiority over other concepts. In the next section I explore this point, with a certain amount of expository analysis, in the context of Whitehead’s overall metaphysical humility about the nature of philosophy itself. As hopefully should become evident, this brief diversion is meant to show how Whitehead ultimately combines elements from both Aristotle and Plato in his construal of the question of being.

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WHITEHEAD’S METAPHYSICAL HUMILITY AND THE BEING OF GOD Whitehead’s defnition of metaphysics as a speculative activity—an a­ symptotic, progressive endeavor (“the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” [1929b, 3], or “the science which seeks to discover the general ideas which are indispensably relevant to the analysis of everything that happens” [1926, 84])—contains a sense of fallibilistic humility about it. Although Whitehead thinks that philosophers err in limiting speculative thinking—“To set limits to speculation is treason to the future” (1929b, 60), and “abstract speculation has been the salvation of the world” (1929a, 76)—he criticizes the dogmatic “overconfdence,” as he puts it, in one’s frst principles and promotes a pragmatic attitude where these principles could be revised in the future (1929b, 35). One could say here that Whitehead’s insistence on not identifying God with being itself, and on not giving God a metaphysical priority over being as such, is an attack on the mentioned overconfdence. As Carl Becker puts it, Whitehead offers one way for philosophy to arrive at ultimate interpretations—and does not claim to have the only way (1933, 87). But when Whitehead follows Aristotle’s steps in defning philosophy as “a dispassionate consideration of the nature of things,” he adds that the consideration has to be undertaken “antecedently to any special investigation into their details” (1925, 157). Perhaps what Whitehead means here is that the philosophical investigation is logically prior to any other investigation—that is, that it is conceptual in nature—but since he also stipulates that the experience of these details has to be the starting point for philosophizing (and also the checking point for the relevance of the outcome of the investigation), it is diffcult not to think of his claim about an antecedent investigation as one of overconfdence. More importantly here, it is Whitehead’s focus on experience that is relevant to assessing his notion of philosophy and to fguring out what his notion of being as such entails. His defnition of metaphysics suggests that he considers it to be grounded in the diversity of all experience, which is also how he expresses his philosophical aim: “to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infnitely various components of experience” (1933, 226). His critique of modern epistemology’s focus on sensory experience confrms this point, in this case that it “fails to justify the practice of daily life” (1933, 224–25). Whitehead states that “we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion” (1933, 226). This requires him to give hermeneutical primacy, as well as comprehensiveness, to all forms of experience, from physical, emotional, and affective experience to

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intellectual, religious, and aesthetic experience. “[W]hether we be ancient or modern,” Whitehead writes, “we can only deal with things, in some sense, experienced” (1933, 223). In chapter 5, I show how all of these experiences are ordinary for Whitehead, albeit not limited to human experience. Here, I want to emphasize that the speculative cosmology he develops is meant to be adequate to all experience, human and nonhuman. “A cosmology should above all things be adequate . . . . Its business is not to refuse experience but to fnd the most general interpretive system” applicable to experience as such (1929b, 69). Experience as such includes events at the subatomic level—for example, electronic, protonic, and other subatomic behavior. Whitehead does not mean that anything goes in this context, however. Any adequate cosmology needs to restrain the aberrations of undisciplined, speculative imagination, he states, and to frame an adequate cosmological scheme for the cosmic age in which it develops (1929b, 61). Clearly, Whitehead sees philosophy’s responsibility here as that of being faithful to a conception of reality that takes account of the experience of its ultimate constituents—for him, the vibratory existence of these constituents. Thus, science is not the last word on the nature of reality for Whitehead, and philosophy has to take part in the discussion over this issue beyond what the sciences can offer on the basis of the common, sensory level of experience (1929b, 77–78; 1925, 35). Science is helpful but, for him, it suffers from the same hubris that absolutist philosophies suffer from, namely the hubris of thinking it can arrive at fnal principles of explanation. Of course, the question to ask here is whether philosophy’s responsibility to the metaphysical could be consistent with its responsibility to the ordinary. Does intelligibility come under attack when there is tension between metaphysics and ordinariness? An example should be helpful here. If we interpret the commonsensical idea of a “stone” as an object that is simply located in space, Whitehead states, an object that is continuous in its identity through time with permanent attributes such as color and shape, then we are irresponsible and unfaithful to the reality of the stone, particularly when scientifc data have helped to show otherwise. He writes: In the frst place, from the seventeenth century onwards the notion of the simple inherence of the colour in the stone has had to be given up. This introduces the further diffculty that it is the colour which is extended and only inferentially the stone, since now we have had to separate the colour from the stone. Secondly, the molecular theory has robbed the stone of its continuity, of its unity, and of its passiveness. The stone is now conceived as a society of separate molecules in violent agitation. (1929b, 78)

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This perspective on color and the stone is partially indebted to science, but it is philosophy that shows how the mentioned scientifc perspective outruns the commonsense associated with sensory experience (Whitehead 1925, 114). Here, unlike other places in his writings, Whitehead does not seem to be comprehensive in his attitude regarding the data of philosophy. The common and ordinary experience of the stone is demoted and does not receive its due hermeneutical justice. Does it not make sense to speak of unchanging stones that have a certain color in daily experience? Why give the scientifc and metaphysical perspectives a hermeneutical priority over the commonsensical if one is a philosopher rather than a scientist? How will intelligibility make its presence known in a world where ordinary experience is not the basis of communication between people? It is interesting in this context that when Whitehead pays John Locke the compliment of having given “the most dispassionate descriptions” of experience, he specifes that what he has in mind are “those various elements in experience which common sense never lets slip” (1929b, 51). He compares Locke to Plato “in personal endowments, in width of experience, and in dispassionate statement of conficting intuitions” (1929b, 61), and he is critical of Francis Bacon for thinking that philosophical speculation, even if disinterested and true, is useless, intrinsically barren, and irrelevant to understanding (1929b, 15). To Bacon’s objection, Whitehead retorts that it is illusory to think that we can have brute, self-contained matters of fact that can be understood apart from interpretation. Philosophy does not initiate the interpretation, he adds, but critically employs it when things are analyzed (1929b, 15). It does not seem, however, that Whitehead’s positive acknowledgment of commonsense in Locke extends to his own metaphysical investigations of science and the question of reality as such. Regarding religion and God, a topic that I pursue in chapter 6, Whitehead states in this context that philosophy should not be biased by particular religious and ethical considerations. His mentioned admiration for Aristotle refects this attitude, and it is one of the points I am trying to make for why philosophy should be descriptive rather than normative. As Whitehead also states, the “dispassionate criticism of religious belief is beyond all things necessary” because religion generates emotions and vivid experiences that cannot guarantee its correct interpretation (1926, 83). But Whitehead agrees with Aristotle that the ultimate metaphysical problem concerning the nature of reality cannot be solved without introducing God as an ultimate explanatory principle (1925, 174). Although there does not seem to be any normative bias in this agreement, particularly since Whitehead knows that Aristotle’s God is not the God of religion, it is still problematic as I show next. Delving into the similarities and differences between him and Aristotle on the reality of God should therefore be helpful before fnalizing what being as such is for

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him and, by implication, whether it matches up with ordinary ways of being in the world.

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Whitehead on the Relation of God to Being as Such Aristotle calls frst philosophy “wisdom” and characterizes it as a form of theology, suggesting therefore that there is a link between the idea of being as such and God. Could God be read as being itself, or being as such, in Aristotle? Aristotle introduces God into his metaphysics in order to explain two things: (1) the eternal movement of the heavens and (2) the change that Parmenides denied and Plato conceived to be an imitation of the eternally stable reality of the forms. Postulating and proving the existence of God solves the problems of change and motion for Aristotle since, as a prime unmoved mover and an uncaused cause, his God becomes the effcient cause generating the cosmic motions that move the world’s material objects.15 For Aristotle, God’s existence is necessary: “[I]f all substances are perishable,” he states, then “so is everything else” (Ross 1964, 342–44) but, since there is a world that has not perished, God exists necessarily. Furthermore, Aristotle rejects the intelligibility of the idea of an infnite series of secondary sources of movement, or, as he puts it, a series of perishable substances. The argument, then, is that there has to be at least one motionless substance, an unchangeable and self-existent being, which is the frst mover. Theologically, God might be the world’s object of desire but, metaphysically, that God initiates the movement of the heavens and therefore explains not only the reason for its own existence as a frst mover but also for the existence of the world. The ultimate characteristics of wisdom for Aristotle are contemplation and self-knowledge, which are also characteristics of his independent God, and if wisdom is knowledge for the sake of sheer knowledge, as Aristotle also states, then this might suggest that, as the object of theology, God is also the ultimate object of frst philosophy (i.e, being itself). But this is not the case. For one thing, God constitutes only one type of existence for Aristotle, a substantial, nonmaterial existence, and cannot therefore be inclusive of the variety of ways in which being is expressed.16 In addition, being as such requires an explanation for Aristotle and does not act as the explanation of itself whereas God could function as a frst principle or cause and, therefore, as an explanation. Whitehead objects to Aristotle’s identifcation of God with the unmoved mover, but not because of biases in Aristotle or because such identifcation is unintelligible. Rather, he believes that Aristotle’s identifcation of God with the prime mover is based on mistaken physical theories and, therefore, on the wrong cosmology. As he puts it, “The phrase, Prime Mover, warns us that Aristotle’s thought was enmeshed in the details of an erroneous physics and

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an erroneous cosmology” (1925, 174).17 Although Whitehead believes that any philosophical understanding of the nature of reality, including his own, has to face the same metaphysical problem that Aristotle faced in accounting for the particular facts of existence and for how anything exists, he needed a different solution to the problem than Aristotle’s God. As I already indicated, Whitehead, too, allows logical space for God in his metaphysics. But whereas Aristotle’s God is taken to be fully responsible for the creativity of the world and for instantiating being as such, Whitehead, as I further explain below, introduces the notion of “creativity” to argue that all actual entities, not only God, are creative, and that being as such is the potentiality of all entities, actual and potential, to be a factor in the constitution of other actualities. Furthermore, Whitehead speaks of God as a “single unitary experience” that constitutes the essence of the universe (1947, 139; 1933, 274) and that differs from being itself—the latter point of which he is in agreement with Aristotle. But, differently from Aristotle, God for Whitehead is not the single creator of events in the world. This is shown from philosophical analysis of the notions of creativity and being as such. In Process and Reality, for example, Whitehead makes a distinction between the ideas of “becoming” and “being,” invoking his so-called principle of process to argue that “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’” (1929b, 23). In this analysis, which is also applicable to God, the idea that being should be defned in terms of becoming is not Aristotelian even if it indicates a certain closeness between Whitehead and Aristotle on taking the reality of change seriously.18 Whitehead argues that we cannot encounter the fnal, becoming units of being in our three-dimensional space directly for the obvious reason that, individually, they are not objects of sense perception. This is true of God as it is of every other becoming actual entity, but we witness the “being” of nondivine actual entities if and when they are present in objects that are subject to sense perception. That is, we can witness multiplicities of actual entities when they come together in perceivable structures—for example, as stones, chairs, and trees. An electron in a specifc region of a chair, for instance, is something that we can detect by scientifc measurements, though not by the senses, and, as such, it is a manifestation of the actual entities that come together to form it. Whitehead calls the latter “societies” of actual entities that are experienced in concrete forms witnessed in sense perception and scientifc measurements. God is experienced differently, and, in chapter 6, I discuss the implications of this fact for Whitehead’s implied view of atheism. Whitehead’s account of the notion of “being” may give the false i­ mpression that he uses it in an ordinary rather than a metaphysical sense because he uses

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it mostly to refer to individual beings or determinate entities. For example, in his defnition of the category of the ultimate, which includes the three notions “creativity,” “one,” and “many,” he writes that these three notions “are the ultimate notions involved in the meaning of the synonymous terms ‘thing,’ ‘being,’ ‘entity’” (Whitehead 1929b, 21). Here, “being” is an entity or an individual thing, and the term “one” stands for its singularity. The term “many” describes the “disjunctive diversity” of all the singular entities, as Whitehead puts it, and it presupposes the term “one” in the same way that the reality of the “one” presupposes that of the “many” (1929b, 21). But it should not be concluded from this that Whitehead’s main use of the term “being” is ordinary, or non-metaphysical. True, the “one” stands for the singularity of an entity, but that is not the only function it has. It also describes the unity of being as such because during the process of becoming it is subject to infuences from all entities external to it, whether positively becoming parts of it or negatively excluded from it. For Whitehead, each actual entity is mainly a unifcation of its universe, as is also clear from his description of “creativity” as the “ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively” (1929b, 21). The non-ordinary nature of Whitehead’s concept of “being” in this context is also clear from his appropriation of a particular characteristic of being from Plato. As I suggested above, what Whitehead accepts from Plato in regard to the notion of being is its function as a factor in the existence of other actual beings. This is a metaphysical, not an ordinary, description of what “being” is. No one ordinarily speaks of “being” in the world as something that entails infuencing other beings, at least not as a frst defnition.19 Furthermore, when Whitehead’s own use of the terms “existence,” “being,” and “reality” is investigated, it becomes clear that they are interchangeable terms for him. What he calls “categories of existence” in Process and Reality, which are metaphysical categories, are termed “categories of being” in Adventures of Ideas, or at least two of these categories—the “propositions” and the “actual entities”—are explicitly termed as such (1933, 245). In Modes of Thought Whitehead refers to these categories as “modes of reality,” saying that his main interest lies in showing how they require, and relate to, each other (1937, 69). “Existence,” “being,” and “reality” enjoy equal logical status in Whitehead’s metaphysics, in addition to any particular meaning they may have. What needs to be asked of Whitehead here is the extent to which his metaphysical notion of being retains ordinary references to being in the world, and whether he opens the door for skeptics to deny intelligibility to his notion of being? Also, how are some of the traditional interpretations of Whitehead’s idea of being as such relevant in this context?

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Whitehead and Ordinary Ways of Being in the World I argued that Whitehead’s distrust of ordinary language has its main sources in his doubts, frst, about its conceptual usefulness for organizing the chaotic experience of human beings into a coherent whole and, second, about its practical relevance for the attempts of the new sciences at the time to make sense of the ultimate nature of reality. I also argued that this distrust comes forcefully to the surface in his acceptance of the Greek framework of dealing with the question of being as such. Whitehead takes on the task of explaining being as such seriously and, as I have shown, he combines ideas from Plato and Aristotle to promote a notion of being that is meant to be true to experience as such. My questions in the last paragraph of the previous section are: where do ordinary ways of being in the world ft in the metaphysical picture he offers for being as such, and can the latter sustain criticism from skeptics who might think that this notion is bereft of any intelligibility? Whitehead’s autobiographical notes should be helpful here. Being philosophical in orientation, they supplement his metaphysical perspective on the question of being as such by showing another side to him, one in which he not only trusts ordinariness when speaking of being in the world but also provides a context to answer the skeptics. First, however, I want to present several perspectives on Whitehead and the idea of being as such that I believe are relevant, albeit one-sided.

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Traditional Ways of Understanding Whitehead on Being I mentioned in the previous section that, metaphysically speaking, the eternal objects, or the eternal possibilities of existence, are as real for Whitehead as the actual entities. If I read Charles Hartshorne correctly, he has a different perspective on the matter. He defnes metaphysics in a similar way to Whitehead and Aristotle, linking it to the idea of being as such, but he argues that Whitehead’s idea of “becoming” or “experience as such” constitutes the meaning of being as such.20 He states, for example, that “Becoming is not a special mode of reality, rather it is its overall character” and, further, that “it is not obviously impossible that it should be universally real, present in all things from atoms to deity, and constitutive of reality as such” (Hartshorne 1983, 15, 13). His justifcation for characterizing becoming as being as such is based, partially, on his understanding of it as something necessary and eternal and, regarding Whitehead’s philosophy, on his understanding of Whitehead as someone who sees all the actual entities of the world as experiential entities that are in constant becoming (1983, 14–15; see also 1972, 9–20). The context of Hartshorne’s identifcation of being as such with Whitehead’s idea of “becoming” suggests that he gives the actual entities metaphysical precedence over the eternal objects, which I think is problematic. I agree with

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him that the tradition that sees becoming as “a secondary mode of ­reality, inferior to and less real than being” (Hartshorne 1983, 13) is problematic, but the alternative in my view is not to give becoming the status of “reality as such.” If my interpretation of Whitehead’s idea of being as such is correct, then Hartshorne’s perspective fails to do justice to the metaphysical status of the eternal objects as fully real. Hartshorne is obviously right to point out that, for Whitehead, human experience is only one form of being rather than something representative of what experience as such is, and that becoming, or experience as such, is a larger class of experience because it characterizes all actual entities whatsoever, including God.21 But what about the reality of that which is experienced as a potentiality of existence but not actual? Does it not have an equal metaphysical status to that of the actual entities? Strangely, in limiting what is real to what is experienced in its actual form, Hartshorne displays a certain affnity with Bertrand Russell’s view from Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, where Russell states that a “robust sense of reality” requires abandoning the idea that unicorns, golden mountains, round squares, and “other such pseudo-objects” can be said to exist (1919, 169–70). For Russell, we cannot make true propositions about these subjects, and to speak of a different kind of reality than that of objects in “the ‘real’ world,” as he puts it, “is doing disservice to thought” (1919, 169–70). Whitehead’s eternal objects do not meet Russell’s test of a robust reality, and his insistence on an empirical context for designating what is real is certainly alien to Hartshorne’s logical sensibility. But Hartshorne restricts the metaphysical discourse of reality, nonetheless, to only what is actual, whether the latter is empirical or otherwise. John B. Cobb, Jr. agrees with Hartshorne that creative experience as such, or creativity, is an ultimate reality, and his attention to Whitehead’s distinction between God and being-itself suggests that, he, too, thinks of this creativity as being itself. Using the language of “reality” and “actuality,” Cobb states that whereas creativity is the ultimate reality, corresponding to what Aristotle and Tillich meant by being-itself, God is the ultimate actuality (1988, 19). Both God and creativity are realities of some sort, one might say, but whereas God is an active agent that makes the unity of actuality possible and, therefore, allows for an explanation of why there is something rather than nothing, creativity is activity itself, not an agent, and its active nature is expressed in the causal activities of the existent actual occasions. But, again, what about the reality of the eternal objects? Are they real only in their creative participation in the actual entries? They certainly move from the status of being potentialities to become actual in the experience involving the actual entities, but they are also real as potentialities. Certainly, God is not being-itself for Whitehead, as I already indicated. Rather, God is a being that partakes of reality by being a factor, perhaps the

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most important factor, in the constitution of all other beings and of the divine self. As Whitehead puts it, God is the aboriginal instantiation, an ultimate “creature,” of creativity, apart from which there would be no other instantiations of creativity (1929b, 31, 225). Whitehead also calls God the one actual entity that unifes the many entities into a single unitary and universal experience. God affects the world and is affected by it, and in affecting the world God is armed with an eternal vision that permeates every becoming occasion of experience. But the unity of God requires participation in the being of the eternal objects as potentialities of relevance in the God-world interaction. Their existence is presupposed, and Whitehead’s doctrine of God’s immanence in the world takes this fact, as well as the fact that the existence of all non-divine actual entities presupposes the existence of the eternal objects, as a starting point in understanding the nature of reality as such (1929b, 32, 225). My point here is that if both God and all the non-divine actualities are instantiations of creativity and are, therefore, equally ultimate on a metaphysical level, the same ultimacy should be extended to the eternal objects: they are metaphysically ultimate in terms of their beingness. Roland Faber has a different focus in his account of being itself. Since this focus falls on the novelty that comes with creativity and its link with mysticism in Whitehead and Deleuze, he considers becoming the ultimate reality because it is grounded in the activity of creativity and allows for novelty in experience (2014, 189–90). But the eternal objects get the silent treatment here, too. I am not arguing, of course, that ultimate reality is a mere potentiality or an eternal object. I agree with the description of creativity and becoming that is given by Hartshorne, Cobb, and Faber since all real entities, actual and potential, take part in the creative process that describes what reality as such is. Also, neither Faber nor Cobb seems to endorse Hartshorne’s stipulation that the eternal objects are real only insofar as they are embodied in actual entities. But I think something in the ultimacy of the eternal objects and their logical participation in the concept of reality as such is still missing in their accounts. In order to see the true relevance of the eternal objects to the notion of reality as such, their reality has to be taken more seriously. They are real even if they are not realized in any actualities, and their logical status as potentialities makes them a kind of existence, as Whitehead himself asserts when he ascribes a special category of existence to them. Even Hartshorne affrms this fact at one point, albeit unwittingly, when he states that “Whitehead’s ‘to be is to be a potential for becoming’ applies to any reality whatever” (1983a, 140). Hartshorne makes this statement when speaking of the need in philosophy for a general idea of reality that applies to individuals, events, and abstract qualities. In other words, Hartshorne admits that Whitehead’s notion of “being,” when understood metaphysically, could be predicated of

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both actual entities and eternal objects, and that such notion describes what is real. The conclusion to draw about Hartshorne’s position regarding being as such is that he is perhaps inconsistent about it. Other thinkers who share Hartshorne’s view about being as such include F. H. Bradley who’s Appearance and Reality suggests that what is ultimately real cannot be something in the process of becoming. It seems that, for Bradley, what is ultimately real cannot lack all-inclusiveness and self-completeness (Murphy 1963, 149). But does it not make sense to speak of some things as participating in the category of “being” and, therefore, as being real without them being actual? Or, to respond directly to Russell, why not say that some things are real without “existing” in the empirical sense of being “made of fesh and blood, moving and breathing of [their] own initiative,” or, as in the case of fctional characters, with restriction to “the thoughts, feelings, etc.,” of fction writers and their readers? (Russell 1919, 70). As I suggested above, for Whitehead all real entities that participate in the category of the ultimate, actual or potential, should have a role to play in constituting the grammar, or the meaning, of the concept of “being.” But even Whitehead’s own expressions about the relation between the actual and the real could give rise to confusion regarding the status of ultimate reality. For example, in my discussion of the difference between his notion of change and that of Aristotle above, I mentioned the internal versus external forms of change that Whitehead describes. He uses the technical term “concrescence” to speak of the internal process describing the change within an actual entity, one that leads to its fnal constitution, and he uses the term “transition” to speak of the external change in which the actual entity interacts with other actual entities (Whitehead 1929b, 214). But one gets the impression that the real is less important for him than the actual when he describes transition as an effcient process that affects the movement from the “actual” to the “merely real” and “concrescence” as a teleological process that affects growth from the “merely real” to the actual (1929b, 214). The language of “merely real” could suggest to some readers that, somehow, Whitehead gives the actual entities ontological primacy over the eternal possibilities. In fact, this is precisely how Justus Buchler reads him and how William J. Garland initially read him. Garland explains that he got the impression from reading Science and the Modern World that Whitehead gives creativity more reality than the actual entities that embody it because creativity is described as a “substantial activity” (Whitehead 1925, 254–55; Garland 1983, 212). This impression dissipates after Garland’s reading of Religion and the Making, where creativity is described as one of the “formative elements” of the actual world (Whitehead 1926, 90; Garland 1983, 212). But, if anything, Garland adds, Whitehead “seems eager to dispel any impression that creativity is somehow more real

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than the actual entities are” in Process and Reality (1983, 212–13). I think Garland is correct to fnally see that neither kind of existence is more real than the other and that both are ultimately real in different ways. As for Buchler, he argues that there are two trends in Whitehead’s discussion of the fundamental traits of reality, what he calls Trend I and Trend II (1983, 283). In Trend I, there is an attempt to defne and justify the major concepts applicable to common and special forms of experience that have value for philosophic understanding. “These concepts are designed to distinguish ‘types of entities’ (types of ‘existence’) and to explain their interrelation,” Buchler explains, whereas Trend II involves the attempt to determine how “real” these various entities are (1983, 281). Buchler rightly suggests that Trend II involves giving ontological primacy to the actual entities over the eternal objects, which is absent from Trend I (1983, 282). But Buchler does not think that Whitehead offers any explanation or justifcation as to why the pure possibilities are secondary to the actual entities, or why there are actualities that are more concrete than others, or individuals that are more concrete than societies. He therefore rejects Trend II (Buchler 1983, 284). Buchler forgets here that one important task metaphysicians assign themselves is that of seeking ontological ultimacy when aiming to explain the abstract that is “found” in the concrete. The concrete in this case is that which is ultimate in the line of explanations, and since the actual entities cannot be reduced, explanatorily speaking, to further entities, they enjoy the status of concreteness that Whitehead gives them. Although I do not reject the tendency in Whitehead to determine how real all the entities are, I understand Buchler’s concern and I think he is correct to reject the primacy of the actual entities over that of the possibilities. But, in my view, the reason for rejecting this primacy ought to be based on logical grounds. What I mean is that since both actual entities and eternal objects are real, each a type of existence in its own way, both are equal in terms of their logical status as existing types of being. In fact, we should extend this logical status to any type of existence and Whitehead is clear that we cannot exhaust the number of types of existence in spite of the fact that there are four main types: actual entities, eternal objects, propositions, and feelings (1929b, 22–25, 188–89; 1938, 69–70). I am suggesting that if Whitehead is understood to have limited the reality of abstract or potential entities to their manifestations in the concrete, namely only when they are realized, or only in the sense that the actual includes the potential, then the kind of reality he gives to the potentialities is merely verbal. In the same way that “creativity” is real even though it has actuality only in virtue of its embodiment in the actual entities, so the potentialities are real independently of their actualization in the concrete world. They are real because they are a kind of reality, a category of existence that makes them different in kind from the actual entities although not logically independent

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of them. Whitehead’s insistence on their relatedness to actualities ought to be understood in the context of his rejection that any real thing, actual or potential, is self-sustaining (1938, 68–69). Furthermore, since Whitehead grants the eternal objects this status of existence, reality as such should not be equated with creativity. If the above discussion is on target, it should be clear that the true meaning of reality as such in Whitehead’s metaphysics has to include the Platonic notion of “power” and not only Aristotle’s ideas of change and actuality. Power, here, addresses both the actual and potential factors that constitute the being of another entity, and these include actual entities and eternal possibilities. Simply put, if the terms “existence,” “being,” and “reality” are synonymous, then “to be” is “to be real” for Whitehead, and this includes the reality of both the actualities and the potentialities of experience, as well as other kinds of reality that depend on their existence.22 Reality as such is the potential of all entities whatsoever to be a factor in the constitution, or creation, of other entities. But, to repeat, it is diffcult to associate with Whitehead’s metaphysical notion of being as such any ordinary ways of existing in the world. Luckily, we have his autobiographical notes to correct the one-sided picture that his metaphysics presents. The fnal section of this chapter addresses this point. The Autobiographical in Whitehead Concerning Being in the World

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In his “Autobiographical Notes,” Whitehead offers the following refections on the infuence that his wife, Evelyn Wade, had on his philosophical outlook on life: The effect of my wife upon my outlook on the world has been so fundamental, that it must be mentioned as an essential factor in my philosophic output. . . . Her vivid life has taught me that beauty, moral and aesthetic, is the aim of existence; and that kindness, and love, and artistic satisfaction are among its modes of attainment. (1947, 8–9)

It might not be immediately clear that these refections contain both philosophical and ordinary points about life, particularly since Whitehead credits the infuence of his wife upon his life as an essential factor in his “philosophical output.” But, in addition to making the philosophical point that beauty is the point of existence, there is something very personal about these refections. I think they can also be understood as ordinary, existential judgments about how to be in the world. People give different answers as to what they think the aim of existence is, or at least the aim of their existence, and their answers usually refect their own personal judgments, not philosophical

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answers to a generalized sense of existence, or being, as such. In Whitehead’s case, both tendencies exist. In his philosophical writings, Whitehead argues that moral and aesthetic beauty is a metaphysical value that exists necessarily due to God’s immanence in the world (1926, 17–18; 1929b, 110–11). As such, beauty is taken to describe the value-based nature of the universe, and it is elevated to that status on philosophical grounds. This means that when Whitehead’s normative stance on being in the world is juxtaposed with at least one of his descriptive views on the metaphysical being of values, there is a match between them. There seems to also be a match between Whitehead’s understanding of value as a generic form of being—one that manifests itself in different attained values in religion, art, morality, and politics, among other human practices— and his autobiographical judgment that attaining meaning in life is possible through kindness, love, and artistic satisfaction. Further support for how the metaphysical character of being and its normative exemplifcations can be harmonious is found in Whitehead’s discussion of the notion of “importance” in Modes of Thought. Not only that this importance exists and is derived from the immanence of the infnite in the fnite, as Whitehead puts it, but it is also expressed in ordinary statements such as “This is important,” “This is diffcult,” and “This is lovely” (1938, 8–12). Translating this philosophical judgment into how Whitehead expresses himself in his autobiographical notes, one could see how the idea of importance is exemplifed in his thinking that “The aim of existence is beauty” or that “Love and kindness are attainments of value,” and so on. It seems here that Whitehead is consciously thinking of how the ordinary matches up with the metaphysical, and the reader is left wishing that this was also the case in his appreciation of the Platonic-Aristotelian vision of the idea of being as such. In his autobiographical notes, Whitehead shows that it is natural and appropriate to trust in the ordinary meaning of the concept of being, or existence, but, as I have shown, he shifts to a position of distrust when considering its metaphysical nature. Furthermore, Whitehead is aware of the distinction between concepts indicative of ordinary ways of being in the world and concepts of being that are non-ordinary, and he seems to appreciate this distinction. Consider, for example, his famous statement in Religion in the Making that we use arithmetic, an artifcial language, but that we are religious. This suggests that being religious, or becoming so, is, philosophically speaking, a natural, ordinary way of existing in the world, and that it is one context for fguring out what it means to be in the world. When this statement about being religious is juxtaposed with Whitehead’s historical account of how rational religion gradually developed from ritual, emotion, and myth, it becomes clear that natural, ordinary ways of being in the world are, for Whitehead, necessary for making a philosophical judgment about the concept of being. This is

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particularly evident when we also consider his detailed remarks on the need to take account of the varieties of ordinary experience when philosophizing about the nature of experience. Whitehead writes his autobiographical refections at an advanced age, after having immersed himself in mathematics, logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of science for most of his life. His refections are often intellectual and explanatory in regard to the world or life as such. Furthermore, consistent with his metaphysical outlook that philosophy needs substantiation in everyday experience, his other statements about religion, ethics, art, education, and politics exemplify a perspective rooted in a variety of personal and ordinary experiences with family members, other human beings, and the natural and social worlds in which he existed. Whitehead also acknowledges the role of history in shedding light on some aspects of human existence. After a somewhat detailed description of the physical surroundings of his birthplace in Ramsgate, Kent, for example, where Canterbury Cathedral and the Roman-built Richborough castle are praised alongside Abbey Church in Minster, the place of St. Augustine’s frst sermon, Whitehead laments how modern culture introduced a cheap ending to this impressive history: “I feel a sense of profanation amidst the relics of the Romans, of the Saxons, of Augustine, the medieval monks, and the ships of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Golf seems rather a cheap ending to the story” (1947, 17). Still, “the stuff of human life cannot be wholly construed in terms of historical events,” Whitehead refects, and it “mainly consists of feelings arising from reactions between small defnite groups of persons” (1947, 17). These feelings are ordinary feelings, expressed in ordinary statements such as the ones above about importance, kindness, and loveliness. We might say that history, both physical and non-physical, is the context within which ordinary value is expressed for Whitehead, and that the idea of “being” as a power contributing to the constitution of actualities seems irrelevant here. Russell’s statement that Whitehead “was at all times deeply aware of the importance of religion” (1956, 103) is also relevant here in that Whitehead took religion to be of importance not only for the intellectual side of life but also for the personal, ordinary side. History channels religion through different stages of development, from ritual and myth to rational presuppositions, Whitehead argues in Religion in the Making, but religion expresses value in regard to what it means to have meaning for one’s existence. Thus, in “An Appeal to Sanity,” Whitehead states that “Apart from religion, expressed in ways generally intelligible, populations sink into the apathetic task of daily survival, with minor alleviations” (1947, 69–70). Mere survival might be one way to exist and be in the world, but it is not the same as living better, which is preferable (Whitehead 1929a, 5). In the latter case, when Whitehead connects living better with the aim of existence, his personal views intermingle

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with his philosophical analysis, and he is as normative about what it means to exist as he is descriptive of its metaphysical foundations. The above should further demonstrate that Whitehead’s views on ordinary language cannot be reduced to sheer rejection of its relevance to philosophy, and that, in reality, Whitehead trusts the utility of ordinary examples of being in the world (and the language used in them) to demonstrate philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. In the next chapter I show that he may have firted with the idea of seeking an ideal language to replace ordinary language when discussing symbolic logic and mathematics, but that he never thought that ordinary language can be replaced with an ideal language.

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NOTES 1. Whitehead’s observation here carries a certain similarity, albeit a distant one, to James Frazer’s judgment that magic and science are similar. Frazer argues that magic and science share the assumption, implicit in magic and explicit in science, that nature is orderly and uniform. Like the scientist, Frazer states, the magician “does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects” according to laws that can be foreseen (1922, 56). Frazer knows that the magician relies on performing ceremonies and spells to exemplify the law foreseen whereas the scientist relies on the right experiment and methodology. Thus, he calls magic the “bastard sister” of science, stating its fatal faw in misconceiving the true causal nature of the particular laws that govern the sequence of events (1922, 57). Like Whitehead, however, he attributes to ordinary phenomena—in this case the magical rituals of early tribes—an explanatory role in the lives of people. 2. Whitehead’s admiration for Aristotle as a dispassionate thinker is expressed in his judgment that Aristotle followed the systematization of his thought wherever it took him (1925, 173). Similarly, Plato for him “seeks with disinterested curiosity an understanding of the world” beyond its practical affairs (1929b, 29–30). Whitehead would have rightly disagreed with Jonathan Barnes, one of the authoritative commentators on Aristotle, that, in comparison with Aristotle, “Plato’s philosophical views are mostly false, and for the most part they are evidently false; his arguments are mostly bad, and for the most part they are evidently bad” (Barnes 1995, xv–xvi). 3. Whitehead asks about the sort of things that fow, the meaning of ‘all’, and the nature of the fow itself (1929b, 208). But, in his responses to these philosophical questions, he relies on generalizations that partially owe their reasoning to a combined infuence on him from Plato and Aristotle. Heraclitus’s generalizations were vague, according to Whitehead, and his intuition unsystematized in spite of his attempt at systematization. I discuss Whitehead’s relation to Plato and Aristotle later in the chapter. 4. See n.6 on this issue and on how I show that other interpretations of the Presocratics do not take the references of Thales to “water,” Anaximenes to “air,” Heraclitus to “fre,” and Anaximander to apeiron as substantial in meaning.

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5. I discuss the question of God in much detail in the context of the further question of atheism in Chapter 6. But I touch on the idea of whether God is being itself for Aristotle in this chapter. 6. As a reminder, if a material cause explains something based on the matter out of which it is made, as for example when the bronze is the matter out of which a statue is made, a formal, or an essential cause, as Aristotle also calls it, describes the law, or the form, that explains something and by which it develops—for example, an oak tree that gives its form to an acorn. An effcient cause is the source of the substance under consideration, or the agent that causes that substance to come about, as for example when an artist creates a statue and therefore explains how it exists, whereas a fnal cause addresses the completed product, the end at which a substance arrives and develops, as for example when walking is taken up for health reasons. I should mention the obvious here, namely that the scientifc notion of effcient causality endorsed in contemporary science and philosophy is absent from Aristotle’s philosophy. Aristotle understands effcient causality as the reason or reasons for something’s existence, not the mechanical causes that brought it about—the effcient cause of a bronze statue, as already mentioned, being the sculptor who created it and who is the reason it exists in the frst place. Aristotle is a teleological thinker and causality for him is not independent of a human context when full explanations are provided. His discussion shows that he takes not only Thales’s hyder or “water,” Anaximenes’s “air,” and Heraclitus’s “fre” to be examples of these material causes, but also Anaximander’s apeiron, which is a primordial or indefnite element of which all things partake. The apeiron still functions as a material cause for Aristotle because it overlooks the reasons, or the effcient, active causes, for how things are. As I suggested in the Introduction, however, other philosophers interpret the Presocratic offerings of so-called material causes in a more charitable way than Aristotle—Rush Rhees arguing that Thales’s hyder is a term that refers to the three forms in which water exists: liquidity, gaseousness, and solidity (2004, 2). These might still be material causes, one way or another, but Thales would not be understood in a simplistic way in regard to the kind of material causes he is offering. Heraclitus’ idea of “fre” might also get a different reading when it is realized that, for him, the true nature of reality derives from his notion of logos, by which he meant a “measure” or “proportion,” a constant equilibrium between naturally opposite qualities that ultimately takes the physical form of fre (Rhees 2004, 32–39). 7. This critique applies equally to Parmenides, Plato, and the Pythagoreans, according to Aristotle. Although Parmenides offers effcient causes as an explanatory context and although Plato and the Pythagoreans add to that formal causes, their explanations are incomplete according to Aristotle because they do not use all of the four causes needed for an ultimate explanation. It is now accepted among Aristotle’s scholars, however, that he was not altogether just to Plato in regards to the latter’s knowledge and use of the four causes. David Ross indicates, for example, that Plato suggests effcient causes in Phaedrus and Sophist, and fnal causes in Philebus and Timaeus (Ross1964, 68n3). For different views on Plato’s infuence on Aristotle see Barnes (1995, 16–26) and Mary Louise Gill (1989, 9–10). 8. The alternative translation in brackets is from Jonathan Barnes who renders the frst line as follows: “There is a science which investigates beings qua being and

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the attributes which hold of them in virtue of their own nature” (1995, 69). He states that it is misleading and false to say that Aristotle studies being in the singular sense because the grammatically singular form of “being” in the Greek text is meant in the plural sense (1995, 69–70). Barnes’s translation is important because it clarifes that Aristotle’s a posteriori method of investigation is different from Plato’s a priori approach. 9. David Ross puts the mentioned distinction as follows: mathematics investigates changeless entities that are distinguishable aspects of concrete reality and that do not possess separate existence, but frst philosophy is the study of changeless and separate beings (1964, 156–158). Furthermore, frst philosophy investigates being as such in a generalized way, describing and explaining it through ultimate principles that begin with the incidental causes of individual cases of being and that then trace these causes to their ultimate, essential attributes—namely, to “anything eternal, immutable, and existing separately” (Ross 1964, 153-54). 10. Barnes recognizes this point when he defnes Aristotle’s frst causes collectively as a form of an “unexplainable explanation” in which all other explanations come to a stop (1995, 103). Aristotle’s ultimate explanations are different in kind, one might say, from the kind of ultimate explanations provided by, say, contemporary evolutionary thinkers where natural selection (to give Daniel Dennett as one example of a philosopher who also wants ultimate explanations), is taken to be ultimate. Mary Louise Gill identifes the category of “substances” as that upon which other modes of being depend on both ontological and conceptual levels; substances have a priority over other forms of existence, she claims, and this is evident according to her in Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics (Gill 1989, 3). As for Dennett, he claims that any phenomenon in existence is explained in an ultimate sense if its evolutionary explanation is given, namely in the sense of how it came to be benefcial and to replicate itself—whether the phenomenon is music, religion, money, or science (Dennett 2006, ch.5). 11. For Aristotle, the qualities of things (e.g., the redness or roundness or heaviness of an object) constitute a kind of existence that differs from how quantities or relations exist. The latter two are also kinds of existence—all dependent ontologically on the existence of substances—and are interrelated when the ontology of substances is considered. When a table is identifed as round through one of its qualities, for example, it could also be identifed as one table, as opposed to, say, three, and in relation to one or several chairs. The quality, quantity, and relation of a table to something else are all real, and they are real as kinds of existence that are exemplifed in individualized qualities, quantities, and relations. 12. For an argument as to why Whitehead should not be described as a frst philosopher in the way Aristotle is, see my “In What Sense Is Whitehead’s Philosophy a First Philosophy?” (Ramal 2003). I argue that the similarities between Whitehead and Aristotle on (1) the dispassionate nature of philosophy and its method of descriptive generalization, and (2) their treatment of the idea of being as such (and giving God a special metaphysical space in that treatment) may warrant characterizing Whitehead’s philosophy as a form of frst philosophy but not an Aristotelian one. Whitehead disagrees not only with the ultimacy that Aristotle grants the notion of “primary

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substance,” but also with the results of Aristotle’s investigation into the meaning of “God” (Ramal 2003, 9–16). The primacy of primary substances, as Aristotle himself states, is “in defnition, in knowledge, and in time” and it is involved in the defnition of everything else, which makes it primary in a conceptual sense (Ross 1964, 167–168). For Aristotle, “even matter is recognized as substance, for in all change from one opposite to another it is matter which underlies the change” (Ross 1964, 210). Aristotle also concludes that there is an ultimate, or prime, form of matter that exists—prime matter—which functions as a substratum for all forms of substantive existence, including that of the primary substance. Whitehead is critical of this point in Aristotle and argues that his treatment of the idea of primary substance leads to a mistaken form of “substance-quality metaphysics”—that is, to one where the ultimate units of existence are static substrata that remain the same “amidst changes of accidental relations and of accidental qualities” (Whitehead 1929b, 79, 137). 13. For Whitehead, this mistake was also committed by Newton, who rejected the intrusion of metaphysics into science, and by nineteenth century evolutionary thinkers. Although Newton’s method had pragmatic value at this stage of its scientifc history, Whitehead argues that Newton was emphatically dogmatic in stressing the fnality of his laws (1929b, 42). Newton’s formulae were not false but, like Einstein’s, “unguardedly stated,” Whitehead states (1929b43). He was also critical of Einstein for missing the vibratory nature of existence. When the principle of vibration is assigned to both the steady, undifferentiated matter of nature, and to sound and light (which are made of subatomic organic events for Whitehead), there is no room left for mechanistic explanations. For Whitehead, the physicist’s notion of energy is an abstraction from the concrete organisms constituting it (1925, 36). The latter are the primary organisms “which are incapable of further analysis,” Whitehead states (1925, 103), and a fallacy of misplaced concreteness is committed if the abstractions are taken to be the concrete elements of existence (1925, 36). As for evolutionary theory, its dependence solely on effcient causality to explain the movement upward in evolution shows its lack of consideration for metaphysical thinking—for example, by abandoning fnal causation, which was affrmed by Aristotle. If science is to avoid degenerating into “a medley of ad hoc hypotheses,” Whitehead adds, “it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations” (1925, 17). 14. I accept the general thesis, frst suggested by Werner Jaeger, that Aristotle moved from being a whole-hearted Platonist who accepted the theory of the forms in his early period to becoming an empiricist who renounced this theory later on in his life (See Jaeger). As F. M. Cornford indicates, Aristotle became a commonsense philosopher after leaving Plato’s Academy, turning to investigate human experience and empirical facts (Cornford 1966, 87–89). 15. The nature of God’s causal relation to the world is controversial among Aristotle’s scholars. Since God for him is an immaterial, eternal entity that is devoid of a material body, this God is not supposed to function as an effcient cause or a material cause in the way a sculptor and the bronze used to make a sculpture are causes. Yet, as we know, God for Aristotle is actus purus, a being that acts and an individual substance that operates as an ultimate cause, moving things in the world immaterially.

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16. This might explain why some Aristotelian scholars think it would be a mistake to call frst philosophy a theology. For example, John Herman Randall Jr. states that whereas theology is the science of divine things, frst philosophy is the study of any existent things as existent (Randall 1960, 109). Jonathan Barnes characterizes it as a brand of astronomy (Barnes 1982, 25). I think the context of calling frst philosophy “theology” for Aristotle is metaphysical, not religious, namely to show that God is an ultimate, single cause, the primary example of the kind of substances that frst philosophy investigates. Still, in my view, Randall is correct to distinguish God from being itself in Aristotle. 17. More specifcally, Aristotle had the wrong scientifc understanding of the laws of nature, according to Whitehead, and, therefore, was wrong about the laws governing the motions of the stars and other heavenly bodies. When Aristotle employs a teleological law of gravitation to account for the movement of natural elements toward their natural resting places, for example, he states that fre and air gravitate upwards, towards the heavens, because of a gravitational force “up there” rather than in the earth where water remains. But nowadays science explains these movements on better grounds—namely, on the basis of effcient rather than teleological causes—and, for Whitehead, this shows that Aristotle’s physics, which is his reasoning about the ultimate causes governing the motion of the physical world, is rooted in confusion. 18. Whitehead uses the term “becoming” somewhat differently from Aristotle because he employs it to refer mainly to the internal process through which the ultimate building blocks of reality, the “actual entities,” form, whereas Aristotle uses it to mean external change—for example, when a leaf turns red after being green. Change describes only the external, observable relations between actual entities, and Aristotle refers mainly to external relations, not internal becoming, when he discusses “becoming.” For Whitehead, this observable change is the result of a process of transition from one state of being to another between actual entities that constitute the physical leaf, but the whole observable process is the expression of an unobservable “becoming,” the internal experiential process that actual entities undergo, and whereby the infuence they receive from the world is processed and accommodated in accordance with their own nature. 19. On a separate issue, an argument could be made that when Whitehead speaks of the conjunctive unity of the universe, he means to speak of the unity of the universe as a whole, not only the unifcation of the universe in each becoming actual entity. This unity has to do with the immanence of God in the world, not only the mutual immanence of all actual entities in one another (1933, 157–163). 20. “Metaphysics, in an old phrase, explores ‘being qua being,’ or reality qua reality,” Hartshorne writes, “meaning by this, the strictly universal features of existential possibility, those which cannot be unexemplifed” (1958a, 37). He also writes: “successful or true metaphysics expresses no illusion but a necessary or a priori truth, not in particular about ‘the world,’ but about reality as such, about any and all possibilities or conceivabilities for worlds or thinkable states of affairs” (Hartshorne 1958b, 226–27). 21. Whitehead does say that his philosophical interest is “to express a way of understanding the nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is

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illustrated by a survey of the mutations of human experience” (1933, vii), but, as is clear from other statements he makes on the topic, he meant his metaphysical principles to be exemplifed in all of experience. 22. For example, Whitehead understands the propositions as a kind of existence that is described through (1) logical subjects, themselves representing or relating to actual entities in the real world, and (2) predicates that represent eternal possibilities. “The grass is green,” for example, is a proposition that contains (1) the logical subject “grass,” itself describing the actual entities that come to form a certain patch of grass in the real world, and (2) the predicate “green,” which, when the proposition is true, describes the actuality of the grass in its embodiment of the eternal object “greenness.”

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Chapter 3

Courting Ordinary Language with the Ideal Language Philosophers

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WHITEHEAD AND THE VARIOUS INTERESTS IN IDEAL LANGUAGES In chapters 1 and 2, I discussed the various contexts for Whitehead’s ­oscillation between trusting and distrusting the relevance of ordinary language for philosophy. I argued that although his explanatory interest in the world put him frst on the path of distrusting the adequacy of ordinary discourse for expressing ultimate scientifc and metaphysical truths about the world, his metaphysical attention to the problem of being as such intensifed his distrust. Whitehead’s trust in the ordinary appears mostly when he shows normative interests in the world—as is the case in his discussion of the humanitarian ideal, for example—but, as his autobiographical notes and his discussion of the metaphysical question of ‘importance’ reveal, he can also be trustful of the ordinary when he is descriptive and explanatory. I drew the conclusion that Whitehead should not be labeled one-sidedly as a purely descriptive philosopher who is entirely distrustful of the ordinary’s relevance for philosophizing about the world. The logical responsibility of philosophy to sense and intelligibility in the context of the ordinary is preserved, albeit not in an exclusive way. In this chapter, I explore an additional context in which Whitehead’s thinking about the ordinary and philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility is important and relevant. The foundations of this context have their philosophical roots in his and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, which was frst published between 1910 and 1913. Russell and Whitehead aimed to provide the logical foundations of mathematics in this three-volume book and, according to William Alston, at least Russell had already been thinking about the possibility of constructing an “artifcial” and “logically perfect” language 63

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that would remedy the defciencies of ordinary language (Alston 1964, 3–6). Whether or not Russell considered the Principia itself to be an example of this ideal language is not clear, but some of the so-called ideal-language philosophers who fourished much later in the twentieth century refer back to the Principia as their inspiration for developing a blueprint for a successful ideal language.1 What Russell seems to have in mind in regard to this ideal language is that it would contain “a logically correct symbolism” in which “there will always be a certain fundamental identity of structure between a fact and the symbol for it” (Alston 1964, 2). At this point, prior to his specifcally epistemological interest in the link between language and the world, Russell held the view that “common language is not suffciently logical” and that philosophers “must construct an artifcial logical language” before investigating the nature of things (Alston 1964, 3). His epistemological interest in the supposedly causal link between language and reality came a few years later and, like the empiricists, he became concerned with the causal means by which words can be said to correspond to the objects they signify (e.g., Russell 1923, 84). To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Whitehead thought of the Principia as a blueprint for developing a logically perfect language. But his overall distrust of the suitability of ordinary language for philosophical success, and his further belief that the beginnings of philosophy itself are rooted in responses to the perplexities that arise “from the common obviousness of speech” (1933, 222), puts him in close company with the ideal language philosophers. Like them, he argued that ordinary language cannot be relied upon to solve the traditional problems of philosophy without external help, and that one of philosophy’s main tasks “is to delve below the apparent clarity of common speech” (Whitehead 1933, 222). As I already stated, Whitehead also accuses the “critical school” of philosophy—as he calls the analytic tradition—of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary, the fallacy of thinking that philosophers have all that is needed in ordinary discourse not only to solve the traditional problems of philosophy but also to produce the fundamental ideas needed to make the ultimate nature of reality intelligible (1938, 173). But the similarity between Whitehead and the ideal language philosophers has limits. There were three strands of ideal language philosophies that dominated the twentieth century—a formalist, a pragmatist, and a constructivist strand (Rorty 1967, 1–39)—and, as I show in this chapter, Whitehead’s ideas are congruent only with the constructivist strand. Gustav Bergmann, the coiner of the term ‘the linguistic turn’ and the one responsible for dividing philosophy of language into its two main categories (namely, ideal language philosophy and ordinary language philosophy) identifes himself

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as a constructivist, ideal-language philosopher. Below, I show the similarity between him and Whitehead. Bergmann groups Rudolf Carnap and Irving Copi in the formalist ­tradition of the ideal language philosophy but does not provide examples from the pragmatist tradition (Bergmann 1967a, 63–71). In an interesting and informative exchange between him and Copi, however, Bergmann associates the pragmatist tradition with the idea that when an ideal language is properly developed it could have the potential to dispense with everyday language entirely when philosophizing (Bergmann 1967a; Copi 1967; Bergmann 1967b). This is something that Leibniz seems to have frst promoted, and he was even optimistic about the possibility that such an ideal language could be developed during his lifetime—as he puts it, “within a few years by a number of cooperating scholars” who could create a blueprint for its development (Leibniz 1965, 3; see Rutherford 1995, 224–69). Leibniz imagined this language to be a calculus of some sort, one “in which the ideas were reduced to a kind of alphabet of human thought” and where, then, “all that follows rationally from what is given could be found by a kind of calculus, just as arithmetical or geometrical problems are solved” (Leibniz 1965, 12). But what are the features of this ideal language that would supposedly make it better than ordinary language, and why does Whitehead not favor replacing ordinary language with this type of ideal language?

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THE NATURE OF AN IDEAL LANGUAGE If a philosopher is to construct a schema of description, interpretation, and analysis that could function as an ideal language, Bergmann says, two conditions and three steps need to be considered. The two conditions for the schema are the following: “(1) everything can in principle be said in it and (2) all philosophical problems can be solved by talking commonsensically about it” (Bergmann 1964, 334). It is not clear how talking about the schema itself through commonsensical, or ordinary, language could solve all philosophical problems but, certainly, if it is to become an ideal language then everything that can be thought should be sayable in it. After all, the idea behind developing an ideal language is to solve all philosophical problems. Bergmann thought that there can be more than one ideal language: “But just as there are several ways of axiomatizing Euclidean geometry,” he states, “there could be (provided that there is any) two or more ideal languages” (1967b, 133). Regardless, what must be remembered here is that the construction of any ideal language, whether one or more, requires the help of ordinary language, and this is something of which Bergmann was aware (see, e.g., 1967b, 134). This should be obvious, but what is typically forgotten by those

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who want to replace ordinary language with the proposed ideal language when solving philosophical problems is how the process of constructing the ideal language cannot be had without the clarity denied for ordinary language. Bergmann is not one of those who want to replace ordinary language with an ideal one but, as I show below, others in the ideal-language tradition do. As for the three steps needed to construct an ideal language, Bergman’s explication of them should be familiar to any logician, as I show next. First, the philosopher should select certain shapes to be the signs and symbols of the language—for example, letters of the alphabet or other signs on which an agreement has been established. Second, these signs and symbols should be used to create sentences that can describe facts in the world through meaningful ordering and sequencing. Thus, atomic sentences such as ‘Peter is tall’ and ‘John is bald’ would be represented through sequences of descriptive signs—for example, “P = t” and “J = b”). Finally, these atomic sentences could then function as a basis for constructing more general and complex sentences that, presumably, not only describe things but also analyze and interpret—for example, “There is something such that it is tall” can turn into “There is x such that x is T” and, when the rules for understanding such a sequence develop, ∃x [(t)x]. Since sentences are normally composed of subjects and predicates— “Peter is tall” or “John is taller than Peter,” and so on—descriptive signs would replace these categories and the relations between them. It is not clear how the descriptive signs could stand for relations such as “taller,” “louder than,” and so on, although we have the familiar connectives in formal logic to replace words such as “not,” “and,” “if, then,” and the quantifers “all,” “some,” “none,” “there is something such that.” Bergmann seems to suggest that variables and additional signs could be created to make the transition from ordinary to ideal confgurations (1967a, 66–67). One could say that formal logic is one of the several possibilities that Bergmann and other ideal language philosophers envisioned for the ideal language. In Logic and Reality, Bergmann claims that “One does not, in any intelligible sense, choose the ideal language. One fnds or discovers, empirically if you please, within the ordinary limits of human error and dullness, that a schema can be so used” (1964, 69). This remark is not clear, but it might be related to Bergmann’s view that more than one ideal language can be developed. More importantly, Bergmann wanted the ideal language to be tied to experience (1967a, 92–93), and he located its adequacy and usefulness in creating exactness and clarifcation. Like Wittgenstein, he spoke of dissolving philosophical problems rather than solving them in the traditional sense (Bergmann 1964, 10).2 But, ignoring for now the irony of accusing ordinary language of being both the source of philosophical problems and yet the necessary medium to create an ideal language to solve them, what

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is the point of speaking of an ideal language if it is just another version of formal logic? Copi, a formalist ideal language philosopher, tries to answer this question by arguing that suitable steps can be taken in symbolic language to eliminate the defects of ordinary language (1967, 130–31). This means that ordinary formal logic is not the ideal, or perfect, language for him, but one that functions as a blueprint for the proposed ideal language (1967, 130). If Bergmann believed that the Principia of Russell and Whitehead is the blueprint for an ideal language (1967a, 63–71), Copi thought that a developed symbolic logic is. Also, like Bergmann and Whitehead, Copi does not argue that the newly developed symbolic language would need to replace ordinary language but only to perfect it for the purpose of describing and explaining the ultimate nature of reality. He does think that ordinary language is an imperfect natural language that has a misleading structure and one that does not picture the world properly in the way a logistical language does or can. But his solution is that the ideal language would need to avoid vagueness and ambiguity, which is possible according to him if it has rules of syntax that avoid nonsensical discourse. Interestingly, Copi argues that an exact, or ideal, language must await the complete development of metaphysical knowledge before it can be constructed. He claims as much when he stipulates that an ideal language cannot be developed unless a metaphysical investigation of reality has been completed. If so, this view suffers from circular reasoning since the whole point of developing an ideal language is to help in giving an accurate metaphysical description of reality, and if the latter is needed for the former, then Copi begs the question that needs to be answered. He does speak to the benefts of initiating the process of constructing an ideal language prior to completing the metaphysical description of reality. For example, whereas ordinary language treats “existence” and “thinking” in sentences such as “people think” and “people exist” in the same predicative way, a logistic language, which is a step in the direction of a logically ideal language, could correct this confusion, he states. A logistic language demonstrates that “people think” should be transcribed as (x): Px ‫ ﬤ‬Tx whereas “people exist” should be transcribed as (Ex): Px (Copi 1967, 129). He might be right on the idea of a frst-step logistic language, but the mentioned circular reasoning cannot be resolved with this rationale. Still, Copi’s aim is not to completely replace ordinary language with an ideal language. To repeat, only in the pragmatist strand of the ideal language philosophers, the details of which are vague, is it assumed that an artifcial, symbolic language could, and should, replace ordinary language. Rudolf Carnap, another ideal language philosopher within the formalist tradition, defnes the ideal language in his early work as a formal mode of expression that incorporates formal rules, or logical syntax, to

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analyze concepts and propositions in science (Carnap 1967, 54–62). But he does not consider this invented logical syntax to be a replacement for ordinary language, and, in actuality, his formalist idea is not far off the Bergmann-like constructivist idea. At this stage, Carnap simply focuses on scientifc discourse but his position can be extended to ordinary language as such. Richard Rorty rightly claims that the prudence Bergmann, Carnap, and Copi take in rejecting the pragmatic nature of the ideal language is sound because the “form of life” that is supposed to house this pragmatist language is not actual even though it is not logically impossible. In Rorty’s own words: “The Ideal Language philosopher, if he is wise, will freely grant that his Ideal Language is merely a sketch of a ‘form of life’ that is logically possible, though pragmatically impossible, and thus will give up his claim to literal replacement of ordinary discourse” (1967, 17). I agree with Rorty that the idea of an ideal language is pragmatically impossible, but I think that he is hasty in his acceptance of the logical possibility of a form of life that can give intelligibility to such language. After all, the reason that the practicality of the ideal language is impossible is precisely because one cannot imagine a form of life that would allow for that intelligibility. What then does it mean for this form of life to be logically possible? More importantly, perhaps, ordinary language philosophers agree with their ideal-language counterparts that a response of some sort is needed to address the ambiguities of ordinary language, but the response is philosophical for them, not linguistic. For example, Alice Ambrose, a student of Wittgenstein at one point, maintains that the ambiguity of language can be remedied if people, philosophers included, are careful in how they express themselves. Philosophers need not devise a new language that, purportedly, links them to reality in a better ft than ordinary language does. The same, she states, can be undertaken in situations where people fnd language vague or inexact when trying to express what they want to say (Ambrose 1966, 157–81). In other words, philosophy can offer clarifcation of real issues with the help of ordinary language as is. The crucial point to emphasize here is that ordinary language philosophers, Ambrose included, deny the intelligibility of the logical reform that the ideal language philosophers offer. Language is not a tailored suit to be modifed according to various conceptions of reality, Ambrose claims, and there is no future time where the possibility of the ideal language will be intelligible. The idea here is that the remedy needed to cure the ambiguities of ordinary language is clarity, and these ambiguities do not simply disappear when words and sentences are turned into symbolic letters and formulas that follow logical rules. Ambrose makes an explicit reference to Whitehead here, saying that by seeking to remedy ordinary language through a revision of its

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concepts, he, in effect, condemns it for failing to do what it is not meant to do (Ambrose 1966, 157). In the next section I address Ambrose’s critique of Whitehead. I also show that he is closer to the constructivist-formalist strand of ideal language philosophy than the pragmatist strand. Whitehead developed his views on ordinary language independently of the ideal language philosophers, it must be noted, but it should also be clear from the previous chapter that I think Ambrose is correct if the problem that Whitehead treats is that of the ultimate nature of reality. This critique has to be put in the right context, or relative to a particular problem, however, and not applied generally to Whitehead’s philosophy. In chapter 6, I argue that whereas Whitehead’s views on God, and by implication atheism, commits the logical problem that Ambrose discusses, his views on experience and knowledge, as well as nonhuman animals, cannot be subjected to the same critique, at least not in any sweeping fashion.

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WHITEHEAD’S MAIN PROBLEMS WITH ORDINARY LANGUAGE So far I mentioned that Whitehead shares with the ideal language p­ hilosophers their distrust in the adequacy of ordinary language for solving the problem of the ultimate nature of reality. Like them, he formalized his distrustful position partly in response to the distrust that ordinary language philosophers showed toward speculative and metaphysical thinking. But, as I have shown so far, Whitehead’s love for symbolic language (1961, 213) does not lead him to seek replacing ordinary language with an ideal language. As with the constructivists among the ideal language philosophers, he only aims to coin new terms that he thought expressed the philosopher’s insights in a better fashion. Ordinary language suffers from two main problems that can be remedied, according to him. The two main problems that Whitehead identifes in ordinary language are: (1) the practical nature of ordinary language—in the sense that it had developed to address the practical concerns of human beings and, therefore, is tied up with sense perception too strongly at the expense of other modes of experience and knowledge; (2) its inability to provide clear and decisive expression to the philosopher’s imaginative insights into the nature of reality. Before I discuss these two problems in full and offer my commentary on them, however, a few remarks on Whitehead’s relation to both ordinary and ideal language philosophies are in order. First, there is a major difference between Whitehead and the majority of both ordinary and ideal language philosophers in that, unlike them, Whitehead had deep interest in the question of truth beyond the search for meaning. His

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multifaceted position on language and knowledge could be better clarifed if it is realized that he had serious interest in the conditions for the possibility of meaning in a truth that is independent of that meaning. I revisit this issue in chapter 6, where I discuss the problem of giving metaphysical analysis and speculations logical priority over experience. This priority is rooted in his interest in truth, I argue. Also, Whitehead seems to distinguish a practical side to philosophy from a speculative side that deals with the ultimate nature of reality. The practical side engages in “the accurate analysis of propositions; not merely of metaphysical propositions, but of quite ordinary propositions such as ‘There is beef for dinner today,’ and ‘Socrates is mortal,’” he writes (1929b, 11). I do not think that Whitehead meant to introduce a hierarchy of importance between a speculative task of philosophy—which investigates the nature of reality as such through generalized principles of analysis—and a practical side that is supposed to focus only on the analysis of proportions. If he did, his negative remarks about the obviousness of everyday language might suggest that he thinks of the speculative side of philosophy to be more important than its practical side. My discussion here regarding his views on ordinary language, including the two main problems he fnds in it, should prove otherwise. It is also important to remind the reader that Whitehead’s attention to the importance of analysis, whether practical or not, shows that it is extremely essential for him. If he gives the impression that ordinary propositions are problematic because they “carry with them an enveloping suggestiveness and an emotional effcacy” that are absent from metaphysical propositions (1927, 67), this does not negate the importance of ordinary propositions for him. “No one ever says, Here I am, and I brought my body with me” (1938, 114), Whitehead cleverly states when discussing the role of the body in proving the primacy of emotional and purposive experience in human life over sensory perception. In this simple example, but also in other examples elsewhere in his writings, Whitehead reveals the important role that ordinary language plays in shedding light on philosophical problems. Just because ordinary language is part of everyday and common discourse should not mean that all it can do is express what is ordinary and common. The philosopher who thinks so would be confusing the form of language for its content. Still, in regard to the idea itself of an ideal language, the overall approach Whitehead undertakes shows that he affrms the logicality, or possibility, of an ideal link between language and reality. This link can be arrived at through a sustained effort of metaphysical analysis, a revision of some of the ordinary uses of words, and a use of the philosopher’s imagination, Whitehead suggests. This approach entails adopting gradual steps in the direction of generating speculative principles of description and analysis, but, unlike Leibniz and the pragmatist ideal language philosophers, Whitehead does not suggest that

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the actual development of an ideal language is likely to happen. This caution on Whitehead’s part, which he shares with Copi, is wise but it does not annul the fact that he affrms the logical possibility of that endeavor. In other words, if philosophers were able to use their imagination to develop metaphysical principles that describe, and explain, the nature of reality, then the defciencies of ordinary language, which for now prevent them from formulating these principles completely, are not the end of the story (See Whitehead 1929b, 4–8; 1933, 208). This is problematic and I shall come back to it in the next two sections. I mention it here to reiterate the point that Whitehead’s relation to ordinary language is complex. I mentioned that Whitehead shares with Bergmann the view that everyday language is defcient for the purpose of describing and explaining the world as such. But whereas Bergmann considered the Principia a blueprint for his ideal language, it should be clear that the later Whitehead does not provide a symbolic system of reference mixed with explanatory phrases from ordinary language. Rather, as the opening pages of Process and Reality demonstrate, he provides a “categoreal scheme,” one that contains explanatory principles (“categories of explanation”), an ultimate metaphysical category of “creativity” that describes and explains both creation and novelty in the world, and various categories of existence such as actual and potential entities that include the primordial and eternal entity God (1929b, 18–30). This scheme is not one of symbolic logic but a metaphysical scheme that functions as an explanatory system for rendering all aspects of reality, concrete and abstract, intelligible.3 I mentioned in chapter 1 that Whitehead would have agreed with Austin that stretching the meaning of words beyond intelligibility reveals a lack of responsibility on the part of the philosopher. He clearly acknowledges the need to take the contextual, ordinary use of discourse into consideration when searching for meaning, a fact which cannot be affrmed of all ideal language philosophers. In what follows I elaborate on the two main problems that Whitehead found in ordinary language and show, on the one hand, why it would be a mistake to see him one-sidedly as antagonistic to ordinary language and, on the other hand, how philosophy’s responsibility for him entails looking with both trust and distrust at the relevance of the ordinary life for philosophy. The Quarrel with the Practicality of Ordinary Language In Must We Mean What We Say, Stanley Cavell describes the relation between ordinary language philosophers and traditional philosophers as that between two “friends who have quarreled” and who are “able neither to tolerate nor to ignore one another” (1976, 2). I think if we allow Whitehead

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to count as a traditional philosopher, at least in the sense that he is neither an ordinarylanguage philosopher nor an ideal language philosopher in the traditional senses of these terms, then Cavell’s description of a quarrelsome relation would apply to Whitehead’s attitude toward ordinary language philosophy. The quarrel here pertains to Whitehead’s dissatisfaction with the reliance of ordinary language philosophy on a language that is meant, at its essence, to focus on people’s abstract and practical experiences of the natural world rather than the latter’s more ultimate constitution, which is the concrete world of natural and human events. Everyday language is an artifcial form of symbolism that evolved at some point in the history of humankind to (1) express the epistemic impact of the complex natural world on people’s sense organs, and (2) describe and explain the practical consequences of that impact for human existence—for example, to express people’s experience with natural phenomena such as rocks, trees, and mountains, to explain the mysterious and perhaps frightening phenomena of lightning and thunder, and to make people aware of the presence of any danger from the natural world, etc. (1927, 4–5). For Whitehead, this means that everyday language is tied strongly to sense perception, which is itself a natural, inevitable outcome of an organic relationship between sentient beings and the natural world. The lungs and throat in humans and higher nonhuman animals are responsible for the production of sound and speech, Whitehead states, and these make language natural, but, as with the ideal language philosophers, this kind of natural language is seen by him as defcient for describing and explaining the ultimate constitution of the natural world. As a natural form of expression, sense perception is more intimately tied to the natural world than language is. It contains natural signs and symbols—for example, the sights of rocks and trees and the sounds of gushing rivers that represent actual rocks, trees and rivers. The words and sounds through which we mediate the natural world are artifcial signs and symbols, whether they are mediated through the senses or through feelings, emotions, and thoughts that are expressed in ordinary language.4 This artifciality simply puts an epistemic distance between humans and the natural world, according to Whitehead, and a different tool is needed to acknowledge another rudimentary form of perception that underlies sense perception. What Whitehead has in mind when he speaks of a direct form of perception that underlies, or coexists with, sense perception is “perception in the mode of causal effcacy” or, as he also calls it, “prehension” (1927, 5, 16ff.). He puts emphasis on the causal, discreet nature of this form of non-sensory perception, one that exists due to the causal impact of the phenomena in the world on perceivers, whether human or nonhuman animals. In contrast to the natural sensations perceived through sense perception or “perception in the mode of presentational immediacy,” the knowledge that issues from causal effcacy

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is infallible, according to Whitehead, which means that it is necessary and inevitable (1927, 5–6; 16ff.). Also, the impact itself is experienced on a nonsensory level, which is the reason it is a source of knowledge (Whitehead 1929b, 254; 1933, 180; 1927, 5). Based on its nature and structure, Whitehead was led to believe that ordinary language evolved to express mainly the immediate presentations of sense perception, thus bringing into awareness only the abstract side of experienced phenomena. Written language in particular is the systematization of organic expression, including human emotions, thoughts, and their physical and mental feelings, Whitehead states (1938, 34–37). But it is this kind of systematization that brings about the focus on abstractions that are remote from how the world really is. It is perception in the mode of causal effcacy that brings the concrete side of experienced phenomena into one’s direct reality, he explains, and ordinary language was not designed to account for their impact on humans. Of course, there is an obvious commonality to the two forms of perception regarding the world, namely that both are natural, and therefore ordinary, forms of perception. But this commonality does not obscure the important differences between them for Whitehead, including the difference in their levels of ordinariness as I explain next. Perception in the mode of causal effcacy is the ontological condition for the possibility of sense perception, one might say, in that the latter could not have come about without the former. As such, it is natural but not something that people are usually aware of in the way they are aware of perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy. My sensory awareness of the various objects in my offce as I contemplate the differences between this awareness and causal effcacy does not usually include the awareness of the causal infuence of these objects upon my presentational perception. Whitehead claims that without the actual entities causing my perceptions in the mode of causal effcacy, there would be nothing to exist and nothing to perceive (1929b, 167). This means that both forms of perception are ordinary, but readers of Whitehead might not immediately see perception in the mode of causal effcacy as an ordinary phenomenon. It is therefore important to make this point clear. The above is a very short synopsis of Whitehead’s analysis of sensory and non-sensory modes of perception, and I have not given full attention to the differences between his version of sense perception and that of classical epistemology. I do so in the next chapter, focusing on how Whitehead identifes sense perception in its classical, empiricist form with perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, and how he does not think that classical empiricism is successful in accounting for people’s perceptions of the actual world. My focus here is on the problem of practicality that Whitehead fnds in ordinary language.

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Before I discuss Whitehead’s account of the second problem he fnds in ordinary language, a complication that arises from his account of the frst problem needs to be addressed. This complication involves two diffculties related to the question of the ordinary, the frst of which I already suggested in passing above.

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Ordinariness and Concrete Existence What I suggested above is that Whitehead’s readers should not take his analysis of the development of ordinary language and its promotion of descriptions that are limited to the abstractions of the natural world—to the exclusion, therefore, of its concrete manifestation—to mean that he excludes the microcosmic world of concrete existences from the category of “the ordinary.” This understanding of Whitehead is problematic not only because the macrocosmic world owes its ontological existence to the microcosmic world of concrete existences, but also because “the ordinary” would then be understood to exclude what is natural—in this case, the causal infuence of ultimate actualities upon each other and upon the complex actualities capable of perceiving this causal infuence. To rectify this misreading of Whitehead, we must keep in mind that he describes perception in the mode of causal effcacy as an experience of causal effcacy. This means that non-sensory perception is an experiential phenomenon, which is the reason it is also described as an act of perception. In fact, when Whitehead uses technical language to convey this point, he states that whereas the rocks, trees, and other physical objects of our immediate perceptions are abstract representations of a concrete reality of bare individuals, the latter are experienced by us through “pure instinctive action”—which is a type of ordinary, nonlinguistic, experience that we share with nonhuman animals (1927, 78–82). My point is that an experience that is based in an instinctive response to the world, which is really an experience of pluralities of individual existences, or actual entities, that have subjective experiences of their own (1929b, 253–54), is as ordinary as the perceptual experience of the clear and distinct singularities of the natural world. This fact should make it clear that the direct experience of the world in the mode of causal effcacy is an ordinary event, and Whitehead does not state otherwise. As a reminder, what is “unusual” or even “extraordinary” in the ordinary meaning of these terms is still ordinary in the grammatical sense in which I am using the idea of ‘the ordinary’ in this book. As I suggested in chapter 1, ‘the ordinary’ should not be limited to the common or the commonsensical. People have come to accept the latter as ordinary and this has become the norm, but this fact should not exclude what has not been accepted as a norm from being considered ordinary. To give one example for illustration,

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let us assume that the current scientifc research on gut bacteria—the kind of research that shows how people’s eating habits affect their mental health— becomes an uncontested scientifc fact. Even if this scientifc fact does not become common knowledge, it remains an ordinary fact because science is an ordinary feld of research. I do not mean, obviously, that scientifc work is akin to ordinary activities such as walking, eating, or talking about the weather. But it is ordinary in the sense that scientifc discourse is not a second-order discourse in the way, say, philosophy and theology are. Science explains the world by looking into its causal workings and it presupposes the kind of “explanation,” or sense-analysis, provided by philosophy. As such, scientifc discourse is ordinary and the facts it explains are ordinary. I am suggesting the same thing in regard to perception of the concrete individuals of the world. But there is a second diffculty to tackle here, one that is not easily dispensed with as the frst diffculty.

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Intelligibility and Concrete Existence Whitehead’s ideas of non-sensory perception and non-sensory experience— the kinds of perception and experience that permeate all levels of actual existence—are substantiated in what he takes to be both logical and evidential grounds. Evidentially, Whitehead takes ordinary facts such as memory, feelings, and dreams as examples of non-sensory forms of experience that support the idea of non-sensory experience. But ordinariness extends for him to phenomena evidenced by evolution and quantum mechanics. The behavior of electrons, to give one example, manifests a level of spontaneity that defes mechanistic explanations, but one that is still proven by science. Whitehead gives further substantiation to this idea of electronic behavior on metaphysical grounds, stating that this kind of spontaneity should be described as a subjective form of experience. As such, it is ordinary for him. Whitehead does not mean that electrons are subjects of experience in the way human beings are, but that they are agents of experience nonetheless because if the metaphysical assumption about their subjectivity is omitted, he states, it would then be impossible to account for the continuity between the micro and macro aspects of the natural world when evolution is taken into consideration. Whitehead supports a causal type of continuity albeit, as we have seen, not merely that of effcient causality. How could subjectivity emerge at the macrocosmic level, in other words, unless it existed at the microcosmic level, at least in a rudimentary form that evolves into more complex forms when evolutionary development is taken into consideration? The same goes for evolutionary beings that lack a nervous system and anything resembling sense organs—for example, the gut bacteria mentioned earlier.

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In the metaphysical scenario suggested by Whitehead, he is proposing that certain conditions have to exist in order for the world of the senses to be what it is. How the macrocosmic world behaves, Whitehead assumes, has to have an experiential equivalence, or an ontological counterpart, at the microcosmic world (1929b, 81). The question to ask here is whether or not Whitehead goes beyond the limits of intelligibility when he attributes rudimentary forms of agency to the ultimate actualities of the world. I do not mean by this that we cannot understand what Whitehead means by this attribution of agency and subjective experience to the ultimate actualities—although, in one sense, to which I return below, we do not—but only that the application of subjectivity and agency to the microcosmic world needs to be intelligible in itself. A ­relevant example from literature might be helpful here. In J. M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus, the character of an old woman by the name of Alma makes the point that had passion not existed in the molecules of the universe, before life came about, we would not have been here. “Even the molecules (have passion),” she states during a conversation with her sisters and friends about the laws of nature, and “We wouldn’t have water if oxygen didn’t have a passion for hydrogen” (Coetzee 2016, 76). Her “argument,” if that is what we should call her viewpoint, is based on the idea that passion exists between the sexes, whether among humans or nonhuman animals, and, by analogy, a similar mechanism should be at work in the universe as such. But can we really say that, literally speaking, the relation between hydrogen and oxygen is the outcome of passion, in the sense that this passion is the product of subjectivity rather than the outcome of external factors that are causal in the scientifc meaning of the term “causal”? We can speak metaphorically of passion between the molecules constituting the objects of the universe, but intelligibility collapses if this language is meant on a metaphysical level. As mentioned, Whitehead puts some of the blame on ordinary language for the dominance of sensory perception in our experience. He states that in spite of the practical benefts of this evolutionary development, ordinary language fails to convey the philosopher’s true understanding of the ultimate, concrete nature of reality. “The great diffculty of philosophy is the failure of language,” he states at one point, especially since the philosopher’s understanding “outruns the ordinary usages of words” (1938, 49). With his typical fallibilistic attitude, Whitehead states that “understanding is never a completed static state of mind” but always a process of penetration because understanding itself is not limited to the things understood (1938, 43–44). I have suggested that Whitehead’s remarks on the so-called microcosmic or concrete world imply that the naturalness of the latter makes it as ordinary for him as the macrocosmic world is. His distrust of the ability of ordinary language to describe this concrete world cannot be taken one-sidedly

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as representative of his entire outlook on ordinary language. I have also suggested that Whitehead’s appreciation for ordinary language cannot be ignored—for example, when he writes affrmatively in the context of discussing evolution and human history that “If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift of language to mankind,” adding that “[t]he account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech, and they became souls” (1938, 40–41). The latter is a powerful acknowledgment of the importance of ordinary language for all human activity, including philosophy, and this importance is not limited to the ability of human beings to express themselves in powerful ways and to communicate well for practical reasons. This brings me to the second problem that Whitehead has with ordinary language.

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Whitehead’s Second Problem with Ordinary Language In stating that the philosopher’s understanding of reality outruns the ordinary use of words, and that everyday language often fails the philosopher who seeks the mentioned understanding, Whitehead is already expressing what the second problem is in regard to ordinary language. As I already indicated, the problem here is the supposed defciency of ordinary language to give clear and decisive verbalization to a variety of meanings available to the philosopher. In Alice Ambrose’s words, ordinary language for Whitehead does not ft in the suit built for it. But a clarifcation is needed here. Whitehead distinguishes verbal statements from propositions, describing the former as vague, indecisive, and too general. Propositions are not always verbal, and they are clearer than statements, particularly those proposed by the philosopher (Whitehead 1933, 243–44). The verbal statement “Socrates is mortal” is not as clear as propositions that might be entailed in it and that are more precise, Whitehead states—for example, “The philosopher Socrates is mortal” or “The man Socrates is mortal” (1929b, 80, 195). The same goes for “There is beef for dinner tonight,” a proposition that is much clearer than “There will be dinner tonight” (1929b, 11). Defnitionally, Whitehead describes a proposition as “a notion about actualities, a suggestion, a theory, a supposition about things” (1933, 244) and, as is well-known, he calls propositions lures for feelings in the sense that they function as objects to be prehended, or experienced/felt, on a non-sensory level (1929b, 186, 256). From this perspective, it is understandable that Whitehead takes propositions, rather than verbal statements, as the ultimate tool of expression for the philosopher (1929b, 11). Verbal statements need to be analyzed and transformed into propositions that convey the general understanding of the philosopher, and the metaphysical system suggested should always “elucidate the meanings to be assigned to the words and

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phrases employed” (Whitehead 1929b, 13). When he therefore writes that ordinary expressions cannot express the philosopher’s understanding of the world, Whitehead has verbal statements in mind. Applying the distinction between propositions and verbal statements to Whitehead’s critique of Greek philosophy, it would be for the trust shown in the latter in verbal statements about reality. The Greeks should have allowed propositions, instead, to guide them beyond the limitations of ordinary discourse (Whitehead 1929b, 12). Whitehead sees ordinary language as a form of distortion that warps the perceptions and conceptions of both philosophers and ordinary people when only verbal statements are accommodated into their understanding. As the most important and necessary tool for communication and expressing thought, Whitehead writes, language must be redesigned “in the same way that, in the physical sciences, pre-existing appliances are redesigned” (1929b, 11). But his coining of words to express his philosophical insights does not suggest a desire on his part to stretch the meaning of words beyond intelligibility. Rather, he wants to stretch meanings beyond their common applications, and in proposing that metaphysical propositions have the potential to transcend the vague verbal statements of everyday discourse, he insists that they need to be applicable to what is described and explained. As a reminder, Whitehead makes a distinction between philosophical propositions and ordinary propositions, just as the constructivist ideal philosopher does. But, for Whitehead, philosophical propositions are not merely second-order, analytic propositions that aim to clarify the meaning of what is said in frst-order (ordinary) propositions. Thus, the language of perceiving, or arriving at, a reality beyond its appearances puts Whitehead in a position where the philosophical task could be said to violate intelligibility. I think this is what happens when Whitehead insists on subjectivity, rudimentary as it is, at the level of the microcosmic reality. In my judgment, Whitehead’s distrust of ordinary language here, even when merely aiming to stretch words beyond their marketplace meaning, is misplaced. In a way, the temptation to arrive at an ultimate, concrete reality with metaphysical propositions echoes the temptation to arrive at a metaphysical notion of being as such regardless of how ordinary, verbal statements that express being in the world are stated. In both cases, Whitehead accuses ordinary discourse of being vague and imprecise even when he sees that, in other situations, that discourse is perfectly fne. As I already emphasized, the rootedness of this suspicious attitude about getting to a reality beyond appearances is both scientifc and metaphysical. Whitehead interpreted the evidence from quantum mechanics to be indicative of a metaphysical reality that transcends ordinary discourse.

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What Whitehead cannot seem to accept, or see, is that a metaphysical l­anguage that goes beyond the function of second-order analysis—the analysis of the ordinary, that is, and the analysis of what makes and does not make sense in second-order discourse—ends up losing intelligibility and the ordinary world with it. To use the example from Austin I discussed in chapter 1, there is an ordinary context for making sense of the idea that we perceive things, or events, in the world indirectly—for example, a music performance while sitting outside a music hall. But, in the case of perceiving the concrete world through causal effcacy, there is no natural and ordinary context to make sense of this suggestion. We may say that we deduce the world’s causal effect on us, or that we have evidence for that infuence through scientifc data, but even then the idea that subjective agency lies behind this infuence—rather than, say, aimless randomness—lacks an intelligible context within science to make it real. Whitehead’s reinterpretation of scientifc data is certainly interesting, but feasible intelligibility is what is at stake here. Like the ideal language philosophers, Whitehead fnds ordinary language to be an imprecise tool that is incapable of conveying exact meanings. Instead of using it as is to rectify ambiguities, they ask philosophers to manipulate it when describing the ultimate nature of reality in precise propositions. If Ambrose’s intention was to reject the use of ordinary language in any application to any metaphysical problem whatsoever, she might have gone too far in her ambitions. It all depends on how the application is undertaken. I have argued that in agreeing to the metaphysical terms set by the Greeks regarding the problem of being as such, Whitehead lost the ordinary world, but I also argued that this need not be the case regarding other issues. Whitehead seems to have worried about the hidden assumptions behind the ordinary use of words, saying that the latter use entails a certain imposition of meaning on us. This is a legitimate concern, as I show next, and creating new clarifcatory concepts is a legitimate philosophical endeavor. The response of the ideal language philosophers to this problem was to pursue exactness with whatever helpful blueprint of an ideal language is available, but Whitehead’s response is to look for a metaphysical way to fgure out the hidden assumptions. The issue to raise, as always, is whether or not the project is intelligible—in this case, whether or not the hidden assumptions can be overcome intelligibly. Beyond the Hidden Assumptions of Ordinary Language One of the assumptions that are hidden in how ordinary language functions, Whitehead claims, is that the ultimate “units of existence” it describes, whether they are ‘bare individuals’ or otherwise, are substances carrying accidental properties. The traditional image that comes to mind here, or at

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least one of them, is that of grains of sand carrying certain properties such as smoothness, yellowness, or blackness, depending on the location and nature of the sand perceived. Whitehead believes that both Aristotle and Descartes, if not most Western philosophers, fell victim to this substantialist assumption of ordinary language, which is exemplifed in the subject-predicate structure of ordinary verbal statements. From this perspective, when Descartes writes about the soul, or the mind, the hidden assumption of the ordinary language he uses is that the soul is a substance carrying the attributes of thinking, feeling, being non-extended, and so on. Aristotle’s “A human being is a rational animal” connotes something similar: human beings are substances carrying the attribute of rationality. As stated, this assumption is rooted in the fact, at least according to Whitehead, that ordinary language evolved to give the content of sense perception, which is substance-oriented, a voice (1927, 1–2). What is philosophy’s responsibility here according to Whitehead? In his “Analysis of Meaning,” he writes that “the task of philosophy is to penetrate beyond the more obvious accidents to those principles of existence which are presupposed in dim consciousnesses, as involved in the total meaning of seeming clarity” (1947, 122). The “obvious accidents” are the abstract properties conveyed in ordinary sense perception and expressed in everyday language. Whitehead argues that philosophy’s job here is to show that we need to go beyond these accidents that supposedly reside in substances and arrive at the explanatory principles of existence that provide clarity on the matter. Whitehead’s intentions here are purely descriptive, not normative, and they touch on the question of truth. For Whitehead, both sense perception and verbal statements are cases of appearance that relate to a concrete reality in the context of true and false relations. Both need to correspond to how things are for them to be true, but Whitehead’s understanding of how things are is unique. The sensations derived from bodily activities are primarily felt as affective tones in the body that are then projected upon regions in the world, he states. Although they are derived from the body, they are transmuted by it as actual attributes of the regions perceived. Thus, when a region of space appears red in sense perception, Whitehead claims that the red in this case has been projected onto the region where it appears red and that, unlike traditional models of explanation where the region is seen as made up of passive substances that possess external qualities, in this case the red perceived by the observing subject of experience is itself felt as red by the actual entities in that region (1933, 245–56). These actualities are themselves subjects of experience that feel the red in the world. Thus, truth here is not the correspondence between the experience of active perceivers and passive objects of experience, as traditionally implied, but a correspondence between experiences of various subjects of experience.

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But, for whatever reason, Whitehead thinks that ordinary language cannot access this truth about correspondence because it is tied too closely to sense perception and verbal, rather than propositional, thinking. Truth, including philosophical truth, “is to be sought in the presuppositions of language rather than in its express statements” because these presuppositions refect a certain understanding of reality that can be criticized, or confrmed, in accordance with the philosopher’s insights (Whitehead 1938, vii). If Whitehead means here that the philosophical analysis of perception requires special philosophical skills, he is right, but, as can be seen, the analysis can be undertaken in ordinary verbal expressions, albeit ones that are not vague and imprecise, and without the need for special terms. After all, Whitehead himself does the analysis without limiting himself to metaphysical propositions. Perhaps a clarifcation of Whitehead’s idea of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary might reveal his full intentions here. His accusation of the analytic tradition that its mode of philosophizing is confned “to verbal analysis within the limits of the dictionary” due to the misguided impression that the latter possesses the complete and exact words to express all of the fundamental ideas that render reality intelligible (1938, 173) comprises the essence of the fallacy. Although it is wise to admit that “there is not a sentence, or a word, with a meaning which is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered” (1947, 96), Whitehead states, the idea that philosophy has acquired “a set of technical terms suffcient for its purposes, and exhaustive of its meanings, is entirely unfounded” (1933, 229).5 Certainly, description and analysis are dominant in Whitehead’s attribution of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary to analytic philosophers, but do they really help in clarifying why philosophy cannot complete its tasks by relying solely on ordinary language? In contrast to the critical school, Whitehead associates his own philosophy with the speculative school, the metaphysical tradition that enlarges the dictionary by appealing to direct insight and to circumstances that promote such insight. As mentioned, he does not seek to invent a new, ideal language to replace ordinary language, and he clearly commissions the speculative philosopher with the responsibility to “elucidate the meanings to be assigned to the words and phrases employed” (1929b, 13). But if the speculative philosopher cannot have access to propositions without a verbal mediation of some sort, as Whitehead himself admits, how is his distrust of the ordinary different, in practice, from the distrust of it by analytic philosophers? Both will seek to offer therapy for the confusion that arises in mis- and dis-placed uses of ordinary language. The following remark by Whitehead when discussing the relation between the human body and the self that identifes that body as his or hers exemplifes this fact: “No one ever says, Here I am, and I brought my body with me” (1938, 114).

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Another point of relevance here is that although Whitehead believed that ordinary language originally developed in response to practical concerns, he did not think that its primary function remained practical. When he discusses the nature of propositions, for example, whether ordinary or metaphysical, he states that it is more important that they be interesting than true, notwithstanding the fact that propositions might be even more interesting when they are true and meaning is empty if it is not true (1929b, 259). Propositions can be utilized to elicit feelings from the subjects hearing or reading them and, at least for that normative purpose, they are signifcant. Whitehead does not mean that language should be used to manipulate people into doing things against their will. Propositions for him are “lures” for feelings in the sense that they arouse reactions from the subjects “feeling” them, and this fact could lead the philosopher to recommend a norm for acting and living in the world. If so, perhaps Whitehead is guided by the need to preserve the normative aspect of philosophy here, but this suggests that any normative solicitation of a virtuous end on his part is undertaken in the name of truth. Since Whitehead likens philosophers to poets in seeking to express themselves “beyond the direct meanings of words” (1929b, 174; 1927, 67–68), and since poetry is as seductive as any other normativizing activity, this makes the likelihood of positioning the responsibility of philosophy on the normative side of philosophy strong for Whitehead, at least in the case of his critique of ordinary language.6 In the next section, I continue discussing this point in relation to the idea of metaphysics as such, but with a focus on the question of whether or not it makes sense to subject the intelligibility of language to metaphysical reasoning. METAPHYSICS AND INTELLIGIBILITY

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Metaphysics and Ordinary Language Whitehead recognizes that the function of language “depends on the way it has been used, on the proportionate familiarity of particular phrases, and on the emotional history associated with their meanings and thence derivatively transferred to the phrases themselves” (1938, vii). He wants philosophers to express themselves interestingly and truthfully beyond the limitations of the ordinary use and the familiarity of particular phrases and words. But, as I have shown, Whitehead does not deny the need, and importance, of being accountable to meanings that have already been established. The coinage of new uses and new applications is meant to go beyond the limitations of ordinary language, not to replace it entirely. If ordinary language is defcient here, the defciency should be seen relative to the particular purpose of penetrating the shield of appearances in order to arrive at the truth behind them.

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What has also become clear is that Whitehead cannot help but ­incorporate normative arguments in his philosophy. He wants philosophy to be responsible not only to intelligibility but also, or concomitantly, to ethical standpoints and views. He states, for example, that the emotional history of words ought to be utilized to instill a sense of unity in the community—for example, encouraging love for one’s country or promoting the coming together of a nation by the common emotions it elicits (1927, 67–68). This normative agenda is consistent with the idea that philosophy should express, and promote, the humanitarian ideal characteristic of the idea of civilization but, as we have seen, it is not something that the ideal language philosophers promote. They share Whitehead’s view that the purpose of the ideal language is to solve philosophical problems, but they do not talk about interest as an ultimate value or purpose. Neither do they think that philosophy has a normative aspect where something like the common good might be taken as an objective that philosophy could promote. Whitehead’s views on philosophy and language are important because they show that, in spite of the inexactness in ordinary language, the beauty and intelligibility of ordinary language should not be sacrifced for accuracy, even when ordinary language is transformed into an ideal language. Thus, his idea of a precise language not only relies on ordinary language for its feasibility but also retains that aesthetic value that one fnds in it. Furthermore, Whitehead is explicit that the only method available for the philosopher who is interested in producing general metaphysical principles that render reality intelligible is to start from ambiguous and ill-defned verbal expressions while subjecting them to criticism by looking into their presuppositions, and also by comparing them to subsequent descriptions of experiential facts (1929b, 13). When the expressions are found adequate and their ordinary use justifes this adequacy then Whitehead accepts the ordinary use without hesitation. The ordinary statement “My eyes see” is literally true, Whitehead states, because it renders true the metaphysical fact that the body is an agent of perception (1938, 21–25). Obviously, Whitehead picks and chooses what he fnds suitable in ordinary language. His desire to avoid the fallacy of the perfect dictionary has an understandably strong hold on him. When he reads Plato to be saying that we should not have uncritical trust in the adequacy of language (1933, 228), he implies that a critical trust in it is acceptable. But does Whitehead end up subjecting language to something that supposedly makes sense independently of it? When Whitehead, like Copi, suggests that “A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge” (1929b, 12), one that might reform not only the ambiguity of words but also the form of language, the statement suggests that the achieved metaphysical knowledge, which surely had its

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beginnings in an imprecise ordinary language, can somehow reform the latter by reference to something that has sense independently of any language. But it is diffcult to see how this can come about in the frst place or if it makes sense at all. After all, Whitehead not only acknowledges the asymptotic nature of knowledge (which makes the idea of a “completed metaphysical knowledge” suspicious in meaning), but he must also rely on a precise language in order to try arriving at the suggested completed knowledge. Is this not simply an example of begging the question? It is not clear to me how Whitehead could fnd a way out of this problem. If we look at his example of the metaphysical notion of ‘importance’, which he links with the idea of metaphysical value, he is right to argue that when people speak of the importance of specifc, individual things (using the ordinary terms “important” and “importance”), they need to remember that the generic term “importance” requires clarifcation in a different way from how the ordinary use is clarifed. But it is not clear how any complete metaphysical knowledge, whatever it is, is the answer. The term “importance,” like other generic terms that have a second-order status, is grammatical—that is, it is descriptive and clarifcatory of the uses of the ordinary term “importance” and its ordinary cognates (‘important’, ‘importantly’, etc.). But Whitehead seems to want to generate an additional metaphysical use of the term “importance” for which he wants applications beyond its ordinary uses. If we assume that “metaphysical importance” is a term that refers to value on the level of reality as such, it would not then have a grammatical sense. What I mean is that Whitehead would be using it then in a manner beyond its common uses in everyday life (“This is important” or “I fnd it important that . . .”), and therefore beyond its grammatical sense. Yet this is precisely what Whitehead does when he explains that importance exists due to God’s immanence in the world (1926, 98–99). To think otherwise, Whitehead states, is to reduce importance to silly pomposity (1938, 8–12). Yet this metaphysical use is not a grammatical use that focuses on what the ordinary, frst-order uses of the term mean. People can use their ordinary, everyday expressions to refer to things that are of value to them—for example, “This is important,” or “This is creative,” or “This is orderly” or “This is satisfactory”—but, for Whitehead, the philosopher needs to stretch these individualized meanings when refecting on reality as such in a generic way. “Importance,” “creativity,” “order,” and “satisfaction” gain a new, generic application when this happens, but unless that generic application is grammatical, the metaphysical use of it would not pertain to conceptual intelligibility. Again, the grammatical use of terms is clarifcatory of ordinary uses and is generated, therefore, from the latter. But the metaphysical use seems to rely on insights from the philosopher, ones that are generated from generalized theories about the multiplicity of ways in

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which things are said to be real. The explanatory nature of these theories is not grammatical and the metaphysical, or generic, terms used in these theories are generalized uses that go beyond the specifc, ordinary uses. Their job is to describe and explain something about the world, or reality, beyond their specifc uses. Regarding “creativity,” for example, the generic term refers descriptively to the act of creation as such, an act maximally exemplifed by God for Whitehead, but also by other individual actualities to a lesser degree in terms of its relevance and infuence on other individual actualities. What is new about his use of the term is that it is not limited to God—which is where the ordinary, original use of the term belongs. It extends to all actual entities whatsoever. Whitehead considers his view on the idea of creation to be Platonic, and he includes the idea of ‘order’ in its meaning (1929b, 84). In the Timaeus, he states, creation is “the incoming of a type of order establishing a cosmic epoch,” where the physical laws of the universe are established on the basis of the nature of the ultimate individual actualities composing it (1929b, 96). Whitehead endorses this use and states that other uses of the term “order” are derivative—for example, mathematical orders (1929b, 89). As for “satisfaction,” Whitehead moves beyond the common use of the term when he uses it to refer to the internal genetic process through which the individual actualities of the world come to completion. Metaphysically, “satisfaction” describes the individual actuality as a concrete entity, abstracted from the process of its internal becoming (1929b, 85). Whitehead uses another generic (but technical) term here to describe this satisfaction: “superject” (1929b, 85). He wants to distinguish this technical term from its closely related terms “subject” and “substance” but, obviously, neither term clarifes the ordinary use of the term “satisfaction.” Furthermore, although the term “superject” echoes the term “subject” to a certain extent, its use is not meant to clarify anything about the ordinary use of the term “subject.” Whitehead coins many other terms and phrases in order to express the kind of philosophical understanding that, he believes, outruns the traditional ordinary use of words. But none of them are used grammatically, it seems to me, and so the charge against Whitehead’s begging the question when it comes to the sources of these terms remains unanswered. When borrowing the philosophical term “feeling” from F. H. Bradley and William James, for example, Whitehead states that he wants to use it differently from them (1933, 230–33). They used the term “feeling” to speak of relations between agents of experience such as human beings. Whitehead extends the term to include the actual entities involved in causal effcacy at the concrete level of existence. Again, it is diffcult to see where the grammatical clarifcation resides here. There is certainly an explanatory application for the term, especially when

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Whitehead reminds his readers that he does not treat any group of i­ ndividuals such as rocks, cars, or trees, as individuals capable of feeling but only the ultimate actualities composing these groups. But this explanation, important as it is in showing the extent to which the term “feeling” can apply, does not clarify the traditional sense of the term. We can agree that a colony of ants or termites does not have the unity of a single sentient individual and, therefore, that it cannot be said to have a unifed feeling as a group. But this explanatory scenario involves new metaphysical applications that are remote from anything the traditional meaning of the term “feeling” suggests. This is clearly a legitimate move, but my point for now is that the move is not grammatical. The same point applies to Whitehead’s use of the term “prehension.” Although Whitehead claims that the use of this term is continuous with the traditional use of the term “relation” (1933, 232), it is diffcult to see the grammatical value in this new term. To say that a subject, especially if it is a human being, relates to its “object” either positively or negatively, say with affection or aversion, which is precisely what the term “prehension” is meant to suggest, is interesting in terms of the preciseness offered, but no grammatical clarifcation is offered. In his defense of Whitehead’s use of neologisms, Charles Hartshorne explains that “prehension” for him is simply “apprehension” without the complication of “ap-,” a reference presupposed in the phrase “prehensile tail” (1972, 171). The clever suggestion here is that “prehension” involves clasping onto something, therefore connecting with it in a causal way, which is what the metaphysical term is meant to suggest. Whitehead himself explains at one point that the term “prehension” does not suggest a sense of consciousness or representative perception in the way “apprehension” does (1933, 234). Hartshorne adds that Whitehead uses this term in order to render the subjective side of the idea of the datum apprehended without the inclusion of an interpretation of the given as suggested by “apprehension” or “perception.” In other words, prehension puts emphasis on the side of “the given” and it does not suggest a contrast with memory in the way that the term “perception” does. Also, it might be assumed that in dreams we do not perceive anything, says Hartshorne, whereas we do prehend while dreaming (1972, 172). The point Hartshorne makes is that if it is wrong to assume that the ultimate actualities composing the tree or the rock feel, the mistake is not due to linguistic misuse but rather to substantial assumptions and linguistic habits. The question for Whitehead is not empirical but logical, he states, and philosophy cannot limit the use of “feeling” to human beings. Yet this is precisely the point I am making in regard to the metaphysical use of certain ordinary terms. If Hartshorne, or Whitehead, wants to give ordinary terms new applications that are completely foreign to their ordinary uses, thus creating a new set of applications to these terms, the latter are generated from the ordinary terms and, therefore, cannot be said to have

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come about from any completed metaphysical knowledge. All philosophers are linguistic beings that come with pre-packaged uses of words, and if they want to explain the world in precise terms they cannot do so without relying on certain associations that the original ordinary terms have. What is interesting here is how Whitehead connects his neologisms with the responsibility of philosophy. One conclusion to draw from his discussion of the idea of coinage is that the loss of meaning that would occur without introducing neologisms is paramount. Although philosophy is dominated to a large extent by its past literature, he states that it is not the case that “a stable, well-known philosophic vocabulary has been elaborated” throughout the last two and a half millennia, so that “in philosophic discussion any straying beyond its limits introduces neologisms, unnecessary and therefore to be regretted” (1933, 228–29). On the contrary, consistently with his critique of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary, Whitehead suggests that philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility requires the neologisms he created. What I have been suggesting is that the starting point of creating neologisms matters and that Whitehead might have taken philosophy’s responsibility too far here.

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Taking Philosophy’s Responsibilities Too Far Rorty argues that Whitehead’s “abstract and stark defnitions” of the “actual entities” and the “eternal objects,” two neologisms, “may be given some initial relevance to the usual meanings of the terms defned by noting that the leading candidates for the position of irreducibly distinct levels of entities are ‘things’ and ‘properties’” (1983, 72). But it is one thing to translate the topic that Whitehead discusses to a mainstream philosophical topic, and it is another thing to argue that either topic draws its sense, or at least its signifcance, from ordinary ways of speaking. Do the circumstances under which ordinary words and expressions are introduced not matter for the intelligibility of the new applications given to them? It is hopefully clear from the above that Whitehead’s attention to the circumstances under which a sentence or a word is uttered reveals his acknowledgment of the philosopher’s responsibility to sense and the ordinary contexts in which that sense exemplifes its reality. Whitehead is a realist and his claim that ordinary language is ambiguous, imprecise, lacking the correct terminology for the hermeneutical imagination of the philosopher, and, therefore, in need of stretching beyond its commonsensical meanings, does not entail in itself breaking the limits of intelligibility. But metaphysics could intrude. Instead of encouraging the philosopher to use grammatical concepts in order to illustrate the meaning that concepts have in ordinary contexts, with the understanding that this process requires a generality of some sort in the use,

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metaphysical analysis moves in a different generalized direction while also incorporating normative thinking. Thus, by analyzing the generic idea of importance, Whitehead could have given this term a strictly grammatical function—speaking of how it is exemplifed in values that make their appearances in morality, religion, aesthetics, politics, and so on, without being reduced to any one of them. Certainly, Whitehead does this analysis up to a point (1938, 8–12), but, as I suggested above, when the term importance is explained as the outcome of the immanence of the divine infnitude in the fnite world, where the divine reality is understood as a metaphysical entity of which its religious reality is but one exemplifcation, the starting point of the analysis becomes unintelligible. Whether he is aware of it or not, Whitehead’s metaphysical use of the term “importance” is already infused with a normative value in it, namely God’s immanence. But the religious sense of this immanence, which supposedly gives us religious importance, is taken to be as only one example of it. I am not claiming that importance, or God’s immanence, needs to be restricted to its religious sense. After all, plenty of important moral values can be linked to God’s immanence. The point, rather, is that the metaphysical context does not explain the religious and moral contexts, but vice versa. Without an original context intelligibility would be lost, and the metaphysical context has to depend on another context for its intelligibility. But why does Whitehead give the ordinary and grammatical contexts of the concept of “importance” a secondary importance and transform hermeneutics into an exploratory activity (i.e., in suggesting that without God there would be no importance)? Whitehead recognizes the importance of the contextual use of words, but he fnds the meanings conveyed by them to have historically emerged through biological and cultural evolutions. For him, this suggests that the world is more ultimate than the language and the concepts conveyed in it, and he surmises that metaphysical analysis can arrive at that world. In stating that ordinary uses of language need to be verifed by reference to some defnite metaphysical way of describing the world—“The philosophic attempt takes every word, and every phrase, in the verbal expression of thought, and asks, ‘What does it mean?’” he writes, but it “refuses to be satisfed by the conventional presupposition that every sensible person knows the answer” (1938, 171–72; 1926, 78–79)—he inverts the logical priorities that should be given to philosophical analysis. Although I discuss the question of God in chapter 6 in more detail, here is an illustrative example of what I mean that involves the concept of God. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead states that one of the reasons the concept of God is problematic in religion is because different religions and

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philosophies express different meanings of it. It represents a personal moral entity in Judaism, an image of an imperial ruler in the Roman religion, an impersonal order corresponding to an ultimate philosophical principle in Buddhism and Aristotle, and something that is identical to the universe in Spinoza. What is the true meaning of God and how can we be certain of the truth of that meaning? Whitehead’s answer is illuminating:

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in expressing our conception of God, words such as “personal” and “impersonal,” “entity,” “individuality,” “actual,” require the closest careful watching, lest in different connections we should use them in different senses, not to speak of the danger of failing to use them in any determinate sense. (1926, 78)

If we consider philosophy to be grammatical, then this passage about the need to look at the different contexts in which the word “God” is used is on target because it involves the kind of conceptual analysis that looks at the actual use of words. If contradictory notions are applied to the same fact, this would be a warning signal to the philosopher (Whitehead 1926, 77), which is, again, part of the philosopher’s job to identify and correct. But how is the correction to be done? According to Whitehead, the correction should occur through a reconcilement of the contrary concepts and, more explicitly, “in a more searching analysis of the meaning of the terms in which they are phrased” (1926, 77–78). This looks promising until we realize that no matter what determination the circumstantial, or relative, meanings give us, there is an ultimate proper use for these terms and that ultimacy is discovered “by reference to some defnite metaphysical way of conceiving the most penetrating descriptions of the universe” (1926, 78–79). In other words, metaphysical analysis is required for determining the ultimate meaning of all concepts, including the concept “God.” This is the reason that, for Whitehead, “God” is a metaphysical term that describes an actual reality to which the religious notions of God must conform if they are to have meaning at all or to be true. Meaning is contextual, therefore relative, but ultimate meaning and ultimate truth seems to be independent of all contexts. The oscillation here between the grammatical and metaphysical echoes the oscillation between the descriptive and normative in Whitehead. But, in the case of God, it is clear that logical priority is being given to the metaphysical over the grammatical. Whitehead is not fully satisfed with conceptual analysis in philosophy, not even in its sophisticated Wittgensteinian form. He seeks metaphysical analysis as a way of ascertaining that the ideal link between language and reality, which he espouses on a constructivist level and for which he gives the blueprint through neologisms, corresponds to how things really are.

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Let us recall that, for Whitehead, the philosopher’s insights and deep understanding of reality outruns the ordinary use of words, and if meaning, even when properly reached, requires verifcation in a metaphysical analysis of reality, then it becomes obvious why he thinks a precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge. In other words, when Whitehead speaks of a precise language, it seems he most defnitely means a metaphysicalized ordinary language. This is a metaphysical language that is simply an ordinary language stretched beyond its ordinary limits through neologisms, and one that continually attempts to catch up with the philosopher’s insights about reality. Again, this is not to say that Whitehead wants to dispense with ordinary language when philosophizing, but he has no qualms about stretching it toward a generic sense that is different from the grammatical sense of sheer clarifcation and analysis. In this sense, he simply takes the philosopher’s responsibility to intelligibility too far.

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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In taking Whitehead as an example of a philosopher who is neither an ordinary language philosopher nor an ideal language philosopher, and one whose refections unravel both normative and descriptive tasks for philosophy, I showed in this chapter the oscillation in him between trusting and distrusting ordinary discourse. I also showed that Whitehead’s ideas about the problematic nature of ordinary language precede those of the ideal language philosophers inspired by the Principia Mathematica. Although, conceptually speaking, he was engaged in the same project in which they were engaged, it is more accurate to say, with Russell, that Whitehead is one of the conceptual initiators of the ideal language philosophy. Whitehead asserts that philosophers are capable of intuiting and understanding general truths about reality that cannot be expressed in ordinary language, and he states that an originality of expression is needed in order to express their intuitions and ideas. The ideal language philosophers, especially Bergmann, also propose this view. Furthermore, although Whitehead doubts the actual possibility of ever developing an ideal metaphysical language to replace ordinary language, he still thinks that such an ideal is logically possible, which is also true of the ideal language philosophers. But regardless of whether or not Whitehead is one of the conceptual initiators of the ideal language philosophy, the fact is that he affrms an ideal link between language and reality, one that demands the revision and expansion of some of its concepts to accommodate the philosopher’s search for ultimate truth. I have argued, however, that Whitehead does not attempt to produce a metaphysical language of the same kind suggested by Leibniz, the early Russell, and the

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pragmatist ideal-language philosophers. Whitehead’s grammatical attention to the meaningfulness of ordinary discourse, including the ordinary context in which ordinary utterances are made, shows that he is aware of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. It should also be clear that Whitehead’s philosophy embodies analytic tendencies ignored by most, if not all, analytic philosophers, but his aim of capturing the true nature of ultimate reality is probably the reason he has been ignored by them. There is no justifcation for bypassing Whitehead’s philosophy due to his metaphysical temptations because the positive attention he gives to the nature of the ordinary outweighs the negative consequences of his abandonment of it when seeking metaphysical analysis. I explore this positive attention in the next chapter on Whitehead’s critique of modern epistemologies. It is important to keep in mind, however, that language matters to philosophy for both minor and major reasons. One of the minor reasons discussed by Ian Hacking is that of clearing conceptual confusions in regard to how certain words are used: “if we only produce good defnitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers” (Hacking 1975, 7). The same goes for paying attention to our mother tongues in order to make explicit what is conceptually implicit. But neither one of these two forms of “conceptual minesweeping” is suffcient for Hacking because language plays a larger role in philosophy, namely the abridgment of the gap “between the knowing subject and what is known” (1975, 7, 187). Hacking’s view is consistent with Rush Rhees’s perspective on the importance of language for philosophy. Most of philosophy’s diffculties have their roots in ordinary language, Rhees states, and to dissolve them the philosopher needs to acknowledge why language matters to philosophy. But philosophical diffculties are not simply resolved by looking at how words are used, as if the philosopher is a lexicographer who could compile a list of correct uses; rather, philosophical confusions are mostly confusions about language (Rhees 1969, 133–34)—for example, the confusion about the language of being as such. This suggests that language matters to philosophy because without it there would be neither philosophical diffculties nor solutions for these diffculties. Philosophy cannot do without asking questions about the ordinary meaning of what is said, whether the topic is “being in the world,” being eternal, knowledge of being in the world, or skepticism about this knowledge. Skepticism about the intelligibility of any kind of discourse entails the existence of ordinary forms of skepticism that require philosophical analysis. Furthermore, it is through refecting on the ordinary, one might say, that philosophy exists rather than vice versa. The latter point is supported by Whitehead and, in the

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next chapter, I illustrate its importance through Whitehead’s discussion of modern epistemologies.

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NOTES 1. Below I discuss Gustav Bergmann, an ideal language philosopher of importance, who proposed to develop his own version, or blueprint, for an ideal language on the basis of the Principia. 2. I discuss Wittgenstein in more depth in chapter 5, but he is someone who thought that most of the traditional problems of philosophy are pseudo problems rather than real ones, and he repeatedly spoke of their dissolution. 3. Notice also that Whitehead uses the term “categoreal scheme,” not categorical scheme, to describe the system of his metaphysics. The reason for this, I believe, is that his philosophy is an attempt at being a “frst philosophy,” as I suggested in the previous chapter, one that seeks to discover the frst principles, or the frst categories, that can be utilized to explain all aspects of reality. 4. According to Whitehead, both humans and non-human animals experience natural or non-linguistic symbols whose transition from appearance to reality is automatic—that is, without the mediation of deduction or thinking (1927, 4–5). Although humans use language, both a dog and a human being will typically sit in a chair without stopping to ask whether what they see is really a chair. This behavior is simply instinctive and ordinary to both humans and nonhuman animals. Only when people are trained to see the world with a specifc focus in mind, such as the way in which artists see the world, do refection and deduction come into play, Whitehead states (1927, 4). 5. As a reminder, when Whitehead states that it would be a mistake to accept the ordinary structure of statements (noun-adjective or subject-predicate) as expressive of ultimate reality, and when he proposes a whole new categoreal scheme to account for the true structure of reality, we should keep in mind that his metaphysical method is asymptotic, a speculative scheme that is claimed to approximate the ultimate nature of reality as science and the other disciplines become more sophisticated. 6. In likening philosophy to poetry, Whitehead should not be understood to mean that he thinks of poetry, as opposed to ordinary language, as an appropriate tool for philosophical refection. Philosophy is the critic of both ordinary and literary language, he states, and literature in general cannot be utilized to describe the metaphysical frst principles because, like ordinary language, it deals with the particular and the static, not the ultimately dynamic nature of reality or the generalities that metaphysics seeks to express.

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Chapter 4

Negotiating Ordinary Experience with the Empiricists

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ON INTERPRETATIONS BEYOND HOPE Although it became clear in chapter 2 that Whitehead considers the problem of being to be the ultimate metaphysical problem, one that tempted him, under Greek and scientifc infuences, to persist in distrusting the full relevance of ordinary language for philosophy, I showed in chapter 3 that Whitehead’s distrust does not entail replacing ordinary language with an ideal language. Among philosophy’s responsibilities, I showed Whitehead to maintain, is the need to look at the contexts of ordinary expressions in order to remedy their potential impreciseness and ambiguity when philosophizing about both the nature of language and the nature of reality. Like the constructivists in the ideal language tradition, Whitehead chose to revise ordinary language where needed albeit, unlike them, with the idea that an independent check on the adequacy of language is possible. The latter, as I suggested in the last chapter, traps Whitehead in circular reasoning because it makes ordinary language answerable to an independent metaphysical knowledge that, should it be logically possible to maintain it at all, would have itself to depend on ordinary language to be what it is. In the last chapter I also suggested that philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility makes an appearance in Whitehead’s critique of the modern reliance on sense perception as the primary mode of knowledge. I mentioned that his views regarding ordinary human experience negate taking only perceptual experience of physical objects as ordinary, and that he accepts as ordinary the effcacious and value-based experiences that are evident in people’s aesthetic, ethical, and religious experiences, on the one hand, and in their direct bodily experiences of the world’s ultimate actualities, on the other hand. In this chapter I justify these claims through a detailed discussion 93

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of Whitehead’s critique of empiricist epistemology and, in doing so, build on my argument in the last three chapters that Whitehead should not be read as rejecting all things ordinary. In spite of the metaphysical framework he seeks to justify, he still requires philosophy to fulfll its responsibility to intelligibility by paying attention to the clarifcatory role that ordinary ways of experiencing the world play. As I also mentioned, this fact about Whitehead does not fully shield him from the valid critique that he does not always keep that responsibility. Some of the empiricists discussed by Whitehead link their epistemological discussions of experience with the question of language, warning against treating questions about the world as if they were questions about language. This warning is something with which Whitehead would agree and it is relevant to my discussion of the ordinary, as I show in this chapter. But Whitehead dedicates signifcant critical material to the empiricists’ ideas about perception and knowledge, arguing that these ideas distort the true (ordinary) nature of people’s epistemic link with reality. I show here that Whitehead’s epistemological project is connected to hermeneutics more intimately than it has been thought. Whitehead expresses this link as follows: “If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography” (1929b, 15). Experience for Whitehead requires interpretation in order to make it intelligible but argues that not all interpretations are successful: “Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation” (1929b, 15). He rejects the modern interpretations of the empiricists and tries to prove them wrong. Knowledge for him comes in multiple forms, not just the empiricist form, but he would have never consented to Rorty’s suggestion that we should abandon the epistemic quest for knowledge in exchange for hope (Rorty 1999). Rorty emphasizes the need to move away from thinking in traditional philosophical ways when considering how human beings relate to the world, something with which Whitehead would agree. But Rorty’s cautionary language includes a critique of the use of dominant philosophical terminology, such as the language of Truth, Knowledge, Reality, Objectivity, and also of theories that derive from this kind of terminology. The language of “truth as correspondence to reality” or “knowledge that derives from the infuence of substances and/or essences on us” or “ethics that requires principles” might have been useful at one point, says Rorty, but it is no longer useful (1999, 23–90). For Rorty, we are dealing now with a different set of problems than the ones our philosophical ancestors dealt with, and we should speak of hope instead of knowledge, he argues, asking questions about how to get along and achieve happiness rather than about whether our beliefs correspond to the

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world. From the perspective I am promoting in this book, Rorty’s position is an intellectual, not a philosophical, one. He is an intellectual who wants to reform society by suggesting certain democratic values that would help people get along. Like other normative endeavors that promote the so-called common good, this is a noble way of thinking, but it is not philosophy and cannot be argued for on neutral grounds. It might seem on the surface that Whitehead should welcome the kind of attitude that Rorty suggests. After all, like Rorty, he adopts a normative attitude when needed in philosophizing—making recommendations that seek to change the world rather than only describe it. But Rorty believes that any so-called objective attempts to seek knowledge and truth throughout the history of philosophy have proven themselves to be not only futile but also confused (1999, 31–32). The pragmatic attitude in this context is to leave philosophy behind and to propose possibilities of hope for people to get along with one another and be happy. Whitehead wants interpretations and not just hope. Although he wants his cosmological and ontological thinking to be relevant to the world’s practical problems, philosophy for him needs to be speculative—coherent, rational, and comprehensive—in order to be relevant to the world. It needs to be interpretive of all experience, including sensory experience, and the interpretation needs to be rational in the sense that it uses ultimate explanations. In this sense, Whitehead sticks to a metaphysics that Rorty thought was hopeless. Whitehead is not entirely anti- or non-epistemological in his approach to knowledge, of course. Although the emphasis on ontology and cosmology is primary in his thinking (Cobb 1993, 179), he ties the interpretations they provide with epistemology. But, as is well known and as I have shown in the previous chapter, whereas modern philosophy focuses on epistemological concerns that are centered on sense experience, Whitehead enlarges the idea of experience to include the non-sensory. He is considered a postmodern thinker by some of his followers precisely because he is comprehensive on the question of knowledge. As John B. Cobb, Jr. puts it, for philosophers to be speculatively postmodern, as Whitehead is, they would need “to articulate the best theories they can invent, and then test them against a wide range of evidence” (Cobb 1993, 179). This kind of testing has an epistemological face and sensory evidence is not the only relevant evidence to consider for Whitehead. But, as I show in the next section, although both sensory and nonsensory forms of knowledge are ordinary for Whitehead, his insistence on the causal nature of this knowledge is problematic. It turns his hermeneutical approach into an explanatory rather than a grammatical approach, an issue I touched upon in the previous chapter, and this puts his search for intelligibility into question.

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METAPHYSICAL VERSUS GRAMMATICAL EXPLANATIONS

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On the Evidence for Ordinary Forms of Perception and Knowledge Whitehead approaches the question of knowledge on multiple levels: ­logical, empirical, and metaphysical. Although the logical and metaphysical approaches are different in nature from the empirical approach, they are not the same for Whitehead. As I suggested in the last chapter, metaphysical propositions are not produced to analyze the logic (grammar) of ordinary propositions or to check whether or not something makes sense on the basis of their contextual use. Rather, they are meant to compete with scientifc and other explanatory accounts of how things are. In this section, I argue that causal explanations do not address the grammatical aspects of perception and knowledge and I give examples of grammatical analysis that show the kind of intelligibility philosophy owes the ordinary life. In his quarrels with the modern empiricists, Whitehead makes a crucial distinction between what can be experienced and known, and what is actually experienced and known (1933, 224). In addition to attacking modern epistemology’s “exclusive stress upon sense perception for the provision of data respecting nature” (Whitehead 1938, 133), he charges the empiricists with trying to determine the question of knowledge a priori. This charge is evident in the distinction he makes between the is and can. Asking what can be experienced, Whitehead suggests, taints the evidential nature of ordinary experience and knowledge, and it denies the existence of certain epistemic experiences such as the direct experience of causality in the actual world— that is, perception in the mode of effcient causality (1929b, 113). Whatever else readers want to make of Whitehead’s critique, his argument about knowledge itself is logical in that it pertains to the sense of how knowledge ought to be understood. It is not a metaphysical point because, in this case, Whitehead is not talking about the nature of reality and how things work in it. He himself claims that his account of ‘sense-reception’, or prehension, can be undertaken on scientifc, epistemological, or metaphysical grounds (Whitehead 1929b, 117), but I think his own attention to the metaphysical is not itself metaphysical but logical. When he exposes the one-sided focus on sensory and conscious experience among the empiricists, however, replacing it with a better account of ordinary experience, the account he proposes is metaphysical. The latter is partially reliant on empirical data and it competes with the empiricists’ account for a better explanation of how things work in order for complete knowledge to emerge. As such, the epistemological account is based in a metaphysical framework that focuses on how knowledge works.

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In addition to empirical data, however, Whitehead’s account of perception and knowledge gets help from the metaphysical question as to what must be the case in order for ordinary experience to be what it is. When soldiers react automatically to a command, without refecting on the original meaning of the words and phrases they receive, Whitehead reads their “refexive action” to be the outcome of being causally impacted by the command, through causal effcacy (1927, 75). His interpretation here is not based on direct empirical observation, however, because he did not need to watch soldiers in action to draw this conclusion. It is an example of what must be the case if one is to assume that they understood the command they received (1927, 74–83).1 Furthermore, Whitehead believes that the world cannot make sense unless we surmise that it contains active subjects of experience that affect us in the perceptual mode of causal effcacy. These subjects of experience function as the experienced data for the receiving subject and are absorbed into the latter’s subjectivity. There is a scientifc-empirical side to this process: the experiential process is one of “localized energy,” as Whitehead puts it, whose “quantitative intensity . . . bears in itself the vector marks of its origin, and the specialities of its specifc forms; it also gives a reason for the atomic quanta to be discerned in the building up of a quantity of energy” (1929b, 117). But this “scientifc” explanation is itself grounded in the metaphysical idea that, unless this is the case, there would be no coherent account of the world. Another logical point that Whitehead makes here pertains to denying the possibility of interpreting experience independently of taking human experience into consideration. He states that modern epistemology errs in supposing that we can place ourselves “in an introspective attitude of attention” that allows us “to determine the given components of experience in abstraction from our private way of subjective reaction, by refexion, conjecture, emotion, and purpose” (1933, 224). Metaphysically, it is possible to arrive at the idea that human experience is the partial outcome of the world’s causal impact on it but, logically speaking, that impact and the nature of experience as such cannot be understood without realizing that they are not entirely independent of human experience and language. As for the evidence that Whitehead relies upon for his metaphysical ­analysis, he insists that it is the whole evidence, one that is rooted in “language, social institutions, and action, including thereby the fusion of the three which is language interpreting action and social institutions” (1933, 226). This is how the philosopher could be persuaded to move away from the narrow basis of an epistemology that limits itself to sense-data disclosed in direct introspection, Whitehead states (1933, 225). He proposes that philosophers use the language of sense reception, not perception, to speak of the effcient causation impacting human beings from the world, and he characterizes the impact in terms of emotional tones that are effected into the body and

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then transmitted from one occasion of experience to another. There is no ­interpretation on this level, according to Whitehead, and the causal infuence fows unhindered from the actualities in the world to their receivers. This is one of the reasons Whitehead states that since sense perception focuses on the abstract world of appearances rather than their concrete reality, it gives the wrong impression that the perceiver is the only active agent in the act of knowledge whereas the perceived is passive. Whitehead’s metaphysical account of perception in the mode of causal effcacy is given speculative evidence from evolution, and from the scientifc research in biology and on memory and intuition, among other sources. I discuss this point below, but I should point out that since he defnes metaphysics as a speculative adventure, one that approximates the true nature of reality asymptotically, this makes his metaphysics somewhat scientifc in orientation, albeit with a larger scope (in terms of the objects it investigates and the kind of evidence it admits).2 Furthermore, both science and epistemology are dependent on causal explanations, which also seem to be the case in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Like Aristotle, at least in theory, Whitehead takes human experience and ordinary knowledge as the starting points for speculating about experience as such and, although they end in ontological assertions about the world and reality as such, these starting points are not metaphysical. In the last chapter, I mentioned that Whitehead is not consistent on this point, and I revisit this point later in the chapter and also in chapter 6. In attacking the modern empiricists for seeing sensory perception as the only source of knowledge regarding the external world, Whitehead reveals not only the subjective and linguistic biases on which their theory is based but also their lack of attention to fnal causality when seeking explanations. “One task of a sound metaphysics,” he writes, “is to exhibit fnal and effcient causes in their proper relation to each other” (Whitehead 1929b, 84) and, connecting this task with creating a responsible cosmology, he writes: “A satisfactory cosmology must explain the interweaving of effcient and fnal causation”(1929a, 28). Together, these two forms of causality allow the philosopher to explain experience not only on its external side—namely, in regard to the relation between experiencer and the experienced—but also on its internal side, that is, within the individual, fnal actualities of the world. As shall become further clear in what follows, whereas effcient causality allows the actual entity to objectify itself into the actual world, fnal causality allows it to arrive at an internal “satisfaction” that gives it a completion of some sort, which is a form of concretion (Whitehead 1929b, 87). In taking fnals explanations—that is, explanations that focus on fnal causes—into consideration, Whitehead attempts to be comprehensive in his approach in accordance with the metaphysics he advocates. Simply put, Whitehead seeks ultimate explanations that are not limited to causal

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explanations in the traditional sense of the origins and sources of things (Cobb 1993, 167–68). But one point to keep in mind here is that ultimate explanations are still causal explanations, and although they might be helpful for understanding how perception works, they do not clarify the grammatical nature of perception or the meaning of what is perceived. The latter can be understood independently of any causal explanation, and I think more acknowledgment should be given for the presence of non-causal explanations in Whitehead, especially conceptual elucidations.

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On the Grammars of Perception and Knowledge A quick refection on the empiricist expression “to perceive” should make it clear that it differs from the phrases “to see,” “to smell,” “to hear,” “to touch,” and “to taste.” The expression is a generic phrase that is meant to account for, or represent, the sensory activities of smelling, hearing, touching, tasting, and seeing. To see, smell, and so on, is to perceive something but, of course, to perceive something is not limited to any one of these activities. Rather, the logical status of “to perceive” suggests a defnitional function of the activities associated with “sight,” “touch,” “hearing,” “taste,” and “smell.” One could say that the expression “to perceive” has a hermeneutical role to play in this context, which is precisely what I mean by a second-order grammatical activity that aims to clarify the senses of ordinary activities. One could construct empirical statements with the help of seeing, hearing, tasting, and so on, activities that are subject to the tests of truth and falsity, but one cannot demonstrate the logical function of perceiving in the same manner. For example, the statement “I am here to see the president of the university” has a certain meaning whose truth-value can be confrmed or disconfrmed by checking the appointment schedule of the university’s president. Similarly, the statement “I am writing a book on philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility” is one whose meaning can be verifed or falsifed depending on whether such evidence for such a book can be produced. But one cannot give a similar sense to second-order statements that are formed with the phrase “to perceive.” To state you are about to perceive a book on philosophy is not only an awkward sentence but one that does not make much sense. The ordinary context of speaking of books dictates the awkwardness of the situation. If statements that include the phrase “to perceive” are not empirical ­statements in the traditional sense of the phrase, then perception is not an activity that can be investigated empirically. Whitehead’s idea of non-sensory perception gets support here in that if the nature of “perception” is not itself empirical then it should not be limited to sense perception. If part of what the philosopher does is to clarify the meaning and nature of the ordinary concepts

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we use, then the question in regard to perception is the following: what is it to perceive something or what do we mean when we speak of perception? This is a logical question because it deals with the concept of perception, a concept that creates logical space for the perceptual activities associated with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. It would be diffcult to see what it means to subject this logical concept to an empirical test. As with the examples of the university’s president and the book on philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility, here, too, we can test whether what we see, hear, and taste is truly the case, but we cannot test the logical instrument that allows us to test these activities in the same way. Further examples might be needed here to make this logical point clearer. If we want to test whether the sound that we hear is that of a low-fying airplane, for example, rather than, say, a sophisticated child’s toy, we rely on empirical evidence to substantiate our claim. But perception is the vehicle through which we verify the source of the sound. Similarly, the term ‘physical object’ is a logical concept, not an empirical one. In the same way that we do not encounter a physical activity called ‘perception’, we also do not encounter an object called ‘physical object’ in the world. We encounter objects such as trees, rocks, televisions, and rugs. To be philosophically responsible here is to see the logical point that when we refect on the meaning of empirical encounters with physical objects, we grammatically describe these encounters as “perception.” This is a responsibility to the process of how second-order grammar emerges, but it extends to ordinary ways of sensing. After all, we do not learn about the existence of “physical objects” before we learn to do things with the ordinary objects that we later describe as physical objects. Ordinarily, we are initiated into activities through which we learn what physical objects are—for example, we learn to sit in chairs, use forks and knives to eat, and climb trees and ladders. These activities are not dependent on perceptual activities for their conceptual intelligibility but on discursive and practical ways of interacting with the world that give sense to what it means to perceive something. When we master these activities, whether when we are trained to do so as children or later, we also master the various discourses that describe the activities. If the above elucidations make sense, then we can see why the investigation of perception should be logical, or conceptual, rather than empirical. Philosophy investigates the concept of perception by looking at the logical link it has with the realities associated with it and, naturally, it will not do in this case to try to explain the link between perception and reality in a causal way. We need causal explanations, of course, but they do not clarify the grammars at hand. Thus, if metaphysics acts only in an explanatory fashion that is focused on causal factors, it would miss the necessary grammatical boat that would take it to the shore of clarity. Metaphysics could elucidate the

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nature of perception through analysis of the role that perceptual activities play in people’s lives, however—showing how the concepts of seeing, hearing, touching, and so on, function in people’s various and ordinary practices—and if it does so without a heavy focus on causal explanations, it would fulfll its responsibility to the intelligibility of knowledge.3 In the previous chapter I mentioned that the main linguistic bias Whitehead fnds in modern empiricism has to do with its division of the world into active subjects of experience and passive objects of experience and knowledge. Ordinary language focuses on perceptive activities associated with the fve senses, neglecting other perceptive activities that relate to our emotions and feelings.4 As I already suggested, Whitehead argues that the empiricist bias emerged in the context of expressing our sensory but superfcial relation to the world (1929b, 115, 1938, 29). In reality, he argues, our conscious experiences are only one type of experience, a kind of experience that, upon refection, reveals itself not to be dominant in our lives or in nature. As Whitehead’s readers know all too well, he thought of consciousness as “the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base,” and as a phenomenon that presupposes experience, not vice versa (1929b, 267). Whitehead does not object to seeing human experience as the paradigm of all experience, and he admits, again in theory, that such experience is our only starting point. If the distinction between metaphysical and grammatical explanations is valid, then we have a philosophical diffculty at hand in Whitehead’s accounts of perception and knowledge. He does not fully see that the main diffculty lies in the very sustaining of an epistemological relation between the world and us, whether the relation is based on sensory or non-sensory knowledge. What I mean is that Whitehead’s focus on the primacy of non-sensory experience and non-conscious knowledge led him to seek evidence mainly for his metaphysically epistemological theory, not to grammatical analysis. He looks to evolution, biology, physiology, and even certain uses of ordinary language to substantiate metaphysical views about the link between human knowledge and reality. This is the case with his invoking low-grade creatures in nature that are entirely devoid of sensory perception, and yet fully interactive with the world on an affective level, as an illustration of his theory. Furthermore, when evolution is given an organic interpretation, he believed, it shows how complex organisms that have sense perception originate from less complex organisms that possess non-sensory perceptions. This point is both epistemological and metaphysical, of course, but, again, it does not touch on the grammars of knowledge and perception. But to say that evolution provides evidence that there are non-conscious experiencing entities in nature, on various levels of development, and that consciousness is a later introduction into our evolutionary history (Whitehead

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1929a, 53), leaves the logical gap between the grammars of our perceptive experiences and the world intact. We do not have to know how things happen in order to know what they mean. The conceptual framework we inherit is that which provides intelligibility regarding their sense. The following insight from Emily Dickinson comes to mind: “How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude” (Todd, 395). We can understand perfectly well what Dickinson wants to say, without any explanation, namely that there is perfect harmony, or continuity, between the poet’s soul and that of nature. The intelligibility that issues from explanations, scientifc or metaphysical, is interesting and might even be necessary but, from the perspective I am presenting here, rightly or wrongly, it is not the responsibility of philosophy to provide that kind of intelligibility. Thus, the metaphysical assumption that presupposing evolution means that both human and nonhuman experiences have to be of the same kind on an ultimate level is interesting but not necessarily true, especially for our attempt to make sense of the world and reality as such. A coherent account of how humans make sense of the world is not dependent on an understanding of how an ant, colonies of ants, or a rock exist in the world. The same is true of (1) Whitehead’s critique of evolutionary theories that offer mechanistic interpretations of nature and that suffer, therefore, from internal inconsistency because they cannot account for how we all came about from an original stuff (1929b, 20–22) and (2) the evidence he fnds in human experience for the primacy of non-sensory forms of perception. Let us say that human intuitions, memory, and similar affective experiences allow people to live a purposeful life even if their sense organs are inoperative, which is something that Whitehead allows for (1938, 45), and let us say that memory can be shown to present the immediate past of experiences as a factor that interacts causally with the present (e.g., when upon hearing the word “United” the listener expects the word “States” to follow [1933, 181–82] or, when one hears the end of a musical phrase as an isolated sound, it can be causally connected to a previous musical sound [Cobb 1991a, 186]), what is the lesson to be learned about the grammars of perception and knowledge? Has the explanation, metaphysical or otherwise, helped add conceptual clarity to these grammars? My critique here applies also to the idea that we are causally linked with an ultimate reality through the body, where the latter is said to be an agent of experience composed primarily of emotional experiences and only secondarily of sensory experiences (Whitehead 1938, 115). I do not think that the logical gap between the grammars of our emotional experiences and the world can be bridged with this kind of causal account. The conceptual diffculty related to the link between language and the world remains, and Whitehead’s account of symbolism remains epistemological and metaphysical in its main

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orientation. Understanding our emotional encounters with the world does not depend on an understanding of the body as an agent of experience whose experiential events are similar in nature to events in the external world. Thus, to say that the statements “My eyes see” and “My ears hear” are literally true and, therefore, lend support to the role of the body as an agent of experience does not address the logical link between language and the world on a grammatical level. Whitehead hoped to put an end to the dualistic understanding of experience whereby what goes inside the body is completely different from what occurs outside the body. This is an important point to make and metaphysics, acting as a philosophy of science in this case, is needed here. The point I am making is that this explanatory knowledge does not provide us with the necessary understanding even when it is accurate. More needs to be said about this point, however, and I explore it further in the next section.

INTELLIGIBILITY AND NON-SENSORY PERCEPTION

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The Causal Framework of Non-Sensory Perception I think Whitehead is right to emphasize that sense perception is limited, even superfcial, and that sensory experience cannot be the sole basis upon which a philosophical understanding of reality can be produced (1938, 31). Indeed, “we have only got to shut our eyes, and visual experience has vanished. We can block our ears, and there is no hearing” (Whitehead 1938, 29). We should admit that there is a wider form of perception, which is prehension, and that the latter one should not be identifed with perception (Whitehead 1933, 178–81). But why the heavy focus on causality when explicating non-sensory perception? What intelligibility does that offer? Whitehead rightly sees that prehension refers to an external world and that “it involves emotion, and purpose, and valuation, and causation” (1929b, 19). Prehension refects a direct, causal motion from the world into the perceiver of that world, a motion that sense perception cannot account for. This causal motion gets mediated as an emotional, purposive form of reception on the part of the perceiver. Furthermore, Whitehead might also be right to say that the actual entities of the world are prehended “more primitively by direct mediation of emotional tone, and only secondarily and waveringly by direct mediation of sense” (1929b, 141). After all, how can sense experience account for emotions and feelings such as hate and love if they are taken simply as the result of sensory perceptions? (Whitehead 1929b, 146). Whitehead is careful in how he expresses himself. It is not that sensory experience should be rejected but that “No philosopher really holds

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that this is the sole source of information” (1929b, 174). “Hume and his followers appeal vaguely to ‘memory’ and to ‘practice,’ in order to supplement their direct information,” he writes, as, for example, when people enter a dark room and blink when the lights are turned on (1929b, 174–75). His point is that there is more than just sense perception at work in this situation: the perceivers also feel the causality directly enacted on them—for example, in seeing that the lights came on prior to their blinking. Since sense perception is a form of presentational immediacy—seeing the dark room being lit, in this case—it cannot refect the direct causal impact of the action of turning the lights on. As Whitehead explains, the idea of causation arose “because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal effcacy” (1929b, 174–75), and something like the response of the eye to light is a response to causal effcacy, not to presentational immediacy. But, in the context of the question of intelligibility, the issue is whether or not invoking a causal framework to account for the epistemic relation between the world and us serves any grammatical purpose and helps in fulflling philosophy’s responsibility to sense. Does the explanatory framework regarding the causal nature of prehension and how it produces non-conscious knowledge among its receivers provide the needed clarifcation that philosophy is supposed to give? Cobb argues that Whitehead’s propositions can be tested for their correspondence to events in the world because of this causal framework and because propositions are of the same kind as the events of the world—that is, in the sense that both are nonlinguistic types (categories) of existence (Cobb 1993, 183–84). But how does giving priority to prehension over sense perception, or to subjectivity over consciousness, explicate the ordinary (and meaningful) ways of speaking regarding perception? Or, how does mentioning the causal framework in Whitehead’s distinction between propositions and verbal statements, the former of which are said to be nonlinguistic suggestions, or hypotheses, help when the objective is conceptual clarity? It seems to me that invoking causality to account for conceptual intelligibility simply postpones the need to pay attention to the grammar of whatever concept or theory is being investigated. Also, discussing the correspondence theory of truth in the context of the relation between propositions and the world, rather than between verbal statements and the world, does not really solve the problem of knowledge or, for that matter, the skepticism that could emerge if one is to doubt the intelligibility of what is being said about prehension and perception. Since Whitehead brings the latter two modes of perception together in symbolic reference, the question arises as to whether the latter helps in providing conceptual intelligibility. I discuss this question next.

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Symbolic Reference and Intelligibility In Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference, causal effcacy is one of the natural but primary modes of perception, and presentation immediacy is the secondary and indirect mode of perception. As an artifcial form of symbolism, ordinary language is part of the causal network participating in symbolic reference but, for Whitehead, it is not as fundamental in its symbolic activity as perception is (1927, 4). Whitehead insists that ordinary language cannot account for the innumerable sense data or the other causal details that comprise the events of the external world. As already mentioned, this is partly because language, as Whitehead understands it, has developed to express mainly our conscious sensory activities, most likely due to practical reasons in our evolutionary history. Thus, Whitehead is led to believe that ordinary language is biased: both its structure and use mislead us into thinking that our link with the world is primarily sensory and conscious. The conclusion Whitehead reaches from considering symbolic reference is consistent with his distrustful moments in regard to ordinary language: philosophy should be critical of it. The uncritical use of ordinary language in modern epistemology is one of its main problems, he states (1933, 181). Let us look at an example that Whitehead discusses to see if the relevance of causality he stipulates for knowledge and intelligibility is hermeneutically appropriate in the case of symbolic reference. In Modes of Thought (1938, 33–34), he gives the example of an angry person who knocks his neighbor down with his fst, arguing that, at its ultimate level, the event is a complex network of facts that cannot be properly conveyed in ordinary language. When looked at from the perspectives of sensory perception and ordinary language, the event may seem to be a single event that happens in one setting but, in reality, it includes many sub-events that could not be described without the help of metaphysical propositions. As can be expected, Whitehead requires metaphysical analysis for the event to be understood properly. A metaphysical description of the event combines the external analysis with the help of ordinary language and the internal analysis with the help of metaphysical propositions. No matter how much the world is dependent on the mind, and language, for it to have sense, knowledge of the actual world is always antecedent to that interpretive activity for Whitehead, and it requires metaphysical analysis. Symbolic reference allows the metaphysical analysis to come about. But is there something in effcient causality that forces on its perceivers and prehenders a certain way of seeing the world, one that can be conveyed through metaphysical propositions, or is that causality dependent on the mediation of a language that is already intelligible? Whitehead’s perspective suggests that he takes the explanatorily causal link between the world—for example, the complex events constituting the episode

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of the man knocking down his neighbor—and our concepts (in this case, the linguistic description of the mentioned event) to be partially determining of the scene that these concepts have. When the sensory perceptions of the event are symbolically referenced to their causal ontology, Whitehead suggests, metaphysics takes ordinary language beyond its limits of functioning. But, as is the case with other aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy, complications arise. For example, when Whitehead takes issue with both classical empiricism (e.g., Hume) and transcendental idealism (Kant) regarding their analysis of the relation between knowledge and reality, he shifts his metaphysical analysis into somewhat of a pragmatic perspective. He states that the emotions, beliefs, and purposes that issue from the fusion of presentational immediacy and causal effcacy cannot be justifed intellectually but only by appealing to the future (Whitehead 1927, 30–31). This is indeed a welcome shift because it makes not only the metaphysical analysis accountable to human practices but also ordinary perception and knowledge. From this perspective, any belief related to the man knocking down his neighbor is subject to pragmatic verifcation for its intelligibility. Whitehead is not a naïve realist who thinks the data experienced fully determine the experiencing subject, but he wants to ascertain that we never lose touch with ultimate reality as it is in itself. He claims he agrees with Kant that “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind,” but for different reasons than those of Kant (1929b, 155–56). For Kant, apart from concepts there is no knowledge but, for Whitehead, there is knowledge at any level of experience, including primitive experience, and not only at the level of conceptual experience. Like Kant, Whitehead gives a role to the mind in determining the perceived reality, but this is limited to presentational immediacy and, for him, it is possible to know the world as it is in itself because of the experience in the mode of causal effcacy (1929b, 157). I believe that it is in relation to subjects at the latter level that Whitehead writes: “Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (1929b, 167). In my experience of my wet feet on a rainy day, for example, I am frst conforming to the fact of being wet and only then I feel the wetness. The conformal phase of my experience is an admission of a fact that exists independently of the felt experience. In a sense, the world repeats itself in human experience. This is undoubtedly a sophisticated explanation of an experiential form of realism that goes beyond naïve realism. In spite of the above, I doubt that Whitehead needs to resort to causality for making perception and knowledge intelligible on a conceptual level, and, in his characterization of non-sensory, affective knowledge as an ordinary form of knowledge, he shows the kind of realistic responsibility Austin thinks is necessary. I mentioned that he would agree with Austin that philosophers who stretch the ordinary meaning of words beyond their intelligible limits

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will have to pay the price of losing touch with reality. One difference between them pertains to the fact that Austin’s critique is meant against the view that the only things we perceive directly from the natural world are sensedata rather than the material objects ordinary people assume to perceive. Whitehead would agree, of course, but he would probably also think of Austin as a substance epistemologist, taking substances and material objects as the ultimate constituents of the world. In ordinary contexts, Austin states, when we say that we are seeing or hearing something indirectly—the music heard outside a concert hall on a screen being one example, as we have seen—it should not be assumed that we perceive only sense data rather than the real orchestra. In one interesting but powerful rebuttal to the idea that we perceive the world only indirectly, Austin wonders what would it really be like to smell something indirectly if all perceptions are indirect? (Austin 1962, 17). The price to pay if a general skepticism about the sensible world becomes the norm and ordinary language is abused is the breakdown of intelligibility. This breakdown might not show up on a practical level because people will go about doing things in the same fashion either way, but, clearly, conversations could not go far in these circumstances. Imagine the response people would get if someone having dinner with them said, “I am not smelling the food in front of me directly, but only indirectly” or if someone sick with the fu said, “I do not sense the fu in me directly but only indirectly.” Austin’s focus, it should be stressed, is to locate the confusion about knowledge of the external world in the attempt to stretch the meaning of the word “directly” beyond its intelligible limits. This focus pertains to ordinary perceptions, whether with the assumption that objects in the direct world are substances carrying attributes or events that turn into substances. I mentioned that I consider Whitehead’s idea of perception in the mode of causal effcacy to also be an ordinary idea, insofar as it is a natural form of experience. The diffculty when it comes to intelligibility is when the relocation to new contexts, including the metaphysical context, is miscalculated. The latter occurs if the relocation to new ordinary contexts does not work or if the relocation to a metaphysical context is not grammatical but explanatory. Since Whitehead does not seem to want to affrm the possibility of meaning without the presence of a causal explanation of some sort—even when he acknowledges, for example, that the meaning of a word “is constituted by the ideas, images, and emotions, which it raises in the mind of the hearer” (1927, 2)—most of his relocations of ordinary discourse into metaphysical discourse are explanatory, and most of the new concepts and phrases he coins are not grammatical but also explanatory. To further bring the conceptual irrelevance of causality to knowledge home, the following example might be helpful. Imagine while attending an

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academic conference in a country whose language you do not speak, say Brazil, you get certain instructions from an usher in one of the conference rooms who assumes you know Portuguese. Since you do not know any Portuguese, you are obviously uncertain as to what you were told. When assistance comes from an English-speaking Brazilian who is also attending the conference, you are told that the usher instructed you to avoid some juice-spill on a close-by chair. Can you say in this case that the meaningful translation is precisely what you heard earlier from the usher? What you heard was a sequence of phrases and words in Portuguese, not something that is meaningful to you although, obviously, it is meaningful to someone who speaks Portuguese. The irrelevance of causality here should be clear. The causal infuence of the words on you is not that which brings about understanding in you. The implication to draw from the example about the conference is that it matters what circumstances are present when we speak of causality. Even if the Portuguese words were carried to you directly through causal effcacy, what difference does that make to what you heard? You may have felt the words with certain pleasantness or hostility, but this does not make a difference to the fact that you did not hear anything intelligible to you. Learning Portuguese would help because when that happens you gain understanding through the grammar of the language—that is, through its use. What is known in our ordinary experiences is linked to the world through direct experiences that get their sense from the surroundings in which those experiences occur. If the usher spoke in English or in another language that you speak, the pleasantness with which you might have felt the words is explained on the basis of the familiar surroundings that lead you to feel pleasant in ordinary circumstances. As a reminder, the topic I am discussing in this section is the relevance of causality, or its absence, for intelligibility in cases of symbolic reference. I am arguing that we should question that relevance and, therefore, think of philosophy’s responsibility here as grammatical in orientation rather than explanatory. The last point I made about the usher might suggest that I think we create the world, or its events, through our interpretive activity. I am only suggesting that we make sense of it on the basis of interpretations that do not require causal explanations. We would not know what the concept ‘pain’ means unless we were familiar with that concept in a social context in which the word ‘pain’ is used. The experience itself of pain does not give rise to the concept of pain without the existence of a form of life in which common reactions to pain are a reality. The natural causes that bring the pain about are important for science but, I am arguing, not for philosophical analysis. When asking about what “must be the case” in order for something to happen, the answer could be merely scientifc or also philosophical. In the latter case, the shared reactions that people have when pain experiences occur are the

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conceptual roots of the concept of pain, but that concept would not have been imprinted on people’s minds if they did not share those reactions. It seems that, for Whitehead, knowing how pain comes about is as important for intelligibility as conceptual analysis. If philosophers cannot explain something, including how their knowledge of it came about, the symbolic reference would be incomplete for Whitehead and we would not have intelligibility. I do think that the pragmatic test that Whitehead admits above is relevant here in a constructive way. If we agree that how we really know the world gets answered by seeing how we live in it—in reference to the future, as Whitehead puts it—then knowledge here is founded on how we ordinarily recognize and know things in the world. What we know is not translated to us causally—we do not know what chairs are as a result of perceiving them causally. We know what chairs are by living in a context (a form of life) that has a use for chairs, namely by sitting on them in dining rooms, in classrooms, in courtyards, and so on. A causal explanation could show us how something is the case, but it does not shed light on the reality of the thing explained. In fact, the causal explanation has to presuppose the conceptual understanding that we have. Let us look at another example, one that Whitehead gives in relation to the question of symbolic reference. He tells us that when a puppy dog sees a chair, it acts “immediately on the hypothesis of a chair” and jumps onto it by way of using it as such (1927, 4). In this example, Whitehead wants to explain how symbolic reference works. The puppy dog sees a shape of some sort that we call a chair, knows it can jump onto it because it naturally identifes the shape, or symbol, and immediately does the jumping. The transition from appearance to reality is automatic for the dog, as it is for people going about doing ordinary things in their ordinary lives. It takes a trained eye, such as the eye of an artist, Whitehead states, to slow down the automatic transition from appearance to reality (1995, 4–5). What I take from this example is that in the same way that a dog does not require a causal explanation for it to have a natural response to the chair, human beings do not need it either for the intelligibility of the idea of a chair. Whitehead believes that both ordinary humans and nonhuman animals employ a transitional, symbolic process that relates something in presentational immediacy, the image of a colored shape, to the physical object to which it corresponds, in this case the chair. The philosopher is capable of analyzing this process to say that we are in direct contact with the chair through both presentational immediacy and causal effcacy, and although the latter might be vague it still allows us to experience the ultimate actualities of the world directly. This simple explanation gets an elaborate, technical representation in Whitehead’s metaphysical propositions that one wonders about their necessity for the idea of intelligibility. For example, Whitehead describes

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perception in the mode of presentational immediacy as an “impure” form of prehension (1929b, 63). It supersedes the pure physical prehensions that give us information about the physical world and also the pure mental prehensions that give us information about secondary qualities (1929b, 63). These qualities are eternal objects that are not the result of the simple objectifcation of actual entities to which, in ordinary speech, we ascribe those eternal objects or sense data (1929b, 64). We have a direct perception of these given sense data because they ingress in the perceiving subject. The real challenge in this explanation is not understanding the technical language but seeing its relevance for clarifying perception and knowledge. Also, a dog can never know that a chair is a chair because dogs do not have the concept of ‘chair’ in their conscious experience. ‘Chair’ is a human concept that corresponds to the reality of chairs, namely to what chairs mean in our lives. It would not make a logical difference for the dog whether the object it jumps on is a chair or a sofa; both can be jumped on. This is important because it shows that our encounter with the world is not theoretical but pragmatic. The dog’s experience of the chair is hypothetical only in the sense that it is not linguistic, but the dog need not have intelligibility for the act of jumping on the chair. It just acts. The kind of intelligibility I have been discussing belongs in philosophy, or in other intellectual endeavors that deal with grammar. It is not clear how adding a nonlinguistic step between language and reality, in this case between the concept of a chair and the object it designates, could resolve the diffculty of accounting for how words correspond to reality. The question of how words mean anything cannot be answered by simply saying that propositions are the meanings of these words, and that since propositions are combinations of causal relations between actual entities and eternal objects, they then constitute the link between language and reality. The real questions in this context are: how do concepts arise in the frst place and does the puppy dog come to recognize the chair as ‘chair’? Let us ask ourselves whether it would make sense to say that a dog could eat ‘breakfast’,‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’. The dog eats food, whether in the morning, at noon, or in the evening, but it would never know that it is eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These concepts are human concepts and they describe activities that have meanings foreign to the life of a dog. The dog may eat the same food three times a day but, typically, human beings eat different kinds of food at these different times of the day. The point is that, in different human contexts, we associate different types of food with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. To my knowledge, no such distinction exists in the nonhuman animal world. The same logic applies to the example of memory discussed above. Whitehead states that memory can be explained with the help of effcient

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causality in which the past is made relevant to the present through actual causal connections. He means by this to explain how memory works. I now remember italicizing the word “how” in the previous sentence because I supposedly prehended the causal entities in my own immediate past that exerted causal effcacy on my present self. The same is true of the experience of recalling the act of watching the news an hour ago. But how do we check whether our memory is correct or mistaken if we cannot go back in time? Is intelligibility dependent on that or on knowing the causal factors that led to the memory’s existence? What would be helpful is fnding out the actual ordinary circumstances that led to my memory. For example, what leads me to recall a certain acquaintance who introduced me to a colleague of hers during a conference on Whitehead is my current experience of another person introducing a colleague of his/her to another colleague at a different conference. This is the kind of explanation that people would ordinarily look for when asked about a memory. We can check our memories for something that happened ten minutes ago by various means: asking a person who was present at the time if the memory is correct, or, depending on what the memory is, see if we can verify it by whatever means that are considered acceptable. If the memory pertains to watching the news an hour ago, I check to see whether the information reported then, and which was new to me, has been reported elsewhere. Logical priority should not be given to the memory but to the circumstances that allow its intelligibility. We do not know the meaning of the concept “memory” by empirically verifying its content. It is vice versa. The various modes of verifcation I mentioned are the contexts that give memory its sense. Again, we need not necessarily know the causal processes that tell us how memory occurs in order for us to understand what it is. We cannot speak intelligibly of the experience of remembering something if we forget the circumstances that gave it its life, so to speak. If the idea that Whitehead wants to emphasize is that the experiences we have are, or were, necessary for the concepts describing them to have emerged, then his point is well taken. No one knows the meaning of feeling joniolant because there is no such experience and never was. I made the word up without having any reference to it in experience or the world. But most people know the meaning of ‘feeling giddy’ because such experience exists. Still, we do not come to know the meaning of being giddy simply through an epistemologically sensory, or non-sensory, experience of giddiness but through forms of life that provide the context for teaching and learning that concept. Scientists might be interested in the details (i.e., the physical, biological, and chemical processes) that are at work when feeling the giddiness occurs, but the philosopher’s eyes should be on the kinds of hermeneutics that offer conceptual intelligibility to the experience.

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More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that there is nothing in the experience that issues in giddiness that forces us to recognize it as such. Having learned to call that experience ‘giddiness’ is that which allows us to make sense of the experience. Think also of experiences that we describe as follows: “I am not sure how to describe the experience I had when I thought I was about to die” or, something less dramatic, “The pain I had from the kidney stone was intolerable and I do not know what other experience I can compare it with. I am told that some women who experienced kidney-stone pain compare it to the pains of delivery.” In these two cases, we have one experience of fear, or something of that nature, and another experience of pain that could lead us to invent ordinary words for them. When that happens, new ordinary concepts form that express their meanings. The new words and concepts are a replacement for the natural expressions of the sensations from which they emerge. Language is certainly connected with the natural expressions of our sensations, emotions, and feelings in a conceptual way, and whether or not the link is also causal does not affect the sense the concepts we use in language have. To reemphasize a point I already made, the experiences of pain and fear could not in themselves give rise to the concepts associated with them without the existence of a form of life in which notions of pain and fear have a life. Even if we wanted to know how the frst concepts of pain and fear were formed, which can be done with some imagination, the causal explanation of how concepts operate does not give us that account. Similarly, concepts that are not necessarily connected with sensations, emotions, and feelings in any direct fashion, for example the concept of a chair, are also connected with the reality of chairs conceptually. When we initiate interaction between babies and chairs, we do so by sitting in chairs and putting them in chairs while using the word ‘chair’ (See Phillips 1996, 15–24). Of course, we may simply show babies pictures of chairs when we teach them to speak, or just point at chairs. But none of this has any direct explanatory relevance to the causal interaction between the babies, the chairs, and us. The causal interaction is necessary for us to teach and for the babies to learn what chairs are, but chairs could have been easily called tables without a change in their meaning. What needs to be realized, it seems to me, is that the elucidation, and therefore explanation, provided by conceptual analysis is possible only by relying on an understanding of ordinary events that these terms describe. These ordinary events are conveyed within our ordinary ways of living and speaking. It should be emphasized in this context that understanding the “ordinary” is not based on science but on how things are taken up in the lives of people. When we ordinarily experience “real” things, whether colors, which are taken to be appearances, or what lies behind the colors, if such a thing is possible, the experience itself of what is real depends on the ordinary circumstances that lead

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us to say something is real. Think of the legal age of drinking in many ­countries where people who appear too young are asked for a valid identifcation card. The “real” age of a person is checked with the help of a common form of identifcation if their appearance does not reveal their real age. We sometimes can guess the age of a person, but then it is a guess, not the real thing. On other occasions, we may say that people do not look real after they undergo plastic surgeries. By saying these people are not real, we mean that their looks have changed so drastically that we do not recognize them anymore. The point is that we make a distinction between appearances and reality in various ordinary circumstances, and the sense of what is real gets its meaning from the ordinary responses that people describe as real. Even the scientifc distinction between what is real and what is not real is logically dependent on the ordinary uses of “real” and “unreal.” In regard to the existence of real things and events that constitute the external world, a philosophical investigation can show that the concepts “real” and “unreal” get their sense from the way people apply these terms in their everyday life. When people believe that it is about to rain, for example, they either take an umbrella with them or they put on a raincoat. This is what it means to say that someone believes it is really raining. The response to a belief that it is raining is not theoretical but pragmatic. It shows itself in the ordinary lives of people. It is important to remember that philosophy cannot exist without investigating what it means to say something and how people mean what they say. Language is philosophically important and interesting because it allows philosophers to understand how intelligibility is possible without resort to causal explanations. This is not to deny that we cannot communicate fully without language, but only to point out that intelligibility and sense have logical priority over any other function of language. This is the reason, as J. O. Urmson rightly suggested, that paradigm cases of ordinary use of words are important for settling philosophical disputes (1965, 499–500; 1967, 232–33). Whitehead might refer to this ordinary use as an associative use, one that derives from an original use through a chain of derivative symbols that need not have a necessary connection to the original symbols (1927, 73–74; 83). There is a causal relation between the original symbol and the original meaning. To end this rather long section, the question of symbolic truth needs to be addressed to shed further light on the conceptual link between concepts and the world. Whitehead is certainly aware of the pragmatic link between concepts and reality, but it is not clear how seriously he takes that link. For instance, when he discusses symbolic truth, which for him describes the correspondence between symbols and reality, he states that if the correspondence works then our symbols have a truth value. He does not see symbolic truth to be the result of a direct, causal relation but rather as something that is based on certain symbols being derived from other symbols and where only the last

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symbol corresponds directly and causally to ultimate meaning. But a symbol for Whitehead is any element in our experience that is grasped in perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Thus, any colored shape, word, noise, or tactile sensation would be a symbol that corresponds to the ultimate meaning for which the symbol stands. Both the symbol and what is symbolized are elements of our experience because what is symbolized is the meaning that gets related to the world through symbolic reference. This means that sense perception, as Whitehead understands it, is a symbolic relation. What I questioned above is not the symbolism Whitehead discusses but whether it is a causal relation. If a puppy dog, or an artist, or any person for that matter is able to disregard certain objects when seeing them, does this not mean that the reaction to these objects is not entirely causal? We know of the existence of the environment in which chairs and other objects are located through direct causal effcacy. But is causal effcacy fully responsible for our seeing the object, or the colored shape, in the relation of symbolic reference? Does it make a difference whether I experience the external reality through sense data or non-sensory data? Whitehead’s approach is problematic because he is not offering a different method of analyzing perception and knowledge than the empiricists and rationalists. He simply offers a different metaphysical solution that has the same epistemological nature as the frst solution. A wedge is created between the data and the external world in both sensory and non-sensory forms of perception. The data, whatever they are, cannot be the required evidence for ascertaining contact with the external world because the external world is precisely the evidence for their existence. The point is that Whitehead does not reject the perceptive foundations of understanding and explaining the external world. He simply states that non-sensory perception is the right answer to the question of how knowledge is possible in the frst place. This means that he takes one paradigm of knowledge, in this case non-sensory knowledge, to be the primary sense of our link with reality. In the next section, I show the way out of this epistemological framework by discussing what it means to access the external world from a grammatical rather than metaphysical perspective.

ON THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF ACCESSING THE EXTERNAL WORLD Returning to the Puzzle of the Starting Point If asked how we know that our sensory experience refers to an external reality, Hume’s response is that we cannot know this on the basis of sensory experience itself but, rather, on the basis of observing the customs and habits

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of human beings (1748, 335–40). If we ask the same question of Whitehead regarding non-sensory experiences, the response, as we should expect, is that the analysis of perception in the mode of causal effcacy proves this to be the case. He agrees with Hume that empiricism cannot provide the interpretive data for acknowledging a causal link with the world, but he thinks there is a way out of Hume’s skepticism. “A young man does not initiate his experience by dancing with impressions of sensation, and then proceed to conjecture a partner. His experience takes the converse route,” Whitehead writes (1929b, 315–16). Since empiricism is based on an understanding of perception that is sheer presentational immediacy, it cannot account for how the causal infuence between actual entities, whether separate from or inclusive of human perception, happens (Whitehead 1929b, 123). Causal effcacy is the answer for skepticism in Whitehead. Whitehead commends Hume for having allowed the body to a­ cknowledge direct causal infuence from the world on it—for example, when Hume states that the eye itself has experiences (Whitehead 1929b, 118). But Hume ultimately ignores the evidence of the interconnectedness of observed data because the empiricist theory he employs limited his epistemic experience to isolated impressions that emerged from sensations, and which are interrelated only by association (Whitehead 1933, 221). In this case, Whitehead states, the theory dictates the method of searching for evidence and it cannot be the basis for tracing causality to the world (1933, 220). When he elaborates on this point, Whitehead states that we should reject the skeptical elements in Hume’s account of causality because they are based on a mistaken, intellectual view of substances and causation (1927, 33–34). For Hume, the notion of substance is the result of an impression of refection, not that of an actual sensation. Hume believed that we perceive only accidents, not substances. From Whitehead’s perspective, he therefore reduces reality, the stubborn facts, into its abstract accidents. Whitehead states that the direct perception of causal effcacy is neither a habit of thought (Hume) nor a category of thought (Kant). Kant admits that causal effcacy is a factor in the phenomenal world, but for him such a world is the result of people’s conscious categories of thinking. Direct perception for him is merely that of particular facts, not universal principles. In response to both Hume and Kant, Whitehead states that “our apprehension of causal effcacy does [not] depend either on the vividness of sense data or on the activity of thought” (1927, 41). Furthermore, he thinks that Hume and Kant focused too much on the present and its relation to the past. He says that higher organisms act by seeing the relevance of the future to the present. In other words, for Whitehead, the principle of conformation shows more than the determining infuence of the world (1927, 46).

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But what about the framework that relies on non-sensory perception and symbolic reference? Can the latter two provide an explanation of how we access the external world—for example, of how we come to know that a tree is a tree or that the birds chirping in the backyard are birds chirping in the backyard? This question is important because it is loaded with a logical point that needs to be stated and explicated. Knowing how the correspondence between our experience and the world occurs, whether the experience is sensory, non-sensory, or symbolic, is dependent upon categories of understanding that elucidate the referentiality. Whether we like it or not, we cannot start from the world in order to describe, or explain, its operations, including its causal infuences on us. We have to start from the concepts that we have, ones that can be developed into either metaphysical or grammatical principles of explanation. What is interesting about Whitehead’s claim that our understanding of the world is dependent upon the conceptual categories we bring to that world is that it admits the point I have been making about intelligibility. What I mean is that Whitehead does not, and cannot, show us any access to what is known through causal effcacy independently of our interpretive ideas. The starting point is conceptual, not explanatory—that is, in the sense of relying on causal explanations. I think that Whitehead should not have insisted on the primacy of causal explanations and physical priority over logical priority when it comes to knowledge, and my next discussion of the relation between the observational and conceptual orders in his thinking should justify this claim.

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The Promise of the Interplay between the Observational and Conceptual Orders The puzzle about the starting point of establishing intelligibility regarding perception and knowledge makes its presence also in Whitehead’s discussion of the interplay between the conceptual and observational orders (1933, 154– 55). The observational order, as Whitehead puts it, is constituted by direct, immediate discrimination of particular observations, whereas the conceptual order is constituted by our general way of conceiving the universe (1933, 154). He states that we inherit the two orders and that we cannot know when the interplay between them began. All that can be said, from his perspective, is that the observational order is invariably interpreted in terms of the concepts supplied by the conceptual order, and that the question as to the priority of one or the other is merely academic (Whitehead 1933, 155). If Whitehead has a clear cut and unchanging view of the relation between language and the world, he probably would not have stated that philosophers cannot settle which began frst, the conceptual order (which they use to make sense of the world) or the observational order (which is

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rooted in experience). This is a logical and correct point to make and it should be u­ tilized as a framework within which other views in Whitehead’s works could be gauged, particularly when inconsistency is a concern. But Whitehead’s focus here is on the philosophical confusion that occurs when philosophers forget that the relevance of evidence brought into philosophical discussion is infuenced by theory. As I stated, he accuses Hume of ignoring the evidence of the interconnectedness of observed phenomena because the empiricist theory that Hume employs limited his epistemic experience to isolated impressions that come out of sensation, and which are related only by association. Similarly, he accuses Descartes of ignoring the evidence of the natural connectedness between the soul and the body, between one momentary experience of the soul and another, and even of such momentary experience between two bodily occasions of experience. Whitehead states that Descartes’s theory of substantial souls and substantial bodies limits his epistemic experience to that between two occasions of experience qualifying one soul (1933, 220–21). Since “theory dictates method” for Whitehead and since what determines the nature of the applicability of the conceptual order to all experience is theory-laden (1933, 220–34), there could be no philosophical discussion in the absence of a theory. Otherwise, there would be no criteria for the validity of the evidence (Whitehead 1933, 221). If we need to account for what it means to speak of “access to the external world” here, we need to look at examples in which we speak of such access. For instance, I may have independent access to the cause of the pain in my fnger while gardening, namely the thorn that I see stuck in that fnger. The same could be true of nonphysical pain, such as the anxiety one feels upon parachuting from an airplane or as a result of camping in a remote area that is heavily populated by grizzly bears. I know of these independent forms of access because I can trace my experiences to them. This means that tracing this sense of causality to its source is contingent upon intelligible referentiality to external surroundings that establish the meaning of pain and anxiety in these and similar circumstances. But what access do I have to the causal effcacy between two actual entities in a rock, for example? If the answer is metaphysical access, how does the ordinary person have access to that? Even if we agree with Whitehead on the type of explanation he offers in regard to how perception and knowledge occur, this still does not tell us what they are. From Whitehead’s perspective, we would not be able to identify a temporal succession of events if we relied solely on perception in the mode of presentational immediacy because the experience of, say, the arrival of a train, would be disconnected from the experience of the relation between one train event and another. The claim is that the continuity between the train events would be impossible without causal effcacy.

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I am not arguing with the coherence of Whitehead’s claims, but the crucial point here, as I have been stressing, is that both the presentational immediacy of something like the train and the causal effcacy associated with experiencing its arrival presuppose our ordinary knowledge of what a train is and what it is for the train to arrive somewhere. The explanations offered by causality and symbolic reference are contingent upon the existence of an ordinary form of life in which the language of train-arrival already has a sense. More radically, I need not even know the causal processes of my perception of the train’s arrival in order to know that the train has arrived or what it means for the train to arrive. My unremitting emphasis on the independence of meaning from the causal processes that lead to the occurrence of the events to which that meaning is related is meant also to illumine the nature of what we call an “explanation” or “understanding.” An empirical, causal investigation determines whether it is really raining outside or not, and it could determine whether it is true that the moon is x miles away from the earth. But a conceptual investigation of the meaning of “it is raining” or “the moon is x miles away from the earth” can be based entirely on the concepts and propositions that describe these events and without any knowledge of how we causally interact with them. Again, the kind of understanding that issues from conceptual analysis is not causal and it can be had without resort to any causal explanation. Let us not forget that what is under investigation philosophically is not whether something happens or not, but the meaning of the concepts entailed in that event. It should be obvious that philosophy does not investigate the truth of the statement “It is raining outside right now.” This is the reason, to repeat, that philosophy’s main responsibility lies in investigating the sense and intelligibility of what is said. The statement about the rain is a contingent proposition and it requires empirical verifcation. Philosophy investigates the question of what it means to say something like “it is raining outside right now,” and it does so by investigating the concept “it is raining.” There is no doubt that when Whitehead speaks of understanding, he is entirely focused on the kind of understanding that occurs as a result of providing causal explanations. When he discusses the two modes of understanding in Modes of Thought that metaphysics seeks, they turn out to be causal forms of understanding. He describes them as internal and external forms of understanding, stating that the former is based on knowing the causal processes by which actual entities come to their own satisfaction, and the latter on knowing the causal processes by which actual entities change from one moment of satisfaction to another (Whitehead 1938, 45–46). These are the familiar processes of concrescence and transition, respectively. But, again, are these kinds of understanding the ones that philosophy needs? Is knowledge of the “how” necessary for gaining understanding of the world

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in which we live? I hope to have shown by now that the answer to both questions is a resounding “No.” Whitehead’s view on the relation between the conceptual and observational orders needs to be taken into consideration when refecting on his views on the ordinary and on philosophy’s responsibility toward sense and ordinary meaning. At the end of the last section, I mentioned that Whitehead should not have given causal explanations logical priority over conceptual explanations, but I agree with Dorothy Emmet’s assessment that his philosophical endeavor to “hold together two sides—the abstract schemes, and the concrete fow of experience” refects an awareness of the serious gap that exists between the conceptual/philosophical order, on the one hand, and the radical diversity of experience, on the other hand (Emmet 1948, 267). In her view, Whitehead embarked on “a daring and perhaps desperate attempt to bridge the gap by presenting a view in which the general cosmological principles are generalizations from the kind of structure he believes we fnd in our actual experience” (1948, 268). But we might be able to say of Whitehead something akin to what he said of Plato, she opines, namely that people turn to him not for the supposed systematic metaphysics he attempted to create but for “the wealth of general ideas scattered through them” (1948, 268). This is indeed one of the reasons for my attraction to Whitehead and why I wrote this book.

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CREATING MEANING I now come to the fnal part of this chapter in order to, frst, discuss the implications of denying the importance of causality for philosophical explanations and, second, connect these implications to the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility and the ordinary. I suggested that when Whitehead tells us that the meaning of words is consistent with the ideas, images, and emotions they raise, the question that should be raised in that context is: how do words raise these experiences? I do not mean the “how” in the last question to be taken causally, but only whether the question itself about the causal relation between the sound of a word or its shape on paper, on the one hand, and the meanings it raises in the minds of hearers and readers, on the other hand, can be asked philosophically. To what extent, if at all, do words determine the meaning raised? If the meaning is not the intended one, does this mean that the relation is not causal but perhaps psychological? Suppose, for example, that upon hearing someone speak of her wedding day, the image of people celebrating the bride, groom, and their families comes to your mind. The content of this image will depend largely on the cultural context in which you belong, but to what extent can the images be

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determined by the description itself? Whitehead does not seem to endorse the view that mental and linguistic phenomena are private and hidden, and that only the individual having them can be certain of the existence of the phenomena they represent. If Whitehead admits of the need for conceptual analysis and of the fact that concepts have a history of use, then he would have to deny that individuals are able to know what things are on the basis of their inner experiences. Language for him would have to be public, not private. It cannot arise from the experiences that individuals have, regardless of whether these experiences are shared with others or not. Neither would these experiences force their meaning on the perceiver irrespective of any public context that allows them to be what they are. A certain color cannot force its meaning on an individual and lead her to say that only she knows what the color is. The question here is the following: if Whitehead agrees that the intelligibility of the external world is somehow dependent on a culture that provides this intelligibility, why bring causality into the picture? Why not focus on how the suggestive power of symbols, which he endorses (Whitehead 1927, 67), infuences their meaning, or at least new meanings that they might have? After all, the suggestiveness and the emotional effcacy that symbols carry, and which cannot be ignored (Whitehead 1927, 67), are informed to a large extent by the way the words suggesting them have been used, by the emotional history associated with that use, and by the familiarity that their listeners have of that use. Of course, words are symbols for objects and events, but the latter two can also be symbols for words. Upon hearing the word ‘war’ one may conjure up images of soldiers, fghter jets, tanks, bombs, buildings destroyed, dead people, and so on. In this example, the word ‘war’ symbolizes the destructive events associated with wars. The events themselves, however, could also suggest the concept of war for someone who witnesses them. But the issue is that, for Whitehead, whatever the symbol is, its meaning needs to be accessed somehow (1927, 57), and the latter is possible through direct experience that has causality at its core. Interpretations in this scenario are causal in nature. What we have seen, however, is that the analysis of causal effcacy, presentational immediacy, and symbolic reference does not shed grammatical light on questions related to intelligibility. I believe that if we are reminded by an obvious and crucial distinction in regard to the relation between language and reality, one I provide next, we can then see why creating meaning is possible without the involvement of causal reasoning. If we are persuaded that conceptual analysis is the proper tool for elucidating the link between language and reality, then what needs to be realized is that whereas language itself cannot determine the nature of what is perceived, the analysis of language can. This fact seems to be lost on Whitehead due to

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his fear of losing touch with ultimate reality. As Judith Jones rightly states, Whitehead’s main interest in discussing symbolism, at least in Religion in the Making, is to produce a “philosophy of expression”—a philosophy concerned with symbols and semiotics—rather than a philosophy of language that analyzes words (1996, xii–xiii). This is a crucial point for understanding Whitehead. Expression is a crucial dimension of existence, or experience as such, a “fundamental sacrament,” as Whitehead calls it (1926, 131), and since ordinary language cannot allow metaphysical expression to be fully fulflled, Whitehead does not think the engagement in its analysis ought to be the ultimate aim. Also, whereas every linguistic utterance is an expression of some sort, expression itself, as Whitehead clearly states in Modes of Thought, is a larger category. It is best described as an urge that humans share with nonhuman animals and where the existence of a world independent of it, and to which it reacts, is assumed to exist. Another way of putting the point about Whitehead’s interest in a philosophy of expression, rather than a philosophy of language, is to say that his analysis of language addresses the way we perceive things but not how intelligibility is produced. The whole question as to whether language shapes our perception is ambiguous, of course, because we are not told what kind of shaping is being talked about. Logical priority has to be given to the starting point in seeking knowledge and understanding. This starting point is the grammatical function of concepts in our various discourses. If it turns out that these concepts determine the meaning of what is perceived, then, in a sense, they create that meaning. One fnal point to mention here is that Whitehead’s rejection of traditional empiricism is intimately connected with his affrmation of realities that exist independently of human experience. I mentioned in this chapter that Whitehead is not a naïve realist and he explicitly describes his philosophy as organically realistic (1929b, 70). The question to ask here is how to consider this organic form of realism relative to the questions of ordinariness and philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. In the next chapter I discuss these questions in relation to Wittgenstein’s rejection of empiricism while affrming ordinary forms of realism.

NOTES 1. When the data is received into a conscious being who is able to analyze symbols, whether linguistic or non-linguistic, they are then analyzed in reference to the data perceived in presentation immediacy and we would have a case of a “symbolically conditioned action,” Whitehead states (1927, 80–81).

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2. One of the complaints that Whitehead issues against science is that it is impartial to the objects of its study, an attitude that is typically commendable. But a rock and an animal should not always be studied on the basis of the same principles, he states, because whereas the behavior of a rock could be accounted for with the help of the law of gravitation, for example, the same cannot be applied to an animal with intentions. As Whitehead puts it: “The impartiality of physical science is the reason for its failure as the sole interpreter of animal behavior” (1938, 28). 3. It should be noted that the language of either causality or explanation glosses over an important distinction between causes and reasons, the latter touching on the possibility of offering intelligibility for an action on the basis of motives rather than causes. When an aesthetic reason for preferring a trip to a desert area rather than to the Bahamas is provided, for example, this non-causal explanation is an ultimate explanation insofar as the kind of explanation needed in this case is rooted in one’s motives for preferring one destination over another. One could call motives and purposes fnal causes, of course, as Aristotle did, but there should be no expectation of any necessary causal outcome from them. Motives could be strong reasons for doing something without containing the kind of causal necessity one fnds in effcient causality. 4. Interestingly, this fact was not lost on George Berkeley who thought that any a priori defnition of perception only raises dust that ultimately prevents us from seeing its true logical function. In his discussion of John Locke’s denial of the possibility of accessing substances and primary qualities, he locates the epistemological problem of perception in philosophical misuses of language although, admittedly, he thought the philosopher must also “draw the curtain of words” and look behind them (Berkeley 1710, §§11–13; Hanfing 2002, 9). The latter means that physical reality supersedes language when it comes to perception, but Berkeley warned against philosophical abuses of language that occur when terms are used without clear meaning. As I have shown in the previous chapter, Whitehead holds the same position.

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Rubbing Shoulders with Wittgenstein on Ordinary Realism

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BEYOND THE CELIBACY OF THE INTELLECT At the end of the last chapter, I mentioned that Whitehead endorses an organic form of realism that affrms an accessible reality beyond its empiricist appearances, and one that is directly received through bodily prehensions. The mind becomes divorced from “the concrete contemplation of the complete facts” if it disregards the concrete side of the world beyond its abstract perceptions, and if it claims that the world is inaccessible to us (Whitehead 1925, 197). This celibacy of the intellect, as Whitehead describes the empiricist roots of skepticism about affrming reality, is detrimental to philosophy’s hermeneutical responsibility. In this chapter, I argue that Whitehead’s ontological realism is a recipe against this kind of celibacy, and that his use of ordinary forms of knowledge when fghting skepticism creates a strong philosophical affnity between him and Wittgenstein on how philosophy fulflls its responsibility to intelligibility. Traditionally, Wittgenstein is known among many metaphysicians for his fervent rejection of metaphysics whereas Whitehead is seen as the chief exemplifcation of the systematic and explanatory metaphysician. But this characterization, which is true up to a certain point, misses the fact that Whitehead’s and Wittgenstein’s affrmations of realism reveal a similarity between them not only on how to fght the skeptical ramifcations of traditional empiricism concerning knowledge but also in regard to their shared affrmation of a dispassionate nature to philosophy. Looking one-sidedly at them from the perspective of their views on metaphysics is a hindrance to what can be learned from them regarding philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility and the ordinary. In pointing out how Whitehead and Wittgenstein rub shoulders on the questions of knowledge, realism, and skepticism, I do not mean to stretch 123

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this similarity beyond its limits, however. As I have shown so far regarding Whitehead, he embraces a vision of philosophy that is both descriptive and normative, and his interest in the generic nature of concepts is not always undertaken from a grammatical perspective. Furthermore, Wittgenstein not only rejects any normative responsibilities for philosophy, seeing the latter as strictly grammatical in orientation, but also any explanatory endeavors that are scientifc in orientation. Thus, although both philosophers claim that philosophy ought to be dispassionate in its consideration of its issues, the dispassionism is not always the same. I point out these differences when relevant in this chapter. To explicate the implications of Wittgenstein’s and Whitehead’s shared critique of modern epistemology and their shared affrmations of realism, I proceed as follows. In the next section, I revisit the modern empiricist background against which Wittgenstein and Whitehead operate, indicating the specifc critical issues on which they agree and clarifying the relevance of these issues for the question of realism. The clarifcation is necessary considering the fact, discussed in the previous chapter, that Whitehead uses the term “empiricism” both negatively and positively but also because the term ‘realism’ has acquired various meanings in contemporary philosophy. Since Whitehead is also critical of modern rationalism, including Kant, I briefy discuss the differences between him and Wittgenstein on Kant’s position. Throughout the chapter, I situate the specifc remarks that Wittgenstein and Whitehead make on empiricism and realism in the context of the question of the ordinary and consider the implications of the discussion for the question of philosophy’s responsibility in combatting skepticism. Finally, in the last section, I offer concluding remarks while elaborating in more depth on the differences between Wittgenstein and Whitehead on the nature of ‘the ordinary’. MODERN EMPIRICISM AND REALISM As suggested in the previous chapter, modern empiricism is roughly the view that our knowledge of the world begins with sensations that derive from sensory perception of objects in that world, and that these objects are causally projected onto our sense organs as sensations, or sense data, that are then carried to our minds as ideas. The modern empiricists argue that this process leads to knowledge although, as in Hume’s case, skepticism is also proposed regarding the possibility of justifying the causal process that generates knowledge. It is easy to see how this epistemological view could lead to a form of sensory realism that makes the mind dependent on objects depicted as causally related to it.

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Hillary Putnam describes this picture of the world as the “myth of the ready-made world” (1992, 123) and rightly rejects it, as Whitehead and others do, as a form of naïve realism. This picture is also descriptive of an Aristotelian form of realism where, as Rorty suggests, matter is said to exist not only independently of human perceptions but also of the qualities, or the forms, inherent in it (1983, 68–69). In defending Whitehead’s metaphysical realism, Cobb depicts naïve realism as the idea that “the world apart from our sense experience is much like what is given to us, phenomenally, in sense experience” (1991b, 180–182). Admittedly, the naïve realism linked to modern empiricism is not fully representative of its complexity. For example, John Locke accepts two types of knowledge that are not sensory-based: intuitive knowledge of the self and demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence (1690, book IV, chap. 2). Also, Hume’s skepticism about the possibility that sense perception could provide causal data about the world is one reason not to describe him as a naïve realist. Finally, George Berkeley is an idealist whose esse est percipi denies the independence of the world from perception and the ideas it produces.1 As I also mentioned in the previous chapter, Berkeley links perception with language in a way that shows he cannot be considered a naïve realist. Still, the point about modern epistemology is that it could lead to the naïve form of sensory realism, not that the modern epistemologists necessarily subscribe to that view. It is known that Kant rejects the inevitability of the skepticism associated with Hume. Although he agrees with his empiricist predecessors that all knowledge begins in sensory experience, he does not believe that knowledge forms and ends there. For him, the various categories of understanding that are inherent to the human mind, as well as the innate forms of space and time, impose an epistemic structure on the phenomenal world, the implication of which is that the world is not completely independent from the mind. Only the noumenal reality is beyond such theoretical structuring, according to Kant. His transcendental idealism differs from Berkeley’s empiricist idealism, however, in that he allows for a priori concepts that determine the scope and structure of the phenomenal world. Whitehead agrees with Kant and the modern empiricists that experience is the beginning of all knowledge but, as already indicated, he disagrees with them on the kind of experience from which that knowledge begins. Whereas Kant accepts from his predecessors the primary epistemic function of sense perception, combining that function with some a priori considerations, Whitehead does not agree with the epistemic primacy of sense perception. As I argued in the previous chapter, he accepts the reality of sense perception but thinks of prehension as the fundamental mode of interaction with the world. Of course, his rejection of modern epistemology’s sensory realism and

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of Kant’s more critical realism does not entail a denial of the independent existence of the objects of experience from their knowers. His postulation of a direct causal relation between the ultimate constituents of reality, independently of how they are perceived, and between these constituents and human perception, constitutes his affrmation of a critical form of realism that is different from Kant’s. Whitehead’s ontological realism is based in epistemological and metaphysical reasoning, as I already suggested, and this makes it different from Wittgenstein’s form of realism. Like Whitehead, Wittgenstein rejects the versions of realism associated with the modern empiricists and Kant, although he would defnitely say that the mind, or rather language, has a constructive role in shaping the nature of the world perceived. But, as I show below, his philosophy bypasses the need to reach conclusions about realism on the basis of epistemological and metaphysical considerations. Wittgenstein rejects the relevance of causal thinking for justifying knowledge, whether the causality involved is sensory, non-sensory, or otherwise. He argues, instead, that the link between concepts and the world is conceptual, one that is rooted in people’s agreements of judgment concerning phenomena in the world—agreements that are behavioristic and linguistic, and ones that give rise to concepts. Wittgenstein’s concerns are not epistemological at all, one might say, and the reader will obviously realize that my claims about the need to restrict philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility are indebted to Wittgenstein. What is needed in philosophy, he repeatedly emphasizes, is conceptual elucidation of the ordinary discourses that give concepts their meanings. The elucidation is typically based on clarifying the ordinary use of words that form the content of the relevant concepts. Causality does not play a signifcant role in establishing sense and intelligibility in the context of people’s shared reactions to phenomena in the world. The question to ask, then, about the agreement in Wittgenstein’s and Whitehead’s rejections of modern empiricism should center on its relevance for the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. The answer requires flling in some details about Whitehead’s account of organic realism, frst, and then about Wittgenstein’s ordinary realism.

WHITEHEAD’S ONTOLOGICAL REALISM Perception, Prehension, and Realism Whitehead makes a somewhat obscure remark when he links his affrmation of realism with the question of perception: “It is the basis of any realistic philosophy, that in perception there is a disclosure of objectifed data,

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which are known as having a community with the immediate experience for which they are data” (1929b, 79). The obscurity has to do with whether or not the idea of perception in the above remark is meant to include prehension. Since the tone of the remark seems positive, and since Whitehead typically seeks to go beyond objectifed data toward data that are independent of human objectifcation, the above remark should read to be inclusive of prehension. The focus should be put, however, on Whitehead’s affrmation that any realistic philosophy, including his, needs to affrm interaction between the world and its perceivers. Since we know the role that causality needs to play in this interaction for Whitehead, his ontological realism is confrmed on causal grounds, just like perception, prehension, and knowledge are. But why start this section with a remark that is somewhat ambiguous in meaning? Although the remark itself is not epistemological, it involves an epistemological claim because perception as such is said to be the means by which an epistemic link is created with the external world. Pointing this fact out helps us remember that Whitehead’s project, as I have already stated in more than one place, is mainly explanatory in orientation. Also, in the previous chapter I emphasized how Whitehead’s idea of the world as a multiplicity of actual entities (events) that force a certain causal impact on the subjects experiencing them occurs through perception in the mode of causal effcacy. I did not equally emphasize the fact that Whitehead also allows the subjects of experience some freedom of response to that causal impact. The causal effcacy of the world on its subjects of experience is not fully deterministic of the subject’s knowledge, but one that shows how non-sensory data are an important part of the process of coming to know and shape that world. This has importance for the kind of realism that Whitehead affrms. Since non-sensory data are indispensable and more fundamental than sensory data for Whitehead—whether they are emotional and affective tones of relating to the world, such as through attraction and aversion, or whether they are intuitions and memories—his realism entails acknowledging both the “cognitive apprehension” (perception) and “uncognitive apprehension” (prehension) of the unifed world of experience (Whitehead 1925, 69–70). In other words, Whitehead’s realism cannot be established without perception and defnitely not without prehension. Cobb’s question in the following example of “The grass is green” is helpful here: To say that the grass is green may mean that when persons who are not color-blind look in a certain direction, under favorable lighting conditions, they will see green. This proposition can be tested fairly easily for its correspondence to actual experience. . . . But let us suppose that the propositions intended and evoked are not about observers but about the entities denominated

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“grass.” Are there any such propositions, or is the speaker simply confused? (Cobb 1991b, 192)

The question is meant to invoke a response whereby the speaker is u­ nderstood not to be confused. Whitehead’s realism entails affrming that the grass is there, in the world, and that it is constituted by entities that have experiences of the color green independently of human existence. Cobb does not mean to say that the grass enjoys the color green on a visual level, of course, but he certainly thinks that the proposition about how the actual entities constituting the grass can prehend (or feel) something is intelligible. Whitehead, he tells us, “thinks the proposition might mean that the grass feels greenly, meaning not that it feels greenly to us but that the events, constituting what we call grass, consist in relations with other events that fundamentally resemble the relations of human experiences to other experiences” (Cobb 1991b, 192). The feelings between events, whether human or grass events, are feelings that have an objective side, suggesting the ontological independence of these events, and also a subjective side, one that entails prehending the data in a particular, subjective way. Cobb describes the subjective side regarding the grass as follows: “‘Greenly’ would then designate the subjective form of some of the feelings making up these events” (1991b, 192). Cobb’s affrmation of ontological realism in Whitehead is also refected in his suggestion that possibilities of creativity for the future have to come from somewhere independent of human existence. He states, for example, that “Whitehead saw that all growth requires the achievement of a novel concreteness,” and that novelty “requires the confrontation of each situation by the realm of pure possibilities, the reality of which precedes man’s experience” (Cobb 1969, 54). As Cobb explains, the novel concreteness requires that the mentioned possibilities be ordered in a relevant, purposeful way to each becoming occasion, and that the ordering “is given for man and not projected by him” (1969, 54). This means that Whitehead’s realism entails affrming the independent existence not only of actual entities such as those constituting the reality of the grass but also of the possibilities in which the grass, and every other actuality in existence, participate. Interestingly, Cobb thinks that the form of ontological realism suggested in Whitehead’s work might indicate an act of faith on his part (1991b, 197). The faith here pertains to the conformity between people’s experiences—for example, the feelings they derive from the grass—and the way the events are in the world. In the latter’s category, Cobb has in mind the suggestion that the individual entities constituting the grass might actually feel their surroundings. The idea is that there is an emotional tone expressed by the events in the grass that has a physical impact upon the subjective form of feeling the

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grass by humans, and that there is conformity between these various events (Cobb 1991b, 192–93). This idea of faith is interesting when considering the method used by Whitehead to arrive at causal effcacy. I mentioned in the previous chapter that his metaphysical question about what must be the case in order for the continuity between the world and human experience to happen is one of the reasons he came up with the idea of perception in the mode of causal effcacy. The same goes for the idea that there is conformity between our feelings of the world’s actual entities and their own feelings of what surrounds them. This is partially conveyed in Cobb’s suggestion of faith on Whitehead’s part. This point about conformity between our feelings and those of the world’s actualities does not challenge Whitehead’s realism. If anything, the speculative aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics, which is based on the logic of “what must be the case” in order for things to be what they are, suggests that unless there is something in common between symbol and meaning (the former of which is characteristic of language and sense perception while the latter of which is characteristic of that to which the symbols refers), the possibility of referentiality and truth would not occur (Whitehead 1927, 9). This means that the world is presupposed to exist independently of the symbols, which is part of what defnes Whitehead’s organic realism. But there is another dimension to affrming ontological realism beyond human existence in Whitehead. If the real is that which is independent of human perception and knowledge, then consciousness, or at least human consciousness, should not be the primary example of experience. Whitehead affrms this point in the context of his argument against the bifurcation of nature into conscious subjects of perception, on the one hand, and passive objects of perception, on the other hand. I explain this point next, but the question to which I shall return in this context is whether or not ontological realism absolves philosophy from starting its responsible investigations in language rather than the world. Experience beyond Consciousness and Modern Analysis Whitehead calls the epistemological principle that relies on sense perception the “sensationalist principle” and, as we have seen, he thinks of it as something limited and biased due to the disregard it shows the contrary evidence from non-sensory perception (1929b, 157). He juxtaposes his rejection of the sensationalist principle with a rejection of the “subjectivist principle,” the latter of which sees conscious experience as the paradigm of all experience (Whitehead 1929b, 157). For Whitehead, the subjectivist principle is present not only in the explicitly empiricist philosophies of Locke, Hume, and Berkeley but also in Descartes’ rationalism and Newton’s physics. As

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Rorty insightfully states in this context, to claim that the datum of experience can be adequately analyzed purely in terms of universals, as suggested in the subjectivist principle, is to reduce the ultimate reality of particular actualities to universals, or to form (1983, 71). Whitehead’s realism cannot consist in a reduction of entities on one level (i.e., the actual entities) to entities on another level (i.e., the eternal objects) (Rorty 1983, 72). Like the empiricists, Whitehead states, Descartes and Newton take nature to be an external, passive realm of non-conscious substances facing a conscious investigator. Newton emphasizes the “receptacle” or “absolute” theory of space-time where time and space are seen as actual receptacles occupied by actualities composed of bits of matter whereas Descartes embraces a representative theory of perception, according to which experience does not reveal concrete particulars but only universals, and whereby the fact of concrete particulars is a matter of inference (1929b, 156, 149). Descartes also considers the soul, or consciousness, to be a temporal substance and, Whitehead states, it took William James to get it right when he described consciousness as a cognitive function rather than an entity (1925, 143–44). Self-awareness is a refective activity that leads people to become conscious of the fact that they have sense perception, Whitehead states, but the focus on conscious experience led to the philosophical bifurcation of nature into active, perceiving subjects, on the one hand, and passive, perceived objects, on the other hand. This bifurcation wrongly suggests that there is an external rather than internal relation between perceivers and perceived, and Whitehead rejects this bifurcation. For him, the suggested externality of relations denies the intelligibility of the prehension pertaining to the ontologically internal relation between perceiver and perceived, on the one hand, and that between the independent relata of perception, on the other hand. Nature is self-contained, and Whitehead expresses this fact by arguing that both realists and idealists could start their investigations from an objective standpoint that transcends the individual recipient (1925, 90). As can be seen, the epistemological aspect of reality is not divorced from its ontological aspect for Whitehead, and his realism entails this point. Also, there is evidence to ascertain the truth of ontological realism, according to him. There is the indirect evidence from evolution, for example, where it is recognized that consciousness is a later product of life that was preceded by other experiences. From this perspective, conscious experience cannot be seen as a fundamental type of experience and is not representative of experience as such in the world. This is what leads Whitehead to say that “consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness” (1929b, 53), or, more signifcantly: “We experience more than we can analyze. For we experience the universe, and we analyse in our consciousness a minute selection of its details” (1929b, 89).

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One has only to think of the lives of amoebae and jellyfsh to know that Whitehead is right that experience is not primarily of the conscious kind. As we have seen, he also extends this non-conscious experience to subatomic existence. Whitehead likes to ask, what do we know? (1938, 24), and he takes the evidence from science to show that the behavior of subatomic elements—for example, electronic behavior—suggests that they are experiential realities whose random and unpredictable behavior is, in fact, an example of experiential spontaneity or of a rudimentary form of freedom that responds to its environment in an active way. This kind of experience is not intuitive or conscious, he states. But how is this truth relevant to philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility? Whitehead goes against the grain of Aristotelian realism when he locates the ultimate actualities of the world in the subatomic world rather than in the macroscopic world of objects. This is a legitimate move insofar as he is aided by science to show that the subatomic, concrete world comes together to form an abstract, macroscopic world of Aristotelian objects. But to speak of freedom at the subatomic level, rather than, say, sheer spontaneity, or to interpret spontaneity as a form of freedom, is certainly problematic because it dislocates language from the natural context where it makes sense and relocates it to a context where intelligibility becomes suspect. It makes sense to say that experience as such, when it is intelligible to speak of it in a nonessentialist fashion, is not conscious experience but there is a huge difference between spontaneity and subjectivity (or freedom), even if it is admitted that nonhuman subjectivity is different from human subjectivity. Experience as such is meant to encompass both human and nonhuman experience, including the subatomic world, but certainly there is a difference of kind, not degree, between human events and subatomic events although, from the perspective I have taken in this book, both are ordinary events. Subatomic events are ontologically real and, therefore, ordinary but they operate under different laws of nature than the macrocosmic, Aristotelian objects. The philosophical speculation that a discontinuity of kind between the concrete and abstract cannot be tolerated—whether for the sake of explanatory coherence or ontological unity—is not logically attractive here. As Whitehead himself states, philosophy must be responsible for how things are, not for how they ought to be, until a better scientifc option is provided. Whitehead’s anti-reductionistic approach to modern epistemology and Newtonian science relies mostly on his metaphysical understanding of the world. But his affrmation of ontological realism comes at the expense of intelligibility in the case of experience at the level of ultimate reality. Even when we take the scientifc evidence about the subatomic level into consideration, including the later developments in particle physics, all we get, it seems to me, is that subatomic existence operates according to different natural and

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ordinary laws than those of our macrocosmic existence. To assign freedom to that world in any meaningful sense of the word is unintelligible because there would be no applicable ramifcations to that assignment in the way there would be in the macrocosmic world. No one worries, for example, not even scientists, that the supposed freedom at the subatomic level might lead to a denial of the laws of physics.

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Organic Realism and Metaphysical Relativity So far I expressed my doubts that Whitehead’s rejection of epistemologies that are constructed solely on the basis of sense perception and its complementary conscious experience helps in affrming philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility, at least not directly. Although I agree with his critique of empiricist epistemologies, I do not think that Whitehead’s revision of these epistemologies—through a reconstruction of the subjectivist and sensationalist principles—is helpful for the question of intelligibility. I have not used the language of “relativity” so far but should mention here that Whitehead’s epistemological attempt to revise empiricist principles is typically carried out by supplementing the mentioned two principles with what he calls the principle of relativity, which I explain next. Whitehead describes the principle of relativity as an explanatory principle that tries to account for how all experiencing actualities, of whatever complexity, are internally related to one another and independently of how they are perceived. As an explanatory principle, the principle of relativity is linked with the ontological principle to which Whitehead assigns the explanatory duty of accounting for all the causal relations in the universe, whether internal or external, and whether effcient or fnal, including how nothing foats into the world from nowhere (Whitehead 1929b, 24, 244). In combination, when the two principles are put together, they show how Whitehead’s ontological realism is in fact a form of organic realism, as I explain in what follows. I should mention frst that Whitehead’s ontological principle demonstrates that he rejects the separation of epistemology from ontology, a view that he held as early as 1920, in the Concept of Nature. Whitehead makes it clear in the early pages of the book that he is not doing metaphysics but philosophy of science, a point that he also makes in “The Organization of Thought” (Whitehead 1917). Yet Whitehead’s arguments in these early works aim to show that nature is self-contained and that it is revealed to people in senseawareness rather than sense perception (e.g., 1920, 3–4). In a sense, as Roland Faber rightly states, Whitehead had already broached his non-dualistic theory of perception at this point in his career (2008, 59, 264–66). Not only that Whitehead distinguishes ontological events from substantial objects at this

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early stage, which is itself a metaphysical distinction, but he also links this distinction with the epistemological concerns about how causality plays a role in perception (Faber 2008, 58–62). The perception into which this kind of causality plays a role includes the human body’s interaction with the world. There is continuity between the body and the world, Whitehead states, and in such a way that the body’s direct experience of the world is not merely external but also internal. Whitehead is emphatic in stating: “we cannot tell with what molecules the body ends and the external world begins. The truth is that the brain is continuous with the body, and the body continuous with the rest of the natural world”; or “if we are fussily exact, we cannot defne where a body begins and where external nature ends” (1938, 21). Furthermore, like the grass in the example discussed above, the body for Whitehead is not a material substance but an agent of experiences, a macrocosm of smaller experiential agents, that are interrelated with each other and with the so-called external world. These agents of experience are composed primarily of prehensive experiences that are of the same kind as the events composing the external environment, and they engage in sensory experiences only secondarily. Thus, the body is the means by which the self directly perceives actual events in the external world, which makes the apprehensions of these events completely dependent “on the occurrences within the human body” (Whitehead 1925, 91). The involvement of the body, together with the ultimate ontological actualities of the world, should explain why Whitehead refers to his ontological realism as “organic realism” (1929b, 310). In addition to the fact that the body is “organic,” it does not bifurcate the self and the world into two distant realities, as is the case in modern epistemology (Whitehead 1925, 91). I believe that the term “prehensive empiricism” epitomizes Whitehead’s form of organic realism, without any risk of interpreting it as a traditional form of empiricism. This concept, as I show in the next section, is important for Whitehead’s critique of skepticism and it does not exclude sense experience from its domain. In order to show the sense in which Whitehead’s realism is organic, Cobb describes it as a “sophisticated” form of realism that escapes the weaknesses of both naïve forms of realism and Kantian forms of idealism. “The human mind, in very important respects, does create its world,” Cobb agrees with Kant, but this should not come at the expense of “the equally important truth that the human mind is acted on by the body and through the body by the wider world” (1991b, 180). It is not that Kant would reject the idea that the world acts on the mind, but Cobb’s point is that the body is central to the mediation between the world and the mind, that the mediation cannot occur without causal effcacy, and that the body’s mediation makes Whitehead’s realism organic.

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Cobb’s explication of Whitehead’s organic realism presupposes the o­ ntological and relativity principles mentioned above, but he adds a pragmatic twist to it: “Everyone lives, of course, as if the physical world had a quite objective reality. We would not stay alive if we did not”—for example, when we know “that the car coming down the highway would kill us if we got in its way too late for it to stop” (Cobb 1991b, 182). Cobb takes his own experience as one example of human experience, stating at one point that the applicability of Whitehead’s vision of realism is so obvious to his experience that he is “often puzzled by the deep resistance that it counters from others” (1991b, 183). I think the resistance is justifed not because the kind of realism that Whitehead affrms is wrong, but simply because the explanation for it is not rooted in ordinary expressions. I do not mean that the language explaining organic realism has to be non-technical but that the ordinary (natural) in it—i.e., the causal impact of the world on us—is extended beyond its intelligible limits. In my analysis of the ordinary in chapter 1, I emphasized that anything natural, or in this case organic, should count as ordinary for Whitehead. But I think the explanation of how we experience the world through perception in the mode of causal effcacy simply takes the ordinary notion of experience beyond its intelligible limits. Not all experiences are conscious, of course, but when people speak of the latter, there is usually a context, an ordinary context, that allows them to make sense of it. Think of a specifc feeling that people sometimes develop, namely that something bad will happen to them when no rational reason for that feeling exists. We inquire about the various reasons that could have led these people to feel the way they do, and our questions are typically grounded in intelligible contexts of application—for example, general fears about the economy or pessimism in one’s personality. All things intelligible have an ordinary context of application, but the idea of experiencing causality itself does not seem to have that ordinary context. One could say that causality is itself the context that allows certain experiences to make sense but not that the experience itself is of causality. As for the question as to whether or not Whitehead’s realism is ordinary, the answer to this question cannot be answered in simple terms, which is true, as we have seen, of other aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy. I return with some conclusions about Whitehead’s realism after showing how his form of prehensive empiricism is meant to overcome skepticism, an objective that Whitehead shares with Wittgenstein. Prehensive Empiricism and Overcoming Skepticism Prehensive empiricism is important for Whitehead because it gives him the tool to overcome skepticism concerning the possibility of justifying one’s

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knowledge of the world and the latter’s independence of its perceivers. The reason this justifcation is possible for him is that prehensive empiricism purports to give the perceiver direct knowledge of reality as such. But skepticism comes in many faces, and it is important to pinpoint the kind of skepticism that Whitehead combats. There is the practical, or empirical, sense of skepticism according to which people question whether their sense perception of particular objects is true or false. People could be skeptical about whether their perception of an object in the water is what it is, for example, or about their perception of an animal in a thick fog, or about the oasis they think they see in the desert. But doubts concerning these events are settled through a closer perceptual look, so to speak—taking the stick out of the water to see whether it is really a stick, or, in the traditional example, whether it is really bent rather than straight. People might take a few steps closer in the fog to see what is hidden in it, or they can keep walking toward the supposed oasis in the desert to see whether or not it is a mirage. It is ironic that these doubts, which result from distrusting sense perception, are solved by relying on nothing else but sense perception. As D. Z. Phillips puts it: “Suppose I am doubtful, while driving in a fog, whether there is a tree looming up before me. I may slow down, get out of the car, walk up to the tree, even touch it. I confrm that there is a tree there. I settle my practical doubt” (1995, 5). Yet this demonstrates that practical doubt is not the traditional, philosophical doubt concerning the world whereby what is doubted is the possibility of justifying one’s knowledge of that world. Philosophical doubt occurs in ideal circumstances, when no fog, water, or sun is present to distort our ordinary perceptions. Russell’s well-known remark at the age of ninety represents how philosophical doubt works: “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfed with bad ones” (1962, 65). Doubt is tied here to not fnding good grounds for the kinds of belief that are professed, but it is worth quoting Russell in full on this point, particularly in order to separate him from his younger, empiricist self: Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age. (Russell 1962, 29)

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Here, skepticism is centered on the idea that it would be impossible for human beings to be rational. This is not practical doubt because it cannot be resolved by looking closer at empirical evidence akin to the tree or the animal in the fog, or the straight stick after being taken out of the water, or fnding the actual oasis. The evidence that Russell relies upon to make his case for skepticism is partly historical, but it also exemplifes a logical point—“in the absence of good grounds for belief, [people] will be satisfed with bad ones” (Russell 1962, 65). Yes, this is a judgment on Russell’s part that includes a generalization about human nature, but the skepticism it embodies is philosophical in the sense that Russell did not think there could be a justifcation for considering human beings rational. Whatever else they do, the philosophical skeptic says, human beings have always been, and will continue to be, engaged in irrational behavior. Russell himself is not ultimately a skeptic, even though he was not certain that skepticism can be defeated without people’s acceptance of scientifc and logical reasoning. As it turns out, he believed in degrees of certainty and in the possibility of fghting skepticism through a pragmatist attitude. Refecting on the unfortunate condition of human irrationality, for example, he states: “All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion” (1962, 29). In order to escape it and avoid the “totally barren and totally useless” skepticism that rejects any certainty, as well as the “intellectual rubbish” that succumbs to bad forms of skepticism, Russell proposes to adopt a healthy form of rationalism where things are put in context. In this healthy mode of skepticism, the human tendency to be driven by passion is acknowledged, and degrees of certainties are accepted. “I do not think that we should go in for complete skepticism,” he concludes, “but for a doctrine of degrees of probability. I think, on the whole, that is the kind of doctrine that the world needs” (1962, 85–86). Another way of putting Russell’s conclusion is to say that knowledge and certainty come in different forms, not one form, and skepticism is not on solid ground. Regarding the question of realism, the knowledge and certainty to be had about the world will vary depending on the context. As for Whitehead, it is safe to say that he wants absolute certainty regarding the independent existence of causal effcacy at the level of ultimate actualities. We just have to remember that his method of arriving at that certainty is metaphysical—rooted in asking what must be the case in order for us to be affected by the world in a continuous, non-bifurcated manner. But, certainly, Whitehead’s account of prehensive empiricism is meant to combat not only the epistemological skepticism about knowledge of the external world but also the ontological skepticism about the organic independence of the world from its knowers.

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Prehensive empiricism attempts to confrm the interrelatedness of reality’s actualities, which presupposes their independence from human causal infuence at the level of the universe, and Whitehead also uses it to substantiate one aspect of the correspondence theory of truth—namely, by stating that the appearances derived from sense-data do correspond to the phenomena manifest in prehensions. In this case, truth is the correspondence of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy to perception in the mode of causal effcacy.2 As already stated, Whitehead’s rejection of modern epistemology means that he does not think of presentational immediacy as the sole, or primary, source of knowledge about the external world. As also has been stated, Whitehead does not think that since reality is given directly to us in perception in the mode of causal effcacy, this has to mean that the self is simply the determined result of this effcacy of the world. The mind is partially determined by the world and partially creative of that world and, when this is realized, skepticism is overcome for Whitehead. The attitude I am adopting here, and in the entire book, is hermeneutical. People often disagree on how to interpret any “text,” whether the text is an actual text or the “text” of life, and since any potential agreement is fallibilistic and subject to the changes of time, it makes no sense to think that there is a guarantee of a fxed hermeneutical point that allows us to arrive at the correct interpretation or the truth. This is also the viewpoint Stanley Cavell holds, and I shall employ his help on this issue below. Although the theory dictates the method in some cases, as Whitehead rightly argues, there are plenty of other cases where the method dictates the theory. In the hermeneutical approach I have adopted here, the method dictates the outcome of the investigation and, in the case of realism, this ought to be seen as the right approach, I argue. With this in mind, I turn next to the analysis of Wittgenstein’s account of realism without empiricism, pointing out the sense in which, for him, realism could have an ordinary meaning.

WITTGENSTEIN’S “ORDINARY” REALISM Not Empiricism and yet Realism in Philosophy One of Wittgenstein’s expressions of the idea of realism appears in the following remark: “Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing” (1956, 325). Although this remark is not intuitively clear, it curiously brings to mind the realistic position we encountered in Whitehead. Elsewhere Wittgenstein describes realism as a misguided “battle cry” that

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shares with other philosophical theories, such as idealism, the act of divorcing philosophy from the ordinary lives of people (1970, §§413–414). How can Wittgenstein then affrm realism in the context of his rejection of empiricism if realism is a battle cry, and why should he be grouped together with Whitehead on the question of realism? Cora Diamond reports that Wittgenstein’s remark about realism without empiricism was directed mainly against Frank Ramsey, a mathematician who defended an empiricist view of causality akin to Hume’s view (Diamond 1995, 39–72). Ramsey accepted an inferential view of causality according to which the truth or falsity of people’s habits and customs ought to be determined in relation to how people act in the world. By implication, Diamond states, Ramsey supported an empirical form of realism that traces logical propositions about the world to more foundational, empirical propositions. As she puts it, “Ramsey treats logic as if it were a matter for a kind of empirical knowledge. We know empirically what our habits of thought are, and can then investigate empirically whether these habits are useful or perhaps improvable” (Diamond 1995, 61). In short, Ramsey’s position is that empirical propositions provide a causal foundation for a realism that works on a pragmatic level. Diamond rejects Ramsey’s reasoning. She knows that he does not reject Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as an activity “directed at the clarifcation of our thought, the clarifcation of what we mean by terms and sentences we use” (Diamond 1995, 59). But the problem, according to her, is that Ramsey assumes an empiricist view of philosophical clarifcation. In contrast, she locates the reasons for Wittgenstein’s remark that realism without empiricism is the hardest thing in the diffculty of philosophers to give up the quest for meaning based on their method of verifcation, in this case the empiricist method. The issue is not that a philosopher can operate without a method but that the method Ramsey uses is problematic. Realism for Wittgenstein is not a form of verifcationism, Diamond stresses, and Wittgenstein’s view of logic is such that he could not see the point of arguing for a causal relation between logical propositions and the world. She agrees with Wittgenstein on this point, stating that Ramsey’s position “was the wrong way to show the bearing of empirical data on logic” (1995, 42). What, then, did Wittgenstein mean by realism according to her? Diamond argues that Wittgenstein did not intend the term ‘realism’ to be a philosophical one. Rather, his realism is the kind that reveals itself in ordinary ways of speaking about real things. She gives the following examples to demonstrate her point: (1) telling people to “be realistic” in the face of facts they seem to ignore or deny; (2) rejecting the reality of magical, mythical, superstitious, or fantastic accounts that one fnds in fction; (3) taking into account the consequences of people’s actions with an eye toward their

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workability, so that if these actions do not work, people would then regard them as unrealistic (Diamond 1995, 39–41). All three examples, she explains, demonstrate a form of non-philosophical realism that does not depend on the empiricist view of causality suggested by Ramsey. Although Diamond’s account of Ramsey’s position is focused on the relation between logical and causal propositions, this account could be extended to include ethical, religious, and other ordinary propositions. The point is that Wittgenstein’s realism, whether in relation to the empirical world or to other normative practices, does not draw its justifcation from causal reasoning. Since Whitehead’s organic realism is causal in orientation, this puts him and Wittgenstein at odds in regard to the method of justifying the sense in which things are said to be real, even when both reject the empiricism advocated by Hume. I say more on this major difference between them on the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility below. Diamond’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark about empiricism and realism is very perceptive, but more needs to be said about his view of ordinary realism. At one point, for example, he told Rush Rhees that the distinction between logical and empirical propositions is not a sharp one (Rhees 2001: 159), a fact that comes to the surface even in a quick reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. What Wittgenstein meant is that the empirical nature of some ordinary human practices—for example, picking fruit from trees, climbing mountains, riding bicycles—establishes the limits of logic. Experience teaches us, for example, that we cannot be in two places at the same time, and this fact can be turned into a logical, tautological statement. Wittgenstein’s rejection of the empiricist basis of realism is part of a larger discussion he provides regarding the link between language and reality in the Philosophical Investigations. He describes four links: (1) a “naming” link, the view of which he mainly associates with St. Augustine and according to which each word in language corresponds to an object in the world and for which it stands as a name; (2) an “ostensive defnition” link, the view of which is similar to the frst one and according to which demonstrative gestures (e.g., pointing and saying ‘This is a table’, ‘This is a cup’) are the defnitional means of establishing a link with the world; (3) a “causal” link, the view of which he associates particularly with Ramsey and the early Russell, whereby language is said to be causally indebted to the world for its existence; and (4) an “experiential” link, the view of which is similar to the causal view that Wittgenstein associates more generally with the empiricists and according to which sensory experience gives rise to language (Wittgenstein 1958, §§1–49). Of the four mentioned views, the causal and experiential views are the most relevant to the topic of realism. It is important to mention, however, that Wittgenstein rejects the naming and ostensive defnition views not simply because of the narrowness of their applicability, as if names could intelligibly

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correspond to objects in the world but not particles, demonstrative pronouns, or prepositions. As I show below, language could never be linked with the world by these two methods for Wittgenstein because of the pragmatic, or active, link its words and sentences have with the world, a link that also negates the referentially causal and empiricist links. Wittgenstein is in agreement with Whitehead on this point, stating that at the heart of the causal and experiential views is the idea that sensory experiences, and the causal analysis thereof of the operation of the senses, are the means by which we come to know and understand the external world. Wittgenstein also rejects the early Russell’s experiential view of realism. Russell rejected Hume’s argument that causality is simply an inferential category, but he argued that it is subject to an empirically experiential process of verifcation nonetheless. In effect, he thought of realism as something pertaining to the causal connection between words and the reality of which they are about. Wittgenstein fnds several problems with this and other experiential views, the most important of which is that they confound the discourse of sense data with that of material objects. Wittgenstein writes the following concerning the sense-data discourses of pain and color: “Don’t give a colour or pain the same kind of identity which you give to a physical object. After all, we have a criterion of what we call the identity of a physical object, but what is the criterion for determining the sameness of color or the sameness of pain?” (Rhees 1984: 5). Whatever the criterion for determining the identity of a physical object, the point here is that we should not use that criterion to determine the identity of sense data. Wittgenstein should not be understood here to be denying the possibility of speaking of something called “the same color” or “the same pain,” but only that such “identity” or “sameness” could be determined in the same way the identity of a certain physical object—say a chair or a tree—is determined (see 1958, §§253–54). Exemplifying the grammatical approach I discussed in the previous two chapters, Wittgenstein argues that in both the case of physical objects and that of sense data, their identity could be discovered if philosophers bear in mind the question of how people learn the meanings of the words they use (1975, §6). He argues that when sense data are treated as vivacious objects that project or force their meanings on the perceiver, supposedly imprinting their meanings on that subject without a practical context of application, the natural discourse regarding sense data gets divorced from the natural discourse regarding material objects. Wittgenstein characterizes the confusion in confating the mentioned different sets of discourses as a form of subliming the “logic” or “grammar” of discourse, in this case the discourse of sense data, whereby the latter are displaced from their usual use and treated as something they are not—in this case as physical objects (see 1958, §38, §244–45). Furthermore, it is

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philosophical logic, not epistemology or other theoretical disciplines, that demands determining the meaning of sense data and physical objects on the basis of how people come to learn that meaning, according to Wittgenstein. He asserts that the languages of physical objects and sense data do not stand in need of a causal justifcation but of a clarifcation of their grammars based on how people ordinarily speak of them. This refects, of course, how people come to learn the words expressing these objects and sense data. One of Wittgenstein’s examples in this context is the color white. He stresses that what is needed to explain the impression of white is not a theoretical account of how it comes about but simply an understanding of how the term ‘white’ is taken up in the lives of people (Wittgenstein 1978, 39). The latter is shown in how people give the term ‘white’ application in various activities involving the color white—for example, wearing a white hat when that is the objective, identifying a white circle in relation to circles with other colors, etc. Similarly, to investigate the link between language and the reality of physical objects, the philosopher needs to engage in a conceptual investigation of the meaning of words used to refer to this kind of reality. The methodology here is neither physical nor metaphysical but grammatical (Wittgenstein 1958, II, xi, 225). As I stated in the previous chapter, grammatical investigations are not empirical. They are not akin to determining the length of a rod, the height of a mountain, or even the result of a multiplication. As Wittgenstein puts it at one point, grammatical investigations shed light on philosophical problems “by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language” (1958, §90). Although he describes the essence of language as “the great” or the “big” question of philosophy (1958, §65), the grammatical method Wittgenstein uses to shed light on it does not exclude the clearing of misunderstandings regarding smaller problems. What becomes clear in these grammatical contexts, however, is that Wittgenstein thinks of philosophy as a descriptive activity rather than an explanatory one (1970, §314). Grammatical investigations show that all nonconceptual investigations presuppose the necessity of knowing the meaning of the concepts related to their subjects of investigation. For example, a scientist investigating the existence of the so-called God-particle—the Higgs boson—needs to know the meaning of the concepts ‘particle, ‘God’, ‘boson’ and so on, and what they stand for. Wittgenstein contrasts the experiential and causal views of the world with his view that the very intelligibility of sense data and physical objects is based on there being a public language with a grammar that renders them meaningful. By speaking of public language, Wittgenstein means to reject the notion of a “private language” according to which mental phenomena are private and

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hidden, and whereby only the individual having them can be certain of the existence of physical objects, the “external world,” “other minds,” “perception,” and so on (1958, §§269–75). On the contrary, the public sphere already contains criteria of speaking intelligibly and by which any private use of language is gauged (1958, §269). If language is seen as a private matter, then the possibility of public discourse becomes parasitic on the existence of such private language, when, in reality, the private use is dependent on the public use for its sense. Regarding the realities of the world and other minds, if the picture of a private language is to be accepted then these realities become isolated from their natural, public homes. For Wittgenstein, this kind of picture divorces the inner, mental phenomena from the outer, public phenomena, which is a mistake because the latter provide the proper epistemic playground of people’s lives.3 The private language argument leads naturally to skepticism about the reality of physical objects, and the responsibility that philosophy has in this context is to fght this and other kinds of skepticism. D. Z. Phillips explains Wittgenstein’s infuence on him with this philosophical responsibility in mind. Phillips writes that when he began studying philosophy, he came to see that it “was not a collection of specialisms; it was one subject, and its central theme was the nature of reality” (2001, 148). By “reality” here Phillips means sense and intelligibility since what is real for Wittgenstein is that which cannot be intelligibly denied through skepticism. He argues, alongside Wittgenstein, that philosophy is a battle against the kind of skepticism that denies reality (sense) where the latter is possible (Phillips 2001, 149–50). In the next section, I elaborate on this issue in the context of Wittgenstein’s view as to how concepts emerge from primal reactions that people develop in response to the natural world.

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On Language and Realism To fully understand the kind of skepticism associated with affrming the private language argument, attention needs to be paid to Wittgenstein’s idea of primitive reactions and the role he assigns to them in forming concepts. Wittgenstein’s investigation of concept formation leads him to believe that simple concepts emerge from primitive, common reactions that people fnd themselves having in response to their ordinary surroundings. A primitive reaction may be something like a glance, a gesture, or even a word in response to an encounter of some sort with something in the world (1958, 218). The simple concepts that emerge from these primitive reactions—‘pain’, ‘hunger’, ‘shaking one’s head’, ‘squinting’, ‘panicking’, and so on—can then be the basis of more complex concepts. For instance, under normal conditions all people squint when looking at a bright light and all look up when someone

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calls their names or taps them on the shoulder—if they are not blind, deaf, or devoid of tactile feelings, that is. These are examples of primitive reactions that most people fnd themselves having in common. Calling out one’s name could develop into a more complex picture (e.g., “Excuse me, may I bring your attention to . . .”), and squinting could lead to concepts associated with brightness (e.g., ‘too bright’). Now Wittgenstein emphasizes that the conceptual responses emerging from the primitive reactions are not arbitrary, and precisely because of the commonality, or agreements, in people’s natural reactions to the world. One could say that the conceptual responses are themselves the agreements of reactions and, for Wittgenstein, such agreements are not the result of a deliberate consensus but occur with an element of non-arbitrary spontaneity about them (1958, §§241–42). As Wittgenstein puts it, “Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child hurt himself, and he cries; adults then talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour” (1958, §244). The act of crying is a type of pain behavior that gets replaced by words expressing the pain and, later, the concept itself of pain is used. It is true, of course, that parents teach their children these concepts, but Wittgenstein’s description applies to the original formation of concepts. After all, language developed at some point in the history of Homo sapiens and is not something that precedes human existence. Wittgenstein’s famous remark in this context is borrowed from Goethe: “in the beginning was the deed” (Wittgenstein 1980a, 31e). Deeds are the context in which concepts are formed, and without common reactions such as groaning, grimacing, squinting, retreating in fight, which are all deeds, our concepts of pain, fear, discomfort, and so on would not have arisen. Wittgenstein emphasizes that philosophy is not about explaining the causal facts of nature. Logic lies at the bottom of all the sciences, so to speak, and it manifests itself for him in an investigation of the basis of everything, namely of the possibility of all phenomena. Philosophers may feel as if they have to do science, to penetrate phenomena, but their investigations are directed “not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (Wittgenstein 1958, §90). Such investigation does not rely on physical theories—for example, the causal theory of color—but on a conceptual elucidation of the relevant phenomena. Phillips demonstrates Wittgenstein’s point by distinguishing common intellectualist and voluntaristic views of language from the active view suggested by Wittgenstein (1997, 159–74). He emphasizes that the intellectualist view renders possible our reactions to acts such as eating something bitter or sweet only if we frst establish the truth of such propositions as “Sweetness

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exist” or “Bitterness exist.” The voluntaristic view suggests that we frst choose to call a certain color by the name it has in isolation from our agreements in our natural reactions concerning that color, which is also contrary to the concept formation scenario. Phillips stresses that notions relating to taste and sight would not be what they are independently of our common reactions. It should be obvious that primal reactions do not emerge from reasoning or refection, but are instinctive and, therefore, the concepts emerging from them are actively related to the world. What this means is that concepts emerge and are acquired when we are doing certain things. As Phillips explain, “When a child learns what certain objects are he learns at the same time what can and cannot be done in connection with them”—for example, playing with toys with the knowledge that they will not disappear, and sitting in chairs knowing that they are solid (1976, 162). This active link with objects in the world is one context, or reason, for Wittgenstein’s rejection of not only philosophical realism but also philosophical idealism. Both realists and idealists, Wittgenstein states, teach their respective children to fetch chairs and sit in them by example rather than lecture to them about the existence of physical objects that are called chairs (1970, §§413– 14). All people, philosophers included, initiate their children into activities within which they learn what physical objects are. They teach them to sit in chairs, put cups on tables, climb trees, and carry their bags. When the children master these activities, they also master various language-uses associated with them, including the language of physical objects (Wittgenstein 1969, §476). The active link described by Wittgenstein is one that is discovered by the kind of grammatical investigation I mentioned above, one that unravels the various concepts people employ. We analyze what a chair is, for example, based on the grammar, or use, of the word ‘chair’, which is shown in such propositions as “Sitting in a chair” and “Fetching a chair.” These propositions are active in the sense that when the use of the word ‘chair’ is taught, there is also an understanding of how to use any word linked with chairs. The active link between concepts and the world enables people to speak of chairs and to understand what they mean. Obviously, to say that people know what a chair is by knowing its grammar—its use and meaning—is not to say that chairs are mere linguistic concepts. Grammar is parasitic on there being an active link with the world, and it is only after this is realized that the meaning of ‘chair’ can be said to be its grammar. Similarly, the grammar/use/logic of the realities of pain and, say, the self get their meanings from active contexts such as those of crying and feeling pain regarding the concept of pain, and that of treating others as selves/persons regarding the concept of the self. Pain cannot be reduced to the method of its identifcation; the method simply determines the sense of ‘pain’.

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In the same vein, establishing the reality of the self is constituted for Wittgenstein by responses to others as selves, or souls, not through a causal account about what must be the case. It is in the action that the selfhood of the other is established. As Wittgenstein puts it, “My attitude towards him [i.e., another self] is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (1958, iv; 178). The reference to an “opinion” is meant to combat the idea that we have a theory of an ‘other’ as a self. When we look at other human beings we do not have a belief that they are human beings, a belief that awaits verifcation. Rather, we take them immediately as human beings, as opposed to automatons, for example. We shake hands with them, laugh with them, and so on. For Wittgenstein, these ordinary practices establish, and reveal, the sense in which human beings are real and this is one way in which realism is affrmed— again, not as a philosophical theory but as a result of an active relation.4 It is best to understand Wittgenstein, I think, as saying that words and actions go hand in hand, something akin to how Whitehead understands the relation between the conceptual and observational orders. In Wittgenstein’s case, this is clear from his statement: “What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc.)? . . . Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word ‘tooth-ache’” (1958, §257). This is an example of one type of sensation, but the rule applies to all sensory and non-sensory concepts. These concepts are not beliefs that stand in need of a theory to explain them but are the grammars of, or the result of, our common reactions to the world. Again, the issue here is conceptual, not empirical. How people normally speak of the ‘external world’, for example, is that which gives them an understanding of the “reality” of that world. Such form of language, the actual use of language, shows that language-speaking agents are never really separated from the world in order for philosophers to re-establish a link with it. As with Whitehead, Wittgenstein thinks that philosophy is responsible for creating this ‘separation’, which it then hopelessly tries to overcome. In sum, for Wittgenstein a grammatical investigation of the reality of things, whether sense data, mental phenomena, or physical objects, reveals that: (1) language is not a private phenomenon, (2) sensations are not limited to an inner mind or self that is divorced from the external world, and (3) the belief in the existence of the external world is an active matter. These points tie up with the question of realism without empiricism in the following way. The concepts of a real or unreal external world, or of real and unreal objects in that world, get their sense from the way people speak of, and act upon, them in their everyday lives. Believing that it is about to rain is shown in how people dress up or, perhaps, carry an umbrella with them. People do not usually express themselves as follows: “I believe that it’s raining and, as I am reliable, it will presumably rain” (Wittgenstein 1980, §483). Rather, the independent but ordinary reality of rain gets its sense from the acts of carrying

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an umbrella or putting on a rain jacket. Similarly, the belief in the ordinary reality of the so-called external world is not a theoretical matter but something that shows itself in how people lead a normal life. Again, no one says, “I believe that there is an external world so that when I leave the house there will be somewhere to go,” not even implicitly or internally unless someone suffers from delusions, which is a different matter. From this viewpoint, the mentioned debate between philosophical realists and idealists misses the whole point of either affrming or denying realism. The philosophical idealists and realists divorce the grammars of ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’, and ‘what is real’ from their natural contexts, from the activities in which such concepts are refected, and they treat these grammars as if they were theoretical issues. Knowing that there are objects and other minds in the world becomes something to be established by means of a theory, causal or otherwise. One conclusion to draw here is that any extra-linguistic reality to which references are made in language is affrmed by simultaneously denying any ontological dualism of language and reality. Wittgenstein stresses the need to notice the active link between them, a link that does not allow the grammar of belief about the external world to be divorced from the external world and its grammar. For him, both reality and the correspondence to reality are propositionally rendered in language. Wittgenstein would have no grammatical objections to forms of expression that claim a reality corresponds to what is said, but what is important here is the realization that the correspondence works differently in different contexts. Indeed, Wittgenstein suggests that if realism cannot be expressed in a coherent manner when sense data are divorced from action, then it is also not coherent when knowledge is determined exclusively by a correspondence theory of truth without frst working out the relevant sense of correspondence. A theory that treats correspondence uniformly in physics, mathematics, and ordinary life simply sublimes the logic of ‘correspondence’. Wittgenstein believed that the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy committed this kind of subliming in stating that mathematical propositions and propositions of physics involve a similar type of correspondence to reality.

MOVING FORWARD: PHILOSOPHY, REALISM, AND THE ORDINARY Conclusions about Wittgenstein and Whitehead I argued so far that understanding Whitehead’s position on the question of the ordinary requires paying attention to his views on non-sensory forms of perception rather than only sensory perceptions, and that the latter is not the

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primary mode of ordinary perception for him. I also argued that his views on organic realism entail treating perception in the mode of causal effcacy, which is the kind of experience that accounts for non-sensory forms of ordinary perception, as the source of justifcation for realism. It is this mode of perception that establishes the existence of agents of causality who impact us, and each other, on a causal level. Finally, I showed that although Whitehead engages in conceptual analysis of ordinary discourse and acknowledges its importance as a method of clarifying grammar, this method is not primary for him. His adoption of metaphysical analysis, including looking at what must be the case in order to combat the bifurcation of nature into active perceivers and knowers, on the one hand, and a passive nature, on the other hand, prevents his philosophy from being fully responsible to intelligibility. Wittgenstein takes the ordinary to be that which is expressed and given application by people in their everyday lives, or in their actual use of language. Like Whitehead, what is natural is ordinary for him and he accuses philosophers who dislocate this natural context to be engaged in subliming discourse—the act of taking discourse out of its natural and meaningful context, and relocating it into a new context that is foreign to it and where it loses its intelligibility. But whereas Whitehead considers conceptual analysis to be secondary in logical importance to metaphysical analysis, Wittgenstein’s primary method of investigation is conceptual or grammatical. As I suggested in this chapter, this fact puts Whitehead and Wittgenstein at odds on some issues. When the use of language pertains to the concept of reality, for example, Wittgenstein seems to look out for language-uses (language-games) that demonstrate what is real and unreal in people’s lives. His realism is ordinary in the sense that ordinary contexts that speak of what is real and unreal determine the sense of realism that could be affrmed. As I suggested, for him philosophers still need to teach their children the reality of things through practical, or active, means, and not through theories that rely on how causality works. Thus, unlike Whitehead, Wittgenstein reaches his conclusion on how the subject perceives its world, or on how the real is established, on logical grounds, not on metaphysical, epistemological, or scientifc grounds. He looks to how language operates in different contexts to discover what reality amounts to in these contexts. His realism is pluralistic, not monistic, and causal reasoning is foreign to it. Methodologically speaking, the difference between Wittgenstein and Whitehead on the question of the ordinary is important for distinguishing their notions of realism, Whitehead speaking of organic realism that takes the body’s experiences as primary in establishing a link with the external world and Wittgenstein not restricting the use of the term ‘real’ to its organic context. Both philosophers are critical of modern empiricism, but Whitehead’s

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metaphysical framework includes epistemological considerations that are foreign to Wittgenstein’s methodology. Wittgenstein distrusts any attempt at a theory of reality that does not center on analyzing the grammars of the variety of language-uses in human life. In contrast to this exclusivity in the method of conceptual analysis, Whitehead’s method is speculative and it exemplifes the search for the most general features of reality by analogy with human bodily experiences. As a result, whereas Wittgenstein’s conceptual understanding locates philosophy’s main responsibility in being faithful to the intelligibility of discourse, Whitehead acknowledges this responsibility but fnds it somewhat restricting or, better, he employs it as part of his larger speculative interest in the nature of things. Whitehead widens the category of the ordinary by including perception in the mode of causal effcacy in it. His prehensive empiricism reveals that the ordinary includes the body’s experience of causal effcacy, an idea that Wittgenstein would have found foreign to any ordinary language game. The issue, as I suggested in this chapter, is not the use of technical language—for example, ‘perception in the mode of causal effcacy’—but the diffculty of associating anything intelligible with the idea that this would count as an ordinary experience. Although the ordinary should include the natural, it should also include intelligible applications of that ordinariness. Otherwise, it would be an example of subliming the logic of discourse. In the case of a language that insists on actual human experience of causality, unconscious as it is at the level of causal effcacy, and one that conforms to the experiential subjectivity of actual entities in the world, it is diffcult to digest the intelligibility of this picture. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, Whitehead takes the evidence of prehension too far when he gives the ordinary in it an experientially causal status. Also, his prehensive empiricism shows that he does not reject the evidential methodology of traditional epistemology and that his rejection of it is still traditional in the sense that he only widens the understanding of empiricism and gives it a new application. As I have shown, Wittgenstein’s critique of experiential realism entails rejecting any causal basis for the relation between language and reality. Wittgenstein and Whitehead are in agreement that Hume is mistaken in divorcing beliefs from the reality they belong to, or “theory” from “practice,” but Wittgenstein sees believing itself as an activity and not a conjecture in need of verifcation. He is a pragmatist in regard to this point whereas Whitehead looks for epistemological foundations to validate his metaphysical speculations about reality. His organic realism may be metaphysically based, but his arguments are epistemologically rooted in evidential language. In seeking to make sense of the world, Whitehead requires philosophy to produce justifying theories when the ordinary is included into the theory. Put differently, whereas Whitehead seeks to explain ordinary perception by

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exploring its various constituents, sensory and non-sensory, Wittgenstein asks us to put a full stop to all attempts at causal explanations and to be content with description. One might say that, for Wittgenstein, the description of what is ordinarily known is the explanation of that phenomenon. Whitehead’s distrust of ordinary language, inconsistent as it is, and his seeking to coin new usage from it in his metaphysical analysis of perception, is another reason for the differences between him and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein thinks that ordinary language is capable of providing clear understanding of the grammar of perception, and he rejects the claim that ordinary propositions have to be exact like scientifc propositions. Philosophy for him is not an explanatory science but a contemplative and clarifcatory activity. But the conversation about realism and skepticism could move forward when a non-epistemological context is given to us. In the next section I discuss this option in the work of one philosopher who is known to have championed linking philosophy with the topic of the ordinary in combatting skepticism. Sandra Laugier describes his mode of thinking as a “new way of thinking about the ordinary,” one that combats skepticism through a commitment to what is ordinarily said and meant by people in everyday life (2005, 82). This philosopher is Stanley Cavell, whose work I already mentioned several times in this book.

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Beyond Skepticism: Hermeneutics, Acknowledgment, and the Ordinary Cavell considers the topic of the ordinary to be a central topic in philosophy, one that requires the full attention of philosophers when fghting unjustifable forms of skepticism (1994b, 154, 171). He also declares his main philosophical aim as that of fghting skepticism but, interestingly, he defnes skepticism in two different, albeit not too dissimilar, ways. These two defnitions are scattered in his works and require assembly. In one defnition, skepticism is an attitude of general distrust in the ability of the common and familiar, or the ordinary, to provide a proper foundation for justifying knowledge and understanding (e.g., Cavell 2005, 162). In another defnition, skepticism is the doubt that one could create meaningful relationships with oneself, others, and the world at large to make life intelligible (e.g., Cavell 1994a, 154). When juxtaposed, the two defnitions give the impression that the skeptic is someone who does not think the ordinary life could be relied upon to offer intelligibility to life. But what kind of intelligibility is the intelligibility of life? Is it the same as the intelligibility I have been discussing in this book? In his various works, David Forster Wallace depicts boredom and dullness as things that might kill the spirit of human beings but not their minds. In The Pale King, for example, published posthumously, we read in one

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reference that “the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention” (Wallace 2011, 87, my italics). Ordinary expressions such as “deadly dull” and “excruciatingly dull” suggest that people recoil from dullness because it is painful, Wallace volunteers, but then he adds that there might be more to it: “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention” (2011, 87). But this literary and powerful expression of nihilism does not hide the fact that it is an interesting issue, as Wallace states in my frst quote of him above. My point is that nihilism and boredom are diseases of the soul, not the mind, and that the intelligibility sought when speaking of life is not the kind of intelligibility I have been promoting in this book. It is, rather, an existential form of intelligibility, and those who express skepticism about the possibility of fnding the ordinary life intelligible are asking for a soul-cure while thinking that their minds are sick. This is how I understand Cavell’s presentation of those who doubt that the ordinary could harbor an answer to their questions. To his credit, Cavell does not think of skepticism itself as a theoretical problem that belongs to the traditional feld of epistemology, but he does see the skeptic as a misguided theorist of some sort. He states, for example, that the skeptic who subjects people’s common and familiar ways of thinking and speaking to tests that transcend their ordinariness turns both knowledge and doubt into theoretical problems that cannot have any natural home. The examples that Cavell has in mind here include those who are bored with the ordinary life, failing to see anything extraordinary and redeeming about it, and existential nihilists who think the ordinary life requires a big, overarching answer to its problems (Cavell 2005, 161). In these cases, if I read Cavell correctly, skepticism has an existential favor but, in the demand for a grand, theoretical solution, it is turned into an epistemological question about what can be known rather than what is known. As we have seen, both Whitehead and Wittgenstein would have considered this question to be confused. “Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly,” one of Wallace’s characters states (Wallace 2011, 87). But this might be the case because the kind of skepticism that Wallace and Cavell present is normative rather than philosophical. Interestingly, like Wallace, Cavell thinks that literature contains the solution to the pseudoepistemological skepticism he presents. In Cavell’s case, he focuses on the Transcendentalist and Romantic traditions to offer a solution, stating that the writings of Emerson and Thoreau provide an antidote to the pessimistic perspective of the skeptics (Cavell 1994a, 37–38). In particular, as

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I explain further below, Cavell thinks the emphasis on human fourishing and perfectionism in these writers provides a practical answer to a practical problem. He simply rejects the idea that skepticism is a real epistemological problem. One way in which Cavell expresses his rejection of skepticism as an epistemological problem is by speaking of the need to emphasize acknowledgment rather than knowledge when speaking of the intelligibility of life. He not only expresses disappointment with Kant’s framing of his response to skepticism by focusing on the possibility of knowing reality as it is in itself—not to mention Kant’s limiting of that possibility to knowledge of the phenomenal world—but also declares that this way of doing philosophy divorces it from real life. “Thanks for nothing,” he states in response to Kant’s “settlement” concerning the question of knowledge, and adds that skepticism is really about doubting the ability of the “the common, the familiar, the near, the low” to provide recognition, or “acknowledgment,” of oneself, others, and the world (Cavell 1994a, 31–38). The practical doubt Cavell discusses here is not the same practical doubt I discussed above, namely in cases where people doubt whether what they perceive in unfavorable circumstances, such as when the weather is foggy, is really the case. The latter can be resolved through empirical means, but the kind of skepticism that Cavell discusses is one that can only be resolved through existential acknowledgment, diffcult as the latter might be in some cases. But there is a philosophical context to one aspect of the problem Cavell discusses nonetheless. Let us assume that some people fall to the temptation of speaking without any sensible point to be made. When discussing specifc examples beyond literature, Cavell touches on this issue and states that it is a form of skepticism, albeit still a confused one (2005, 161). I do not think Cavell means here cases of gossip or simply chatting about the weather, and so on, to pass the time. The latter examples can be understood. I think he means that, oftentimes, people speak pointlessly when they try to make arguments that cannot be justifed even in their own lives. To talk about human fourishing without holding people accountable to the standards of coherence and sense is not something Cavell entertains. Alongside nihilistic feelings of being dissatisfed, or of being bored, speaking pointlessly for Cavell is one way of losing one’s humanity (Cavell 2005, 161). Not surprisingly, Cavell’s philosophical heroes in the focus on the common and everyday are Wittgenstein and Austin. He agrees with them that philosophy cannot be detached from the culture in which it operates, and that in its appeal to the ordinary when exercising its responsibility to intelligibility it has to appeal to mutual agreements in communities of discourse (Cavell 1976, 52). Defending Austin against criticism from Derrida, for example, he

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rejects the latter’s claim in “Signature Event Context” that there is nothing new in Austin’s philosophy about the ordinary (Cavell 1994b, 58). Austin’s philosophy of the ordinary is not simply a reiteration of the old views that were provided by the Greeks, he states, because Austin claims that philosophy risks paying a high price for stretching the ordinary meaning of words beyond their intelligible limits (Austin 1962, 14–16)—for example, by incurring confusion and misunderstanding of what is said and meant. Cavell agrees with Austin’s argument, adding that the mentioned confusion and misunderstanding are a threat to losing one’s humanity. It is in this context of loss that Cavell speaks of philosophy’s need to fulfll its “irreducible responsibility for the world,” which is the responsibility to retrieve sense and put acknowledgment back into it when the latter is lost, and to refuse to be too detached from the world in abstract theorizing (2005, 159). He argues that philosophy and literature can come together to actualize philosophy’s responsibility to the world. But not just any literature will do for Cavell. What he has in mind, rather, is the Romantic and Transcendentalist works of his literary heroes, Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell focuses mainly on the similarity between Transcendentalism and ordinary-language philosophy, claiming that both offer parallel and fresh recoveries from loss and skepticism. For example, the Transcendentalists take metaphysics to be a form of intellectual escape, rooted to a certain extent in not wanting to live in a state of boredom with the ordinary. They aim to reestablish a sense of the ordinary that does not ft the characterization of boredom. As for ordinary language philosophers, they advocate consulting ordinary experience and language to reestablish the hermeneutical intimacy with a world that was lost due to metaphysical temptations (Dahl 2014, 22–23). Cavell does not state whether or not the term ‘metaphysics’ is used in the same way by the Transcendentalists and ordinary language philosophers. But he seems to have a different understanding of the metaphysical than Rosen’s view of it. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Rosen takes the metaphysical to be extraordinary in a way similar to how ordinary cases are extraordinary, including literature. For Cavell, philosophy’s responsibility to the world includes an acknowledgment of the extraordinary. Philosophy exposes our knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world through an acknowledgment of both the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary, he states. Linking this point about the extraordinary with ordinary forms of religious and ethical thinking, Espen Dahl explains that, for Cavell, one needs to consider religious, theological, and ethical registers as part of the ordinary here, albeit of a sublime kind (Dahl 2014, 47). As to what is ordinary in the extraordinary, we do not get examples of that but it is clear that Cavell does not consider the extraordinary as something metaphysical and, as such, it

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remains ordinary for him. Cavell makes this point in various works, linking it with philosophy’s responsibility to the intelligibility of existence. One question to raise here is about the prospect of joining philosophy and literature in the fght against skepticism. How is this to happen if philosophy for Austin and Wittgenstein is about the analysis of ordinary grammar whereas the literature of the Romantics and Transcendentalists is normative in orientation? Cavell’s turn to literature might be explained in the context of his reaction against religion since his endorsement of Emersonian perfectionism, as Dahl explains, is a way of encouraging self-reliance through natural effort, so to speak, rather than through supernatural efforts (2014, 164). For Cavell, the Transcendentalists want us to return home, where home, as Dahl explains, is a future-oriented form of moral perfectionism (Emerson) and cultural achievements (Dahl 2014, 24). This is a new home, away from illusions, and one in which striving to be happy and true to oneself is the goal—philosophically so, as well as morally, spiritually, aesthetically, and politically. Happiness is seen here as the antidote to skepticism, and this happiness can only be had for Cavell, as Dahl explains, though literary fgures such as Emerson and Thoreau (2014, 20). In particular, Emerson is seen as a savior in Cavell’s eyes because his idea of self-reliance is taken to establish the possibility of happiness without God. The method Cavell employs is simple: in the same way that Emerson and Thoreau turn to the ordinary and common life to show and acknowledge something not immediately seen about it, including what is extraordinary about it, Austin and Wittgenstein show how the ordinary contains all that is needed for understanding how certainty is possible regarding one’s acknowledgment of oneself, others, and the world. But I think Cavell takes an additional step beyond Austin and Wittgenstein when discussing philosophy’s therapeutic similarities with literature. He thinks that philosophy requires us, as literature does in Emerson and Thoreau, to pursue mutual acknowledgment between people in these communities. But this is something that neither Austin nor Wittgenstein would endorse. They are not normative philosophers and they would consider the latter a contradiction in terms. Clearly, Cavell joins the ranks of Socrates, Kierkegaard, Rorty, and Whitehead in assigning philosophy not only the descriptive task of restoring sense where it belongs—for the sake of getting it right, so to speak—but also the normative task of promoting human fourishing. The acknowledgment Cavell seeks is practical, and it is meant to restore harmony, cooperation, and peace between people who have misunderstood one another. There is also a formal similarity here not only with Rorty’s idea that hope ought to replace knowledge when philosophy has shown that the ideas of objective reality and objective truth do not make sense, but also with Martha Nussbaum’s call to teach philosophy lessons with the help of literature. As Nussbaum demonstrates in Poetic Justice, literature, the novel in particular,

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allows readers to embrace the ordinary as something real and concrete in a way that treatises in political economy cannot. The latter turn reductionistic in their treatments of the ordinary lives of people as abstract, statistical data, and philosophy could learn from literature to do otherwise (Nussbaum 1995, 9–10, 32–33). If Nussbaum was familiar with Whitehead, she would have said that political economy commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in its treatment of the daily lives of ordinary people whereas literature restores the concreteness, the ordinary, into its rightful place for intelligibility and truth. Both philosophy and literature are rooted in the ordinary, and philosophers could learn about the structure of intelligibility from literature as much as they do from other ordinary activities. But, of course, literature is mainly normative in orientation, not descriptive, whereas philosophy is mainly descriptive. It is also diffcult to understand in this context how a thinker who acknowledges the historicity of all moral values and behavior could make an argument that philosophy should be normative in its fght against skepticism. Cavell acknowledges that the criteria and rules that make something meaningful and true change not only across cultures and subject matters but also across time (1979, 6–9). As Stephen Mulhall argues in this context, Cavell is a fallibilist who thinks intelligibility is vulnerable to skepticism because of its historicity (Mulhall 2003, 83–84). There is no eternal truth in this matter since the ordinary that is central for making things intelligible is historical and contingent. Although Cavell is fearful of skepticism for good reasons, namely that it makes intelligibility vulnerable, this is not a reason in my view to think of philosophy as a discipline that could underwrite a particular normative outlook on the world. Cavell thinks that Wittgenstein endorses this underwriting of a normativizing function to philosophy (1976; Mulhall 2003, 85), and was rightly criticized by D. Z. Phillips on this point. As I already suggested, Phillips advocates a non-normative idea of philosophy, describing it as a contemplative activity that does not interfere with how ordinary discourse is carried out in everyday life but simply gives its meaning the elucidation it demands (Phillips 2001, 152). This is a view he adopts from Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees. It is interesting that when Phillips acknowledges the diffculty of philosophy, he remarks that it is so “not because it deals with abstruse and unfamiliar subjects, but because it deals with things that are so familiar that we hardly notice them” (Rhees 2001, 156). In various parts of this book, I presented the main diffculty of philosophy as that of avoiding short cuts and going the bloody hard way. Turning philosophy into a normative practice, as I have shown Cavell to do in this chapter, is one way of taking a short cut. Although he brings our attention to ordinary forms of existence that

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are hardly noticed, as Whitehead does with ordinary forms of non-sensory ­perception and ­knowledge, he cannot help turning into a normative thinker. But there is another, less clear way of taking a short cut and avoiding the hard way of doing philosophy. It is conveyed in what I call committing the fallacy of logical inversion. This will be the topic of my next chapter.

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NOTES 1. Whitehead appreciates Berkeley’s rejection of the idea of simple location in nature—the idea that substances in nature are passively located without change or endurance—but he fnds his idealism extreme because it denies that the unity of nature is objective and relegates that unity to God’s mind (1925, 66–68). 2. In Process and Reality, Whitehead discusses another aspect of the ­correspondence theory of truth (alongside the coherence theory of truth), namely in relation to the question of judgment. The judgment he has in mind here concerns the issue of the conformity of a proposition to an objectifed nexus in the world. Strictly speaking, Whitehead states, if there is conformity then we have a truth of correspondence. Judgments could be correct, incorrect, or otherwise (1929b, 190), whereas propositions are either true or false in the case of correspondence. But, perhaps more importantly here, Whitehead is mindful of the epistemological-metaphysical distinctions when dealing with the problem of skepticism. He objects to the metaphysical disjunction between the components of a subjective experience and those of the external world, stating that this disjunction leads to metaphysical, as well as epistemological, diffculties. The diffculty of the truth or falsity of propositions, as a result of the disjunction, is metaphysical, he states, whereas the diffculty of determining the grounds for judgments is epistemological (1929b, 189). The epistemological diffculty is only solvable, however, by an appeal to ontology since determining the grounds for ­making judgments is a metaphysical issue for him. 3. I italicize epistemic in the last sentence in the text in order to distinguish it from the epistemological context, which is a theoretical context for Wittgenstein. He would not reject the language of an epistemic link with the world because the latter deals with the various grammars expressing knowledge regarding the world. 4. In chapter 7, I show that Derrida holds the same perspective as Wittgenstein on this point, and not only toward other human beings but also toward nonhuman animals.

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Chapter 6

Inverting the Logic of Ordinary Atheism with Flew and Dawkins

WHITEHEAD, ATHEISM, AND THE FALLACY OF LOGICAL INVERSION

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Contextualizing Whitehead’s Position on Atheism Whitehead does not discuss atheism in any direct manner but his ­philosophical treatment of religion and God has relevant ramifcations for the question of atheism. Since what Whitehead says about religion and God contains both normative and descriptive remarks, measuring these remarks relative to the ordinary grammar of atheism provides an interesting context for discussing the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. In the next section, I provide an account of what I take ordinary atheism to be, and then proceed to discuss two accounts of atheism by Anthony Flew and Richard Dawkins, followed by the implications of Whitehead’s position on religion and God for a shared similarity he has with them on atheism. A few contextual words on Whitehead’s conception of religion and God are appropriate here, however, before delving into his potential position on atheism. Whitehead thought that religion is a controversial topic because, throughout history, no agreement among philosophers has been reached in regard to its defnition, he states, including what true and false religions look like, and, furthermore, because the meaning of the concept of God remained debatable (1926, 14, 67). These facts did not stop Whitehead from trying to correct misconceptions about God—for example, when showing that worshipping God for the kind of power associated with coercion is dangerous and barbaric (1926, 54). He states in this context that the intoxication with the barbaric conception of God’s power disgraces the bones of those who were slaughtered in the name of God (1926, 55). Further corrections offered by 157

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Whitehead include his attacks on any theology that separates God from the world, whether spatiotemporally (such as the Hebrew Bible’s suggestion that God is merely transcendent), morally (such as the New Testament’s extreme moral elevation of God above humanity), or in terms of the personal nature of God (such as the rendering of God as entirely impersonal in the Asiatic religions). I stated at the end of my last chapter that the current chapter will expose a new way of taking short cuts in philosophy, one that is not limited to normative thinking. I call this short cut the fallacy of logical inversion, a topic I discussed in considerable depth elsewhere, albeit without specifc reference to atheism or to Whitehead (Ramal 2010). Here, I show that the implications of Whitehead’s views on God and religion entail a logical inversion in the ordinary grammar of atheism, and that, ironically, Whitehead shares this inversion with the atheists Flew and Dawkins. I do not mean to suggest, however, that Whitehead’s approach to religion and God does not entail any normative thinking. In “An Appeal to Sanity,” for example, Whitehead makes the judgment that “Apart from religion, expressed in ways generally intelligible, populations sink into the apathetic task of daily survival, with minor alleviations” (1947, 69–70). In contrast to the above remark about religion—the lack of agreement on its defnition—the judgment in “An Appeal to Sanity” is clearly not descriptive because it does not analyze the meaning of religion or describe its grammar. Rather, it is a normative judgment that could be made equally applicable to ethics and aesthetics. It is related, in fact, to Whitehead’s further judgments that the aim of life is to live well, not just to survive (1929a, 5–6), and that religion contributes to freeing people from servitude and determinism (1933, 11, 25). Another relevant context for discussing the question of atheism is the strong similarity in function and responsibility that Whitehead assigns to both God and philosophy. Whitehead maintains that philosophy needs to survey the ideal possibilities relevant to humanity’s civilized growth and to offer insights and foresight about what makes life worth living (1933, 98). As I show in my discussion of God below, this surveillance of the ideal possibilities is something that Whitehead also expects God to do. Similarly, in giving philosophy the function of promoting a philosophy of life that involves peace and growth in morality, politics, aesthetics, religion, and scientifc thinking (1933, 87–98), Whitehead inevitably connects it with God on a conceptual level because he sees God as the provider of peace in the world. These similarities of function and responsibility between philosophy and God were not made intentionally on Whitehead’s part, but they give further support to the idea that philosophy for him is both descriptive and normative.

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In the next section I give historical and conceptual contexts for ­understanding the ordinary concept of atheism. This will function as a background for my argument that, although Whitehead is not an atheist, he shares the fallacy of logical inversion with atheists such as Anthony Flew and Richard Dawkins. As shall become clear, this logical inversion entails treating atheism as a metaphysical, rather than a religious, form of blindness to God’s existence or infuence, I argue. Philosophy needs to be neutral in its hermeneutical accountability to both theism and atheism, and discussing the fallacy of logical inversion in both theistic and atheistic accounts of God is one way of going the bloody hard way.

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The Meaning of Atheism A common view among historians of atheism is that it is the product of modernity. Although various meanings of the term ‘atheism’ existed prior to modernity, atheism in the sense of rejecting the intelligibility of God’s existence due to lack of evidence became inevitable in modernity (Buckley 1987, 47–58; Hyman 2001, 11). For Michael Buckley, modern atheism began with the Reformation after the authority of the church and the practice of confession within Christianity came under attack, facts that allowed skepticism to ensue in the minds of philosophers who responded to them (1987, 47). The latter philosophers include Denis Diderot and D’Holback who also came under the infuence of contemporary developments in science at the time. Instead of accepting God as the explanation of nature, they required an explanation of God. In many ways, Gavin Hyman shares the perspective of Buckley on modern atheism, and their combined views corroborate one aspect of the now well-known argument by Charles Taylor that, prior to the sixteenth century, it was virtually impossible not to believe in God. Taylor suggests that although the social and political “conditions of belief” in premodern times allowed belief in God to go unchallenged, these conditions changed in modernity (2007, 1–3). Not only that faith became “one option among others,” but the mystery itself of faith was gradually replaced with the rational search for understanding the divine (Taylor 2007, 3). To a certain extent, Taylor’s argument can also be found in Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1982, part IV), and the gist of it is that atheism is the upshot of the inability of philosophy or theology to explain God. Historically speaking, Diderot and D’Holback responded atheistically to theologians who attempted to defend theism on the evidential basis of reason and nature rather than faith. Interestingly, although Hyman treats modern atheism as the product of a disinterested quest for truth and intellectual integrity, Buckley suggests that the atheism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly among

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Catholic apologetics, was treated “as if it were a philosophic issue, rather than a religious one” (Buckley 1987, 47). I fnd Buckley’s remark illuminating because it shows the need to treat atheism as a religious rather than a theological issue if we are to understand its true meaning. To me, this rightly means that philosophers need to relate it to the grammars of ordinary belief and unbelief in religion, and to all religious discourse associated with the role that the divine plays in people’s lives, whether the latter are the lives of believers or nonbelievers. I also think that the etymology of the term ‘atheism’ is relevant here. The danger in defning a term solely on the basis of its linguistic roots should be kept in mind—for example, to avoid an etymological fallacy. It is common knowledge that when religion is defned on the basis of Augustine’s tracing of the word to one of its Latin roots, ligare, suggesting that religion is about reconnecting this world with a hidden, sacred world, the defnition fails the test of the diversity of religions. The latter defnition has an application in some religions that focus on bringing the divine and human worlds together, but religion cannot be reduced to this meaning. In the case of ‘atheism’, however, it might make sense to defne the term negatively as ‘atheism’ where, etymologically, the Greek term means living without the gods in the wider sense of the term, or specifcally without God in the narrow sense of the term. As I explain next, this kind of defnition is pragmatic—in the sense that it is grounded in how people live their lives. Buckley introduces the wider and narrower meanings of the term ‘atheism’ (1987, 15) and, in my judgment, the negative etymology coincides with the actual meaning of the term when the proper philosophical analysis of atheism has been provided. The context for my analysis and understanding of atheism draws on the idea that belief and unbelief are living frames of reference rather than theoretical and intellectual views that one holds in regard to the reality of God or the gods. As I argue below, Flew and Dawkins are mistaken to think of God’s existence as a hypothesis in need of evidential arguments. This is not how the grammar of God reveals its sense in the lives of practicing believers. If theistic belief means living life with a regulative role for God in it, where the reality of God enters the life of the believer in a substantial way, then atheism means living life without this kind of divine infuence or regulation. Atheism in this context does not contradict theism although it is dependent for its sense on the concept of ‘theism’. If my defnition of atheism is correct, then it should not be seen as a form of blindness to God’s necessary infuence on one’s life, causal or otherwise. Normatively speaking, a believer may claim that the atheist is blind to God’s presence, I argue, but this normative judgment is not an objective fact on which believers and nonbelievers can necessarily agree. Atheists could respond with an equally normative judgment to the effect that they see clearly what the believer means by God

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but that the idea of God plays no role in their lives and, fnally, that it is the believers who are blind to the truth that their so-called idea of God does not play a regulative role in people’s lives. If atheism can be understood as a way of life in which a causal infuence from God onto the world is not relevant to its meaning, it would then be correct to designate it as a negative form of atheism, particularly if positive atheism is the denial of God’s existence. Negative atheism makes sense when religious belief is understood to mean a practical commitment to a certain way of living rather than to a theoretical account that could be tested by means other than the life of belief. Although Anthony Flew uses the term ‘negative atheism’, the meaning he links with it is theoretical whereas my use is not theoretical but practical—that is, on the basis of how people practice their faith in God. Unlike Julian Baggini, however, I do not think that atheism is entirely independent of theism. Baggini claims that atheists existed prior to the emergence of theism in the same way that “Anessies” existed before the Loch Ness Monster myth came about (2003, 4). There is something correct about this argument, but only if it is not taken in the wrong direction. The negative atheists need not refer to themselves as atheists if they were not faced with taking a stand on theism, but if no form of theism existed at a certain point in history, it makes more sense to say that neither theists nor atheists existed at that time. What would it mean to say that atheists existed at a time when theism had no existence? It should be noted that, in certain cases, for example Richard Dawkins’s rejection of theism, what is rejected might not correspond to the reality that plays a role in the lives of believers. What Dawkins really rejects is a caricature of theism since what he rejects from his atheistic perspective is a hypothesis about God that does not correspond to what theism affrms. Also, as has already been pointed out by others, there are strong indications that the God rejected in modern and contemporary forms of atheism is not the God of religion but the God of modern philosophy. If this judgment is correct, the latter God is not the deus absconditus of classical theism but the theoretical God of reason that Flew and Dawkins came to endorse. Flew, Dawkins, and the Fallacy of Logical Inversion In “The Presumption of Atheism,” published in 1972, Flew puts the onus of proof on the theist to show that there are suffcient reasons to believe in God’s existence or that God’s existence is at least theoretically possible (1972, 30–31). This is an evidentialist approach to the questions of God and atheism and, at that point, Flew argued that there is no evidence for God’s existence and, therefore, that the presumption of atheism is sound. An echo of this

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argument can be found in Bertrand Russell’s remark, if true, that “if he met God in the next world he would complain that God had not provided suffcient evidence of his existence” (Cottingham 2015, ix). When Flew remarked later in life that he changed his mind on atheism, it was immediately clear that he still harbored the same evidentialist approach he did in “The Presumption of Atheism.” As he states in the Introduction to There Is a God, his real conversion is to deism, not theism, and the God in which he now believes is an Einsteinian God rather than the God of religion, a God that functions as the explanation of how the world came into existence (Flew 2008, 1–5). The deistic God in which Flew came to believe is the same deistic God that Dawkins claimed he does not mind believing in, and precisely because it was not the God of religion. As Dawkins puts it, the belief in an Einsteinian type of God would be religiously trivial (2006, 153). Although there are major differences between Dawkins and Flew, both treat the existence of God as if it were an evidentialist hypothesis that could be either validated (Flew’s later perspective) or invalidated (Dawkins’s perspective and Flew’s earlier perspective). As Flew puts it after he changed his mind: “Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than a half century?” (2008, 88). His “short answer” is that “this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science” although, he adds, “it is not science alone that has guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments” (Flew 2008, 88–89). Still, Flew confesses that his conversion is not a matter of faith but of evidence and reason: “In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith” (2008, 93). What I argue here is that Flew and Dawkins reverse the proper way of understanding the conceptual relation between God and the practices of religion. Instead of seeing the latter as the proper natural home for understanding the reality of God, and by implication atheism, they reverse the process and hold the practices of religion accountable to a scientifc picture of God that is said to make sense independently of them. Religious practices are judged to make or not make sense, or to be either true or false, relative to the supposed picture of that God rather than vice versa. I consider this way of thinking to entail a logical inversion because religious practices should be the starting point in making sense of the reality of God rather than vice versa. If I am correct, the proposed atheism of Flew and Dawkins is not, then, the negative atheism I discussed in the previous section but a positive form of atheism that is based on a mistakenly scientifc picture of God. As can be seen, the fallacy of logical inversion occurs when the two contexts typically used to elucidate the meaning of a concept have been inverted. The fallacy is easily identifed when the conceptual elucidation based on the concept’s ordinary use yields a different sense of that concept than the one

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suggested by the inverted elucidation. Ironically, Dawkins claims that the hypothetical God for which he requires scientifc evidence is the God he fnds in the biblical tradition. If he is correct on this, then he cannot be said to have committed the fallacy of logical inversion. But since he does not provide any serious analysis of the biblical pictures of God and insists, instead, on a factual reading of all religious discourse pertaining to God’s existence, his atheism is confused and he does commit the fallacy. On his account, if religious belief is justifable based on empirical and philosophical evidence, then God exists regardless of whether or not people actually practice any belief in that God. I do not think that the latter perspective makes much sense. At one point, the later Flew explains atheism as the upshot of God’s absence from the world. This would have made sense, and Flew would not have committed the fallacy of logical inversion, if the absence he meant is religious absence. But, as becomes clear, the absence he has in mind is not a religious absence but an evidential absence, one that is empirical in nature. Flew means that since God’s existence is the best explanation for how and why the world exists as it is, atheism is the denial of God’s evidential presence in the world. But no worship to speak of is needed in this deistic picture, and theism here is simply the sheer intellectual affrmation that “an infnite Intelligence” brought the universe into existence (Flew 2008, 88). He, too, inverts the contexts for making sense of God’s existence and ends up adopting the wrong context. I mentioned that Whitehead shares with Flew and Dawkins the act of ­committing the fallacy of logical inversion. Although his position is more complicated than theirs, and his keeping their company is not a comfortable thing to accept, his expressed position on how metaphysics ought to approach the reality of God also entails a reversal of the logical procedure by which people come to know God. By implication, atheism in his philosophy suffers from the fallacy of logical inversion. In the next section I explicate these points in detail while making a conscious effort to avoid exaggerating the intention behind Whitehead’s claim that metaphysical investigations, including the investigation of God, have logical priority over ordinary investigations. Being hermeneutically one-sided about his giving the metaphysical picture of God logical priority over ordinary religious, ethical, and spiritual pictures of God would defeat my purpose of calling for a neutral method of investigation in philosophy. Whitehead’s, Flew’s, and Dawkins’s versions of atheism are divorced from the grammatical sense that the ordinary notion of atheism has because their evidentialist outlooks, different as they are from one another, end up inverting the natural and theoretical contexts of atheism. As I show next, Whitehead’s evidentialism is found in his seeking a causal framework to demonstrate God’s existence. The grammar of positive atheism might entail the rejection

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of the necessity of God’s causal relation to the world, but negative atheism is not causally oriented.

WHITEHEAD AND ATHEISM

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Metaphysical and Religious Forms of Blindness I suggested above that there is more to atheism than simply its positive form—that is, the direct denial of God’s existence—and that Whitehead’s implied view of it is different from the views of Flew and Dawkins. In chapter 1, I showed how Whitehead’s discussion of Aristotle reveals that God’s existence for both of them is necessary insofar as without that existence there could be no explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. Furthermore, this necessity is given a strong expression in causal terms— God is necessary and related to all beings on a causal level. Since causality for Whitehead is inherent to all creative processes, including the process of bringing the world into existence, atheism for him cannot be simply the denial of God’s existence but is a form of metaphysical blindness to that existence. I unpack this conclusion throughout the rest of this chapter and show how it exemplifes the fallacy of logical inversion. Whitehead disagrees with philosophers who claim that God’s existence is generically different from that of all other actual agents in the world because, he states, the view that God is a different kind of reality denies intelligibility to the very possibility of a causal interaction between God and the other agents. “God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space” (1929b, 18), he writes, and except for the fact that God is primordial—which means that God is eternal and does not have a past—God is not generically different from other actual entities (1929b, 87, 75). Without this similarity of kind between God and the worldly creatures, no causal interaction between them would be possible. But the issues of consistency and coherence are also on Whitehead’s mind. One cannot intelligibly and coherently say that two dissimilar realities could interact with each other, Whitehead would say. This is the reason, for example, that Whitehead insists that God is not the sole creator of events in the world but a co-creator of these events, casually bringing them about with the cooperation of other actual entities and with the help of uncreated eternal possibilities (1929b, 348–57). As I suggested in chapter 4, the language Whitehead uses to account for the metaphysical structure of the world is not traditional at all. This is true of how he accounts for worldly experiences of God. He tells us, for example, that God is prehended—felt and received—rather than perceived in the traditional sense of the word, and that all prehensions of God are rooted in causal

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interactions. To focus on human experiences of God, what Whitehead states in this context is that God communicates with people through propositions that are received through a hybrid of “physical” and “conceptual” feelings (1929b, 189, 244–45). The language is technical, but, as a reminder, propositions are not ordinary verbal statements for Whitehead but conceptual suggestions. His point here is that any suggestions received from God are felt, not heard, and that the process of feeling them occurs on both bodily and mental levels. To be more exact, God objectifes ideal suggestions for the world and, in the case of humans, they feel these suggestions through “hybrid physical feelings” (1929b, 244–45). My objective in being more specifc here about the mode of feeling God’s infuence is not to explicate Whitehead’s technical language, however, but, rather, to show how it exemplifes the point I am making, namely that his focus in accounting for our experience of God is foreign to the traditional forms of religious experience. If the technical language was meant to refect the outcome of a certain grammatical analysis of the ordinary language of perceiving God, this would have been precisely what philosophy should do. But, as can be seen, Whitehead’s focus is explanatory, not grammatical. Again, the problem is not simply the use of technical language, which is certainly a legitimate—though not necessary—use when philosophical elucidation is required. The problem, rather, is that Whitehead’s analysis is reminiscent of scientifc attempts to explain how the world at large is the way it is, even when he declares that the nature of philosophy is disinterested and that the main task of philosophy is to clarify the nature of the world and the concepts we use (1929b, 9). Whitehead’s metaphysics is more of a superscientifc account of the world than his proposed journey into the clarifcation of thought may suggest. As I explained in previous chapters, Whitehead proposes an ontological principle to account for causality in his metaphysical system, a principle according to which all actual entities, including God, exercise effcient and fnal types of causality to interact with each other. This principle dictates that the causal link between God and the world is necessary in order to explain, coherently, how and why the world is the way it is, and that it is also absolute in the sense that it cannot be annihilated or cancelled out. Regarding atheism, what the above picture of prehension and causality suggests is that all agents of perception are necessarily subjected to God’s propositional infuence, at least metaphysically, and that if they do not receive it, they are therefore blind to God’s presence in their lives. There is no question that atheism in this context is the denial of the necessity of God or God’s causal infuence on the world, but the denial is not conscious in the way Flew and Dawkins perceive it. Since God can only be perceived through

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non-sensory forms of perception that are rooted in God’s causal effcacy in the world—hence the ideal propositions or suggestions that are passed on to the world and received through hybrid physical prehensions—atheism is the denial of this perception when the propositions offered are not incorporated in one’s life. Put differently, since God’s causal infuence is only received rather than perceived, atheism is the blindness to this form of reception. As a reminder, Whitehead’s God is primordially metaphysical and the concept of God he proposes is not meant to be bound in its applications to the monotheistic religions (1926, 31). First and foremost, God is a necessary, primordial existence that happened to receive religious manifestations in the monotheistic religions, but there are also non-monotheistic and nonreligious manifestations for that God. This is simply a by-product fact of God’s necessary existence, a being who is said to be causally related to all beings, human and nonhuman. Whereas every religious feeling is one involving God, Whitehead states, not every feeling of God is a religious one—or, as he puts it: “The concept of God is certainly one essential element in religious feeling. But the converse is not true; the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in the concept of God’s function in the universe” (1929b, 207). This means that certain feelings of God’s causal infuence might not be acknowledged as such, even if they exist necessarily. Whitehead describes the latter as “negative prehensions,” ones that ignore or reject the causal infuence exercised upon them albeit, as I mentioned, not on a conscious level (1929b, 239). If so, they are a form of metaphysical blindness to God’s infuence. Whitehead acknowledges that what is said about God metaphysically has to be justifed in religious and ethical experience (1926, 31). This means that Whitehead is obligated to analyze the meaning of religious discourse relative to its own contexts. But atheism poses a special exception here because if we try to allocate a religious aspect to it in Whitehead’s system, it would not be the negative atheism I explored above. As I mentioned above, negative atheism has nothing to do with causality; whereas in Whitehead’s metaphysics, nothing can escape causality. My point here is that we should not expect any correlation between the metaphysical blindness to God’s infuence and the religious blindness to that infuence. These two forms of blindness are not harmonious. Furthermore, if claims about religious blindness are normative, it would be diffcult to see harmony between metaphysical and religious forms of blindness to God’s infuence. Claims to metaphysical blindness are descriptive and their veracity can be checked relative to whether or not the metaphysical account of God makes sense but, unless confused, claims to religious blindness are checked relative to how people live their lives, including how they express themselves religiously. A confused claim to religious blindness could arise if the claim is theoretically oriented, as Dawkins’s claim

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is, albeit, in his case, it is directed at people who profess belief in God’s existence. Now, some of Whitehead’s own normative claims about God might give the impression that atheism in his account could be religious in orientation—for example, when he links religion with “the art and theory of the internal life,” stating that sincerity is the mark of a true believer (1926, 15–16), and when he claims that fnding God in a religious context has to be sought through love and not through fear, or with the help of John and not of Paul (1926, 74–76). This kind of fnding is religious, obviously, not metaphysical, and it might suggest that atheism is an affective-existential blindness rather than a metaphysical blindness to God’s infuence upon the world. But, as I mentioned, Whitehead gives logical precedence to metaphysical investigations of God’s reality over historical or affective investigations. Although he states that experience is the starting point of doing metaphysics, this verbal assurance on his part comes into logical tension with his metaphysical account of God. Whitehead would be willing to reject any religious context that contradicts the metaphysical priority he gives to God—for example, if the religious context denies any causal interrelatedness between God and the world. If I am correct on this point then any commitment Whitehead shows toward a religious justifcation of God’s reality, or the rejection of that reality, is subsidiary rather than essential. But why does Whitehead give logical priority to the metaphysics over the practice? As I explain later, this is yet another form of oscillation in Whitehead, in this case one that demonstrates the philosophical struggle he probably had in fguring out the relation between the factual and valuative or, to be more accurate, between the ordinary and metaphysical. Linking causality to God’s infuence on the world is the source of the problem, as I further illustrate below with the help of a proper interpretation of the biblical account of creation, and this fact provides further proof that Whitehead commits the fallacy of logical inversion regarding religious atheism. Creation and the Causal Basis of Metaphysical Blindness The biblical scholar Claus Westermann argues that the temptation to understand the notion of creation in an empirical-causal fashion should be avoided. Neither the Genesis account of creation nor other biblical accounts of it—from the addresses in the psalms to other epiphany narratives—are concerned with causality or with how empirically the world came to be, he states; they are mainly concerned, rather, with God’s mightiness (1963, 197, 207). Westermann acknowledges that the Genesis community had interest in the empirical details of the world, and that the Genesis account of creation

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was produced with those details in mind, but the empirical details were used to speak of creation and of God’s power and mightiness, he advises (1963, 197–98). In fact, when the whole Bible is looked at to check what it coherently says about creation and the creator, Westermann says, the idea of God as creator is understood to be a form of praise (1963, 197). He takes the story of Job as one strong example of how God personally reveals to humanity what it means for God to be a creator without offering an explanatory theory of how the world came to be (1963, 197). Ian Barbour, a science and religion scholar who is somewhat infuenced by Whitehead, echoes the plausibility of Westermann’s account. He argues that “The religious idea of creation starts from wonder and gratitude for life as a gift,” and that the attempt to treat the book of Genesis as if it were a book of science ahead of its time leads to a neglect of the function of the creation stories in the lives of their religious communities (1990, 133ff.). The grammar of ‘creation’ among these communities shows a variety of meanings, he suggests, from a sense of dependence on God to wonder, trust, and gratitude for life. The concept also includes an appreciation on the part of its believers for the interdependence, order, and beauty of all things in the world. The accounts of Westermann and Barbour should steer us away from treating creation as if it requires a causal explanation, and I think they are closer to the religious sense of creation in their interpretations than the metaphysical account suggested by Whitehead. It is hard to imagine, for example, how the Genesis expression of the movement of God’s spirit upon the waters is the result of a causal infuence when it is clear that many people could not even see how such presence is possible. More importantly, there is no indication at all in Genesis that God’s presence is understood in causal terms. The repeated language of “Let there . . . ” (“Let there be light,” “Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters,” “Let the earth bring forth vegetation,” etc.,) precludes the plausibility of an account that requires causal explanations. Of course, Whitehead would not reject the obvious fact that religious people fnd life wondrous and mysterious, a gift from God, but he would not equate that with the full meaning of the language of creation. He clearly links the idea of creation with the metaphysical activity of bringing order and novelty into the world, an activity that he grounds in God through a divine hosting and mediating of all the relevant possibilities and ideals to the world (1925, 174–78; 1929b, 257, 343). Whitehead writers, for example, that “Apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world” since the eternal possibilities relevant to the actual world “would be relatively non-existent” for the actualities that are open to these possibilities (1929b, 247, 31). It is true that Whitehead thinks religion is suggested by whatever suggests a cosmology (1926, 141), which is a statement about how any theoretical

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account of the world, scientifc or philosophical, has religious implications, but the opposite is also true for him—namely that whatever suggests a religion suggests a cosmology. The latter implies that religious discourse is engaged in theoretical expressions of the physical and metaphysical natures of the world, and that the religious accounts of creation are theoretical accounts of how the world came to be. I am not proposing that religion is a science for Whitehead, but it is clear that his technical account of the Godworld relation centers on the how of things and is, therefore, conceptually apart from the accounts of Westermann and Barbour. He assigns a theoretical nature to religion that is absent from their accounts, which is also clear from his view that the religious interest in the world is simply a variant from the scientifc interest since both suggest a cosmology. A comprehensive cosmology “retains its chief importance by fusing the two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought” (1929b, 15–16), which suggests, again, that Whitehead’s descriptive approach here is theoretical. If the Whitehead that the reader is familiar with is believed to be d­ ifferent from the Whitehead I am presenting here, let me emphasize the fact that Whitehead is explicit in ascribing a theoretical aspect to religious narratives that go beyond the basic ritualistic, expressive, and mythic forms of religion. For example, his account of rational religion, which is what he associates with advanced forms of religion, is that it is metaphysical in orientation because its narratives involve “the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity” (Whitehead 1929b, 16). The metaphysical generality that Whitehead has in mind is also found in the following statement: “Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents” (1929b, 15). As a reminder, my aim in discussing the question of creation is to show that causality, and the stipulated similarity of kind between God and the worldly creatures, are problematic for the question of the intelligibility of the religious grammars of God and atheism. Philosophy does not serve its responsibility to religion well if it turns God into a causal agent who interacts with the world in the way worldly creatures—and metaphysical actual entities as such—interact with each other. If we want to allow some sense of ordinary causal discourse to be associated with the God-world relation—for example, “God opened my eyes and showed me the right path” or “It was the hand of God that guided me to do the right thing”—then we have to investigate what it would be like to speak of ‘religious causality’, not metaphysical causality. Certainly, it makes sense to speak of God causing us to do certain things or to express ourselves in a certain way, but here the sense of causality

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suggested is ordinary, not the effcient and undeniable causality associated with the provision of ideal possibilities for the world. Causality in a religious context would be similar to the kind of causality one fnds when the language of love, or hate, or anything to do with feelings and emotions, is present. Let us think of the love between Romeo and Juliet, or other forms of love that might come close to that, and ask ourselves whether the expressed language of necessity, blindness, or lack of choice in these contexts has anything to do with causality. Some people are willing to give their time, attention, and even lives to their loved ones—or, alternatively, they could also hold these acts back for a variety of reasons—and it is these reasons, it seems to me, that shed light on the kind of necessity, or its lack thereof, one fnds in love. I similarly hold that the kind of necessity one fnds in the God-world relation should be understood in light of how people express themselves about God’s role in their lives. This means that the expressions of both believers and nonbelievers must be investigated. When this happens, I think different notions of God and atheism surface than the ones implied by Whitehead’s account of the God-world relation. In regard to atheism, in particular, any time the demand for causal or other empirical evidence for God’s existence is put on the table the philosopher should ask whether the demand makes sense at all. But, it is also important to acknowledge that not all discussions of atheism are relevant to its grammar. A brief example from sociology should demonstrate this point.

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Sociological Blindness to Atheism Phil Zuckerman is a sociologist of religion who claims that his aim in discussing atheism is to draw conclusions about the roots and truth of atheism, as he puts it, and thus to offer an explanation of why atheism has been somewhat closeted (2006, 47–68). His analysis touches on the socio-economic factors that infuence the emergence of atheism in various societies around the world, a fact that presupposes a certain understanding of what atheism is. In his statistical report on atheism, for example, Zuckerman addresses the reasons as to why a wealthy Europe has a signifcant majority of atheists vis-à-vis poor countries in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia where a minimal number of atheists exist. After dismissing biological or similar genetic reasons for this disparity—for example, the expectation that Ireland and England would show similar attitudes towards theism and atheism, which is not the case—he concludes that when food and shelter are scarce and life is insecure, religion gets a large following from people who suffer, but this is not the case when healthcare and wealth are abundant. None of this is philosophically relevant, of course, and Zuckerman does not spend any time either defning or shedding light on what atheism

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is. As a sociologist, he perhaps does not feel the need to attend to the grammars of ‘God’ and ‘atheism’ but presupposes what they mean. But it becomes very clear from what he writes that, like Flew and Dawkins, as well as many philosophers of religion and evolutionary biologists, he takes atheism to mean the denial of God’s existence. This is the positive version of atheism I discussed above. The important question of what it means to say “God exists” or “God does not exist” remains absent in this kind of research, however, and no discussion of negative atheism is carried out. Yet, as I have shown, negative atheism is the context where light can be shed on the true meaning of atheism. As I have also shown, Whitehead focuses on positive, not negative, ­atheism. In his account of the historical development of religion from mere rituals and beliefs to rational religion, he also discusses the relevance of sociological factors to the development and meaning of religion. But his analysis is historical and philosophical, not the kind of analysis offered in statisticallybased sociological data on faith and atheism. As I mentioned, the puzzling thing about Whitehead is that although he does not want to treat God as a reality entirely independent of the religious practices in which it manifests itself, and although he wants to give experience the frst word before making generalizations about the nature of reality as such, he nonetheless argues that the metaphysical account of God, and by implication atheism, have logical priority over experience and religious practices. I discuss the specifc details of this prioritizing for atheism in the next section.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF PRIORITIZING METAPHYSICS OVER THE ORDINARY

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Metaphysics and Religion In Religion in the Making, Whitehead argues that the relation between metaphysics and religion is mutually benefcial. Religion requires critical metaphysical thinking in order for it to be rational and correctly interpreted whereas metaphysics, the science of discovering the general ideas relevant to the analysis of everything that happens, requires concrete illustrations in order to be relevant and adequate to the facts of experience, in this case religious experience (1926, 31, 83–89). But, as I stated in chapter 2, Whitehead shares with Aristotle the metaphysical standpoint according to which the question of being as such needs to be investigated dispassionately and antecedently to any special investigation of various examples of being in the world (1925, 157; 1933, 141; 1926, 83; 1929b, 51, 61, 343). Religious ways of being in the world belong in the latter category and, as we have seen in

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chapter 2, Whitehead does not prioritize them when investigating the question of being as such. Furthermore, Whitehead believes that the metaphysical picture of God to which his metaphysics leads has logical priority over the pictures of God found in the historical religions. The latter perspective is clearly present in the following remark: “Apart from any reference to existing religions as they are, or as they ought to be, we must investigate dispassionately what the metaphysical principles, here developed, require . . . as to the nature of God” (1929b, 343). But why is Whitehead so insistent on giving the metaphysical logical priority over the religious? It must be kept in mind that the priority Whitehead gives the metaphysical picture of God over ordinary pictures pertains not only to human knowledge of God but also to the truths of the existent religious, moral, and spiritual pictures of God. An improper logical inversion of the ordinary and metaphysical contexts would lead to a fallacy of logical inversion. I already mentioned that Whitehead admires Aristotle for the latter’s unbiased pursuit of any conclusion to which his metaphysics leads. Unlike medieval thinkers who let their religious biases get in the way of doing good metaphysical work, Aristotle did not, and Whitehead follows suit. To be unbiased for Whitehead is not limited to affrming God as a central formative force in the universe, alongside creativity, the eternal possibilities, and other actual entities, but also includes admitting that whatever applies to any other actual entity must also apply to God. I discussed this above in the context of causality and how God’s causal interaction with other actualities cannot happen unless they are all actual in similar ways. There is only one genus of actual entities, and both God and all the other actual entities belong in it (1929b, 90). This is true even though, unlike humans and other nonhuman actual entities, God is primordial and infnite whereas other actual entities are contingent and fnite (1929b, 110, 87). But it is metaphysics, not religion, which dictates that God has the same kind of reality as other actual entities. This simply follows from how Whitehead understands the ontological principle, which is the principle according to which all actual entities, God included, participate in acts of effcient and fnal causation, and all have a threefold character: (1) being infuenced by the past, (2) having a subjective character that emerges from their internal process of becoming, and (3) having a superjective nature where they reach satisfaction after combining external and internal infuences, and where they begin the process of affecting other actual entities through effcient causality (1929b, 87). When God’s threefold character is investigated, Whitehead speaks of a consequent nature to God, which is the character of God in response to experiencing the world and appropriating that experience onto its primordial nature (1929b, 345–47). For Whitehead, it is this

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consequent nature that allows God to feel the feelings of the worldly creatures and, ultimately, to reconcile their loss within the divine being as a whole. Whitehead’s argument about the ontological similarity between God and the worldly creatures brings to mind an unpopular fourteenth-century tradition rooted in the thought of the Franciscan priest John Duns Scotus. Like Whitehead, Scotus rejects the ontological difference between God and humanity, and he argues that we can know God apart from revelation. As Hyman rightly puts it, ‘being’ for Scotus is something shared by God and humanity with the exception that God is infnite and humans are fnite (2006, chap. 2, section 4). This means that, for Scotus, there is a difference of degree rather than of kind between humans and God, and that the language people use to refer to God is not analogical but univocal. The question here is whether this conclusion, as well as Whitehead’s other views on the priority of metaphysical principles over religious realities, makes sense when the ordinary grammatical contexts of God, religion, and atheism are consulted. In chapter 2, I mentioned that Whitehead’s mathematical and scientifc interest in the world led him to wonder about its ultimate constituents prior to his discussions of the problem of being as such among the Greeks. Clearly, Whitehead’s interest in being as such preceded his interest in the question of God. Thus, it is possible to say that one could investigate the nature of reality as such prior to investigating any religious example of being in the world. There are no logical problems here, and defnitely no logical inversion to speak of. A philosophical interest in the nature of reality could begin with investigations of particular examples of what is real before including religious examples. Also, the suggestion does not imply that the investigation could be done prior to looking at any example whatsoever of being in the world. But, certainly, the idea of coming up with a vision of a metaphysical God prior to investigating any religious ideas of God is diffcult to justify when it is well-known that the natural home for the concept of God is the world religions. This metaphysical picture would only make sense if the God envisioned is not the God of religion but something akin to what Flew and Dawkins envisioned, namely a theoretical construct that simply explains how the world is held together. Let us assume that one learns that a certain language about God speaks of God’s transcendence or God’s independence from the world. At the outset of this chapter, I mentioned that Whitehead is critical of perspectives that separate God from the world and, certainly, he would be critical of the language of God’s sheer transcendence or independence. “But just as the kingdom of heaven transcends the natural world, so does this world transcend the kingdom of heaven” (1926, 87–88). The transcendence Whitehead has in mind here is moral—“For the world is evil, and the kingdom is good” (1926, 88). Speaking of God in particular, he depicts the religious pictures

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that insist on God’s transcendence in an absolutist sense as one-sided. They do not account for God’s metaphysical immanence in the world: “Any proof which commences with the consideration of this character of the actual world cannot rise above the actuality of this world. It can only discover all the factors disclosed in the world as experienced. In other words, it may discover an immanent God, but not a God wholly transcendent” (1926, 71). Whitehead tries to avoid short cuts in explicating the reality of God and, for him, the pictures of transcendence and independence are distortions of God’s full reality when they are seen from contexts outside of their natural homes. But should the grammars of God’s independence and transcendence be themselves subjected to a metaphysical context that is said to be independent of that grammar? What if the original homes where the confessions, or statements, regarding God’s independence and transcendence are meant simply to suggest that God is different in kind from human beings? The difference in kind here would be linked to something such as moral fortitude, and where the strength of God’s moral character is said to be different in kind from the strength of people’s moral character. Does Whitehead himself not state that the kingdom of heaven transcends the natural world due to its goodness? If Whitehead insists that the difference between God and humanity is not one of kind but one of degree, as he does, then he is not giving any grammatical priority to the language of religion but subjecting the latter to the metaphysical priority he gives to God. This is an example of a logical inversion although, as can clearly be seen, he is not consistent about practicing what he preaches on a metaphysical level. What I mean is that Whitehead cannot help but invoke the religious contexts to say something about his metaphysical God. If the kingdom of heaven transcends the world in its goodness, would God hold the same status? Yes, God is immanent but in a different manner than how God is transcendent, each with a context of its own. Another way of putting this point is to say that we might be dealing with more than one concept of God here whereas Whitehead’s metaphysical God is that which has been manifested in history as “Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, First Cause, Supreme Being, Chance” (1925, 179). What Whitehead is right about, from the perspective of a descriptive philosophy, is that each of the mentioned names or principles “corresponds to a system of thought derived from the experiences of those who have used it” (1925, 179). But a descriptive investigation of the latter should show that their radical differences imply radically different deities or principles of thought. Of course, the requirement itself that the metaphysical references to God need to be checked for their relevance in religious discourse reveals their lack of rootedness in the religious grammar of the idea of God. In my focus on logical inversions regarding the reality of God, however, I look for potential incompatibilities between religious and philosophical pictures of God that

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arise due to giving logical priority to the philosophical over the religious. When this happens and conclusions are drawn about the religious nature of God, independently of how religions speak of God, the fallacy of logical inversion makes its presence. But questions need to be asked. Is everything said about God in the religious traditions and the texts speaking of that God need to be accounted for in Whitehead’s metaphysical God? Could there be compatibility between the metaphysical and religious pictures of God if some of the historical things said about God are not represented in the metaphysical picture? These are diffcult questions. Like Whitehead, Cobb brings his readers’ attention to the fact that some of what is said about God in the historical religious traditions is problematic. He argues that it would be a mistake to think that everything said about God within the religious traditions must be accepted as is. We must realize, he states, that the past conceptualities of the world’s religious traditions are bound up with world views that are now obsolete, and that all interpretations, including Whitehead’s, are conditioned by cultural and historical factors (Cobb 1989, 44). I take this to mean, frst, that certain misrepresentations of God, whether in the religious traditions or in Whitehead’s metaphysics, are expected and, second, that it is possible to encounter expressions of God in the religious traditions that are absent from Whitehead’s account. Cobb mentions, for example, that there is something formal about Whitehead’s defnition of God so that, potentially, it could give rise to incompatible ways of speaking of God—for example, that God is the ground of being but also a transcendent, non-immanent type of existence (1969, 21–23). More specifcally to Whitehead’s own views about God, Cobb argues that inconsistency is expected in them and he gives the example of how God is depicted as a principle of concretion in Science and the Modern World but then as a personal being in Religion in the Making and Process and Reality (1965, 176).1 This is the kind of inconsistency that can be attributed to growth in a philosopher, of course. Whitehead was working on something new and the ideas were coming in a gradual manner. But even in Whitehead’s mature system, Cobb states, there are certain inconsistencies. For example, although Whitehead concludes that God’s consequent nature is personal, purposeful, loving, and necessarily good—mainly due to the fact that God prehends the world in its entirety, without loss—and, further, that there is wisdom in God’s provision of ideal propositions to the worldly creatures, these characteristics are absent in Whitehead’s later metaphysical language about God as a unitary actuality (Cobb 1969, 58). The issue, of course, is whether there is anything in the ordinary concept of God that either contradicts something said in the metaphysical account or, at least, is incompatible with it.

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I cannot help but think that when Whitehead depicts his metaphysical God as necessarily good and wise, these depictions are not purely descriptive but are rooted in normative grounds that are infuenced by Whitehead’s knowledge of the religious traditions. Why should the sheer fact of giving the world ideal possibilities for realization, albeit to the beneft of the world, be considered good if this is done with a certain necessity on God’s part? The same goes for taking up and preserving into God’s being any historical loss, and even reconciling the loss in God, when this is merely a metaphysical act that is carried out on the basis of ontological laws of existence? Cobb has an answer as I explain next. Cobb insists that the central features in the ordinary meaning of the traditional concept of God need to be included in the very defnition of God, and the feature of being supremely worthy of worship is one of them. Even if Whitehead’s language about his metaphysical God lacks certain features found in the monotheist language about God, God is not a mere principle that lacks agency for Whitehead, but is an individual actuality that acts as a subject of experience, an entertainer of purposes, a maker of decisions, and a being experienced by others (Cobb 1969, 58–59). Cobb’s interpretation of Whitehead’s God’s worthiness of worship is partially based on Whitehead’s critique of one-sided pictures of God—for example, where God is pictured as an imperial ruler, or a sheer personifcation of a moral energy, or, following Aristotle, an ultimate metaphysical principle without a personal side (Cobb 1969, 39). Cobb concludes that there is continuity between the metaphysical and historic uses of the term ‘God’ in Whitehead’s metaphysics (1965, 14–15). But, inevitably, if Whitehead’s God is a God who creates with love and tenderness, as Cobb states, and a God who calls the world forward without coercion (1969, 54), then these images were not drawn in a descriptive and non-normative fashion. How could they be? I mentioned that Whitehead fnds problems in the traditional doctrines of God. To depict God as an imperial ruler or a ruthless moral entity is a sign that the church gave unto God attributes that belonged to Caesar, not Jesus, Whitehead states (1929b, 342). In connection with this, Whitehead directs some of his criticism against the Psalms: they glorify God’s sheer power and, thus, refect a barbaric conception of God (1926, 55). He also rejects a host of other theological ideas attributed to God, including the suggestion that God is merely a transcendent being, as I argued above. In accusing the church here of accepting the doctrine of God’s transcendence uncritically, he adds that it lost the world for uncritical apocalyptic ideas about the afterlife (1926, 67). Overall, both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament invoke fear instead of love in some of their passages, displaying their lack of understanding of what God’s nature is like. Whitehead demurs when he reads in Proverbs that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”—“Yet this is an odd saying,

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if it be true that ‘God is love’,’” he writes (1926, 75). Similarly, he thinks the promotion of fear in Paul’s language is contrary to the message of Jesus—for example, Paul’s warning: “In faming fre taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1926, 75). Can these objections on Whitehead’s part be merely the outcome of a metaphysical investigation of the reality of God? Let us take another look at the already mentioned example of God’s power. Whitehead writes: “The life of Christ is not an exhibition of over-ruling power. Its glory is for those who can discern it, and not for the world. Its power lies in its absence of force. It has the decisiveness of a supreme ideal, and that is why the history of the world divides at this point of time” (1926, 57). But can this beautiful description of Jesus’s power be extracted from a metaphysical notion of power that Whitehead arrived at independently of the life of Jesus he knows? On the surface, the links that Whitehead creates between his metaphysical God and the biblical God seem to corroborate Cobb’s interpretation but, again, it is diffcult to see how Whitehead’s references to the scriptures—whether critically or in praise—are really based on his metaphysical concept of God. Is the metaphysical function of providing ideal possibilities of fulfllment the same as the ordinary acts of love and tenderness? There might be ordinary religious contexts that speak of God as a tender, loving, and forgiving being, but it is diffcult to see how the metaphysical context of necessary causal interactions could inspire these attributes. Either Whitehead brings the ordinary to understanding the metaphysical or he does not. I am inclined to think that all the personal characteristics he attributes to his metaphysical God are taken from a religious context, contrary to what Whitehead states verbally. In his critique of Descartes, Whitehead states that his ontological argument for God’s existence fails precisely because Descartes “abstracts God from the historic universe,” and that he should have started his investigation by determining “that aspect of experience which most fully exhibits the universal necessities of existence” (1938, 113). Here, Whitehead writes like the metaphysician he is, analyzing and describing in general terms, and declaring the metaphysical to be prior to the religious when investigating the reality of God. But when he writes that “It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God” (1926, 20), and that this spirit “neither rules, nor is it unmoved” (1929b, 343), what is the metaphysical basis for these remarks? As can be seen, the relation between metaphysics and religion is not as straightforward as it may seem at frst—religion providing the adequate exemplifcation metaphysics needs and getting the rational justifcation it requires. The normative (religious) and descriptive (metaphysical) intertwine in many places in Whitehead’s thinking about God, and although the metaphysical is supposed to take precedence over the religious, in actuality this does not seem to be the case. More importantly, what is said about God

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from a religious perspective does not always correspond to the God arrived at metaphysically. I mentioned above that Cobb thinks there is inconsistency in Whitehead about his treatment of the idea of God as a person. He recognizes that Whitehead does not think religious experience justifes speaking of God as a person—that is, God as having purpose, knowledge, goodness, wisdom, love, consciousness, and a vision for the world (1965, 146–47)—but he theorizes that the basic reason for which Whitehead uses personal language about God is the metaphysical conclusion that, as an actual entity, God has to provide limitations to ensure order and value in the world (Cobb 1965, 147). I cannot make this determination from Whitehead’s work, but, if Cobb is right, this proves that Whitehead cannot help but use the religious context to say something religiously relevant about his metaphysical God. The religious cannot be deduced from the metaphysical. A grammatical investigation of God’s metaphysical role in limiting the chaos of the universe might bring to mind the passage in Genesis 1 about putting order in a chaotic frst-day creation, for example, but the grammar of the ordinary sense of God’s goodness does not suggest any necessary relation to that limitation. This would be a normative response if it occurs, not a metaphysical necessity.2 The same goes for other metaphysical descriptions of God—for example, the language of God as “primordial,” “consequent,” and “superjective.” These descriptions are foreign to how ordinary religious discourse functions and they are not grammatical. They do not shed light on the ordinary discourse regarding God’s nature or character. The only harmony that could exist between the metaphysical and ordinary here would have to be found in ascertaining that the above metaphysical terms, and others like them, are grammatical—in the sense that they are descriptive of the ordinary grammar of religion. For this to work, however, the description of a primordial God as the unconscious unifcation of conceptual feelings that have the eternal objects as their data (1929b, 344) would have to be descriptive of something religious about God. But what would that be? The same question applies to the idea of God’s consequent nature when the latter is depicted as the actual unity of physical prehensions of the actualities of the evolving universe. Perhaps there is something grammatical about speaking of God as an infnite, unlimited, and free being, a being that is devoid of all negative prehensions (1929b, 345), but, if so, this can only mean that some of God’s metaphysical descriptions do come close to the religious grammar of God, not that all metaphysical descriptions are grammatical. Examples of compatibility between the metaphysical and religious do exist in Whitehead, of course. For instance, when Whitehead discusses the relation between God, creativity, and the worldly actualities, he writes: “there is no meaning to ‘creativity’ apart from its ‘creatures,’ and no meaning to ‘God’

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apart from the ‘creativity’ and the ‘temporal creatures,’ and no meaning to the ‘temporal creatures’ apart from ‘creativity’ and ‘God’” (1929b, 225). Focusing on the question of compatibility here, Whitehead can be read to be saying that, grammatically speaking, it would not make sense to speak of God as creator without the concepts of creation and creatures making sense. Similarly, when he comes to the conclusion that humanity lost God in the modern world, Whitehead resorts to conceptual analysis of ordinary references to God to show how the loss occurred. He states in this context that “Language cloaks the most profound ideas under its simplest words” and, therefore, that “words such as ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal,’ ‘entity,’ ‘individuality,’ ‘actual,’ require the closest careful watching, lest in different connections we should use them in different senses, not to speak of the danger of failing to use them in any determinate sense” (1926, 78). The same grammatical sentiment is found in Whitehead’s judgment that when encountering contradictory concepts about God, the reconcilement of these concepts “must be sought in a more searching analysis of the meaning of the terms in which they are phrased” (1926, 77–78). Whitehead’s statement in Religion in the Making that we use arithmetic but we are religious is also relevant here (1926, 15). When this statement is put in the context of his historical account of how rational religion gradually developed from ritual, emotion, and myth, as well as other statements about ordinary ways of being in the world, it becomes clear that the natural, experiential, and ordinary ways of being in the world are, for Whitehead, necessary for making a philosophical judgment about the concept of being. This is particularly evident, as we have seen, when we also consider his detailed remarks on the need to take account of the varieties of ordinary experience to philosophize about the nature of experience. But the temptation in Whitehead not only to systematize by generalization but also to think that the theorized generalization is logically antecedent to the historical-experiential is that which is problematic and which leads to logical inversions. If asked how we fnd out the sense, or the proper use, of the terms “personal,” “impersonal,” “entity,” and so on, Whitehead’s response is the following: “But it is impossible to fx the sense of fundamental terms except by reference to some defnite metaphysical way of conceiving the most penetrating descriptions of the universe” (1926, 78–79). I have been pointing out the logical diffculties in this kind of response. It does not help to learn, in this context, that Whitehead admits in a ­conversation with A. H. Johnson that he made a mistake in designating God as a principle of concretion in Science and the Modern World (1989, 5). This explanation is problematic, albeit not because God should be considered a principle of concretion. Whitehead is right to say that since any principle of explanation or description is an eternal object, to use his technical language

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here, then it cannot be a personal being such as God. But Whitehead’s focus in his response is on how God is reduced to something without causal powers rather than something that does not shed grammatical light on the personal and ordinary language of God. Whitehead is worried about the consistency in saying, on the one hand, that God exerts effcient powers in God’s superjective nature, a power that harmonizes the whole universe, and yet God is a principle without causal powers (Johnson 1989, 5–8). If the consequent nature of God is simply understood to be the outcome of the objectifcation of the world onto God, thus completing God into a fullness of conceptual and physical feelings (1929b, 345), the grammatical context for this description is left in the shadows. The same goes for the following description of God’s consequent nature as something “determined, incomplete, consequent, ‘everlasting,’ fully actual, and conscious” (1929b, 345). The language is diffcult in this and similar contexts not due to the intellectual complexity of the issue but due to the diffculty in putting it in a grammatically intelligible context. What does it mean to say that God could become fully actual, as Whitehead puts it, when each concrescent creature is objectifed in God as a novel element (1929b, 345)? Or, think of the following suggestion: the defcient actuality of the primordial nature is turned into a full actuality when God prehends each new creature of the actual world with a subjective aim directed by a subjective form (1929b, 88). Even God’s uniqueness is rendered cold: “The true metaphysical position is that God is the aboriginal instance of this creativity, and is therefore the aboriginal condition which qualifes its action” (1929b, 225). Again, the ambiguity here is not textual or intellectual. It exists, rather, in the attempt to analyze the metaphysical grammar of God and associate the outcome with anything said about God in religious contexts. Even if all that Whitehead says about God is true metaphysically, why associate that God, or indeed any similar God—Aristotelian, Einsteinian, or Flewian—with the God of religion? I have shown above that questions about the correlation between the metaphysical and religious remain because neither religious experience nor religious discourse is the raw material from which Whitehead’s investigation of God’s reality is pursued. One question to raise here is whether or not the philosopher could hold both the philosophical and the religious poles simultaneously even when there is tension between them. In the next brief section, I present two responses to this question. God’s Religious and Metaphysical Functions Whitehead’s position holds a certain distant similarity to that of Hilary Putnam on how it is possible to separate philosophical and religious pictures of God while keeping both alive. Putnam began his philosophical career with

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a “general scientifc materialist worldview,” according to which he was a thoroughgoing atheist while simultaneously harboring a “religious streak” that got exemplifed later in his life in a set of Jewish religious practices (Putnam 2008, 4). At the time of refecting on his simultaneous religiosity and scientism, Putnam explained that he struggled with how to reconcile them philosophically, adding: “I had come to accept that I could have two different ‘parts of myself,’ a religious part and a purely philosophical part, but I had not truly reconciled them” (2008, 5). He further explains: “I was a thoroughgoing atheist, and I was a believer. I simply kept these two parts of myself separate” (2008, 4). There is a hidden assumption here, namely that atheism is closely tied up with having a successful scientifc explanation of the world—that is, an explanation that does not include God in it. This is a similar assumption to Flew’s atheistic position except that, in Flew’s case, the assumption is explicit, not implicit. But, from Putnam’s standpoint, he was simply accepting a paradox. I think Whitehead would have accepted this kind of paradox, and the “distant similarity” I assigned to him and Putnam has to do with how both were being pulled in two different directions regarding the question of God. In Whitehead’s case, his method of analysis pulled him in a metaphysical direction where the investigation of God’s reality was assumed to be undertaken independently of any religious grammar. Yet, as I have shown above, Whitehead could not do without religious discourse if he were to say anything meaningful about God’s religious functions in the world. Whitehead’s concern that biased religious and ethical views may cloud the philosopher’s understanding of the true nature of God’s reality is one of the reasons for the pull, or oscillation, in him between the metaphysical and religious. He admires Aristotle for the impartial disposition he displays about the reality of God but criticizes him for not imparting upon God personal attributes (1925, 174), albeit without grounding these attributes in religious discourse. By defnition, Whitehead states at one point, religion “is the longing of the spirit that the facts of existence should fnd their justifcation in the nature of things” (1925, 85). A resolution is desired, but a logical problem lurks nonetheless in Whitehead’s thinking about God. His distinction between God’s religious and metaphysical (or secular) functions is interesting, but the question, again, is whether or not the so-called secular functions are compatible with the grammar of God in religion. Thus, when Whitehead writes that the concept of God is one essential ­element in religious feelings but the converse is not true, and therefore that the “religious literature has been sadly misleading to philosophic theory, partly by attraction and partly by repulsion,” his aim is stated in a clear tone: “The secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements in

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experience” (1929b, 207). Not only that the secular functions of God are not experienced religiously, which makes the secular God beyond religious experience, but, as I stated above, the secular functions are external to religious grammar and, in some cases, distort the sense it has. I mentioned that Cobb thinks of Whitehead’s God as supremely worthy of worship and commitment, and that he does not think there is anything arbitrary or contradictory about allocating to God secular functions that are alien to the religious tradition (1969, 20). I would not go as far as saying that none of the secular functions that Whitehead assigns to God can be deduced from the ordinary religious grammar that depicts God in the monotheistic scriptures and the religious traditions that adhere to them. But, methodologically speaking, the starting point, as I have repeatedly suggested, should be religious discourse. If Whitehead wants to argue that evolution is powered by God’s persuasive energy, for example, depicting the latter as a “mysterious impulse” that helps create novelty and promote adaptation to the world (1929b, 19), this does not seem to confict with religious discourse in any straightforward way, and could be seen as compatible with it. But when this impulse is seen as an “underlying eternal energy in whose nature there stands an envisagement of the realm of all eternal objects” (1925, 105), God is turned into an engineer here that, to my knowledge, no comparable religious discourse can be found. In a different passage before Whitehead refers to God as the “metaphysical stability” of the world, he illustrates God’s creative importance, both religious and non-religious, as follows: The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal. The two sets are mediated by a thing which combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential. This fnal entity is the divine element in the world, by which the barren ineffcient disjunction of abstract potentialities obtains primordially the effcient conjunction of ideal realization. (Whitehead 1929b, 40)

When Whitehead tells A. H. Johnson in connection with this passage that God is not temporal in the sense of coming to be and passing away but, rather, historical (Johnson, 7), this historical aspect of God has both religious and secular functions. But, as I mentioned above, it is not suffcient for Whitehead’s account of God to be consistent with some aspects of the religious language revealed in the monotheistic scriptures. How the consistency comes about is also important and Whitehead’s overall description of God’s functions in the world remains somewhat problematic. Interestingly, Roland Faber uses religious language to describe God’s causal activity in the world. To experience God at the level of causal effcacy,

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he states, is to experience God soteriologically and eschatologically in addition to any historical and temporal dimensions (2008, 269). For him, this is what it means to speak of God as the poet of the world, as Whitehead does in Process and Reality. The idea of God as poet of the world who patiently leads it into higher ideals (Whitehead 1929b, 346) could certainly have grammatical relevance to the monotheistic texts. Many passages in these texts refer to God as a being who is mostly patient with human sin and who is steadfast in divine love for humanity and the world at large. Perhaps this is one reason Faber also reads Whitehead’s reference to God as poet of the world theopoetically, emphasizing the idea of salvation over creation (2008, 81). This is confrmed, Faber argues, when we look at how Whitehead introduces God into his organic philosophy: “God is viewed neither as that which grounds and therefore as metaphysically necessary, nor as arbitrary and therefore as metaphysically dispensable, but theopoetically as reconciled nondifference” (2008, 82). I have argued that Whitehead sees God as metaphysically necessary, but I am in agreement that the designation of God as poet of the world has parallel descriptions in the Bible, as for example in the book of Job. Yet I still fnd it diffcult to see how the causal link between God and the world could be translated as a theological and a spiritual link without committing a category mistake and, as I further argue below, the fallacy of logical inversion. Before I return to the questions of atheism and philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility with the above discussion in mind, let me give one fnal and brief example that clarifes my insistence on the need to start any investigation of God from the frst-order discourses that inaugurate it rather than from an independent metaphysical investigation. What I have in mind here is Whitehead’s declaration that his metaphysical God is the same as that which the various religions have called Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, Father in Heaven, Order of Heaven, or Supreme Being (1925, 179). Using the Bhagavad Gita as my example, I want to show that although Whitehead’s declaration about his metaphysical God has certain affrmations in some of the Gita’s language about Krishna, other expressions in it are akin to those of Genesis in their non-metaphysical nature. The point I want to reemphasize is that the compatibility between the metaphysical and religiously ordinary is limited. Lessons from the Bhagavad Gita and Beyond The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogical epic in which Krishna, the supreme deity that takes three forms of manifestation (as Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer, and Shiva the destroyer and reproducer) advises his main devotee, Arjuna, to combat his immoral cousins for refusing to give him his right to the throne. The epic has a lot to say about the need to fulfll one’s duty relative to

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one’s class in society, and how it ought to be fulflled with Krishna in mind. But my focus here is on the role of Krishna as creator, and the implications thereof for the question as to whether, as the creator Brahma, the grammar associated with this deity matches up with Whitehead’s metaphysical idea of God. As a reminder, Whitehead argues that whatever he says about God should get exemplifcation in all religions, not only the monotheistic religions. There are clear similarities between Brahma and Whitehead’s God in the Bhagavad Gita—for example, when Krishna is introduced as “the cause of all causes . . . the primal cause . . . the very form of eternity, knowledge and bliss” (Prabhubada 1986, 14–15). But the discrepancies are signifcant. In contrast to God the co-creator of the world in Whitehead, and the reality that shares eternal existence with creativity, the eternal possibilities, and a world of actual entities, Krishna is “the only proprietor of everything in the universe and . . . the original creator, the creator of Brahma” (Prabhubada 1986, 14–16). The latter statement is akin to having said, in Whitehead’s systems, that the metaphysical God created the religious God, which does not make sense. Perhaps the grammar of “the creator of Brahma” ought to be understood as “the creator of the idea or concept of ‘Brahma’,” but I have no textual basis to make this interpretation. What is clear is that there are religious expressions in the Bhagavad Gita that are akin to those in Genesis, and this fact discloses the divergence between Krishna and Whitehead’s God. The following statement from Krishna is an additional example of this divergence: “I am the source of all spiritual and material worlds. Everything emanates from Me. The wise who perfectly know this engage in My devotional service and worship Me with all their hearts” (Prabhupada 1986, 516). Furthermore, in the same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna declares being the ounce of all things, Arjuna addresses Krishna as “the Supreme personality of Godhead, the ultimate abode, the purest, the Absolute Truth,” adding: “You are the eternal, transcendental, original person, the unborn, the greatest. All the great sages such as Narada, Asita, Devala and Vyasa confrm this truth about You, and now You Yourself are declaring it to me” (Prabhupada 1986, 523). What do we learn from this? Whether Prabhupada’s translation and ­interpretation of the text is biased in any way I cannot judge, but his citations from the older Vedas about Krishna speak favorably for his interpretation. For example, we learn that Krishna states the following in the MokshaDharma: “The patriarchs, Siva and others are created by Me, though they do not know that they are created by Me because they are deluded by My illusory energy”; and Krishna is described in the Varaha Purana as “the Supreme Personality of Godhead from whom Brahma was born, from whom Siva was born” (Prabhubada 1986, 517). All of this shows that the language

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associated with Krishna and Brahma is akin in meaning and intention to the way Westermann and Barbour interpret the creation story in Genesis: a story that entails praise and worship, not empirical or metaphysical accounts of how a causal agent brought the world into existence. Whitehead might have good reasons to say that his metaphysical God is the same as Yahweh, Allah, and Father in Heaven, but he does not have good reasons to make the identifcation between God and the Hindu deity Brahma, which is the creator deity among the Trimurti of the Hindu gods. Based on the above, I would say that this identifcation is partially true but partially wrong, and that the wrongness exemplifes the priority Whitehead gives metaphysics over religious expressions of the divine. Again, it is the insistence on a causal framework for understanding God’s presence in the world that is problematic—one that entails effcient actions on God’s part, enacted through initial aims, or ideal propositions, that shape each and every initial stage of the temporal actualities’ self-formation. For Whitehead, this is the sense, or at least one major sense, in which God is a creator (1929b, 225), and this has ramifcations for atheism that, I argued, refect the fallacy of logical inversion. In the next and fnal section I return to this fallacy and the implications thereof to the question of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility.

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CONCLUSIONS ABOUT WHITEHEAD AND ATHEISM Historians of religion consider atheism to be a product of modernity, with theological roots in the Reformation and unsuccessful arguments for the existence of God. As we have seen, Whitehead also states that the world lost God in modernity. But although he admits that theology’s affrmations of God are based on inference rather than direct intuition of God, his main take on the loss of God is not related to unconvincing arguments for God’s existence. Rather, he blames the loss on modern theology’s affrmations of immoral conceptions of God. More specifcally, he argues that pushing God out of this world and glorifying coercive forms of power led to the loss of the God of love. The moral aspect to Whitehead’s idea of loss is not the focus of the ­historians of atheism I discussed above, namely Hyman and Buckley, or of atheists such as Flew and Dawkins. Interestingly, in giving the loss of God a moral aspect, Whitehead is, in fact, closer to affrming what negative atheism means than Flew and Dawkins. But, as I argued in this chapter, his framing the question of God’s existence in causal terms is a logical deviation from that moral focus. The causality Whitehead insists on when depicting the Godworld relation is the product of his ontological principle. What this principle

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amounts to is a description of the causal links between, and within, all actual agents, including the causal link between God and the temporal actualities. It dictates that the actual entities function as both effcient and fnal causes, allowing self-determination, and freedom, to be experienced through fnal causes and causal determinism to exist by means of effcient causes. This form of determinism is the reason that God’s initial aims for the worldly actualities are causally absolute, even if these aims are negatively felt by those who do not acknowledge God’s presence in their lives. The idea here is that the causal infuence that God has on the world is such that all temporal actualities are subject to it, including believers and nonbelievers, and nonbelievers cannot deny that infuence, whether they like it or not. Whitehead’s account of God and causality allows nonbelievers to ignore God’s causal infuence on them, which is what negative prehensions mean, but it does not allow them to deny its presence or its ontological intelligibility. Nonbelievers cannot simply deny God’s existence due to lack of empirical evidence. For Whitehead, God is not perceived through perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, as we have seen, but through perception in the mode of causal effcacy. As we have also seen, the latter is the kind of perception that is better elucidated as a form of reception, or prehension, and both believers and atheists are participants in it. This means that God exists in the past and future of every occasion of experience but insubstantially, so to speak, or, as Faber puts it, in concealment from the world of appearances (2008, 268–69). This is all explained, for Whitehead, on the basis of the ontological principle. But the ontological point that Whitehead makes raises diffculties because he seems to fnd it logically sensible to say that God’s existence can be known and understood independently of its natural homes in the various monotheistic religions. This is problematic not only for atheism but also for theism. After all, subjecting theism to the test of a metaphysical way of depicting God that does not initiate its depiction in any theistic context is akin to judging one way of life from a perspective that has no knowledge or understanding of the internal rules that govern that way of life. The outcome cannot be just to that way of life, and in the case of theism, to how God is spoken of in its variety of forms. The same logic of alienation applies to atheism. In this chapter, I distinguished negative atheism from positive atheism, and argued that the former is better representative of the true meaning of the term ‘atheism’. If we adopt a pragmatic perspective on the question of atheism, I suggested, one where how people live their lives is the context for understanding what they believe in, then true atheism is found in any form of life where God does not play any positive role. From this perspective, positive atheism is the kind that Dawkins affrms and that Flew used to affrm prior to his conversion to deism. Both are atheists in the negative sense of the term when one looks at how they live

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their lives—that is, without God plaything any positive role in them. But their own positive atheism is theoretical in orientation, nor pragmatic. I opted to speak in this chapter of the committing of a logical inversion when theoretical pictures of God are inverted with religious pictures of God, and when God’s existence, or absence, are given a non-ordinary home. The inversion of pictures occurs when a logical priority is given to the wrong context—in this case to a theoretical context, whether the latter is Flew’s and Dawkin’s scientifc contexts or Whitehead’s metaphysical context. The priority Whitehead gives to his metaphysical account of God over any religious account inverts the contexts where the intelligibility of the concepts of God and atheism belong. Like Flew and Dawkins, he ends up committing the fallacy of logical inversion. If Aristotle is not entitled to his use of the word ‘God’ to explain why there is something rather than nothing—precisely because his God is not the God of religion—then it is diffcult to see why Whitehead should be entitled to the same use simply because his God is a metaphysical agent rather than a principle of concretion or a frst cause. It is not too diffcult to imagine what it would be like to have a life where God has no regulative or signifcant place in it. This is precisely the kind of life that an atheist would lead. It is the kind of life that responds to the language of ‘God’ in religion with either a puzzlement as to what is being said or, when the explanation is offered, with the objection: “So what? It does not hold any authority over me!” Atheists may associate a certain meaning with the concept of God when they are presented with it, but the mentioned responses show that they do not associate anything meaningful or serious with it. It is benefcial here to remember that, typically, the language of the atheist, as that of the theist, is existential in nature and that neither party can be considered to have committed a factual mistake about God. Consistent atheists could not be corrected by pointing out where God’s reality is because this act simply does not make an impression on them. The pictures of God described by believers simply do not touch them on an existential level or regulate their lives in any way. One could call them blind, but this judgment is not metaphysical—in the sense of pointing out how things are relative to an objective criterion of measurement that might exist independently of the reactions of theists and atheists. As I argued at the outset of this chapter, Buckley is right to emphasize that atheism is a religious issue, not merely a philosophical issue. Unless a conversion occurs in the life of an atheist, the language of, and about, God does not make an existential impression on that person. Put differently, the atheist is someone who is not impressed with the language about God and does not give it a signifcant weight in people’s lives. It might not make sense for an atheist to speak of a world without God if visible practices that

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display belief in that God exist. But it makes sense for that atheist to claim that they cannot make sense of it on an existential level. This could be expressed with the words: “I do not understand how people can live their lives this way.” I do not mean to say that the discourse of God’s reality is disconnected from non-religious contexts that surround the life of the believer. After all, the atheist is responding to a language that is typically spoken in theistic contexts. But the existential response here is one of indifference or one where the belief is not taken in any positive way. Of course, when the language of the atheists is investigated, there is a rejection of any intelligibility associated with an objective divine reality that regulates one’s life in a theistically centered way. Atheists might point to themselves as examples where that socalled objective reality does not have a role to play. The problem of evil is relevant here, but I do not mean the philosophical accounts of evil which offer theodicies that do not make an existential impact on the atheist. I mean, rather, ordinary forms of evil to which the atheist is sensitive on an existential level, without exposure to philosophical arguments as to why evil exists when God is described as all good, loving, and powerful. Theoretical justifcations of evil are not the answer to the atheist’s objections. In Whitehead’s case, he might convince the atheist that although evil exists it is not a metaphysical necessity (1926, 51), or that it is not in conformity with God’s nature because God does not infuence worldly events in a deterministic manner (1926, 94–95). But an intellectual agreement with these forms of justifcation is not an existential agreement, which is what the true atheist and the true believer would need to exemplify in order to give God’s reality an acknowledgment. The same goes for a potential agreement between an atheist and a Whiteheadian over the understanding of evil as a form of loss—for example, the loss of precious moments in their past and the loss of what might have been instead of what is (Whitehead 1926, 96–97; 1929b, 340). We can expect the “So what?” response here as well when the problem of evil is given a religious context rather than a philosophical context. Cobb takes the “So what” response seriously and argues that an answer to this response has to begin with seeing the importance of the use of the word ‘God’ (1969, 60). If we limit ourselves to seeing reality in terms of the physical and the mental, seen as ontologically different types of reality, then we end up suffering from ontological dualism. The latter makes the relations between the mind and matter, on the one hand, and between God and the world, on the other hand, unintelligible (Cobb 1969, 69). What is the alternative? Cobb writes: “A better approach is through a critique of the notion of the physical” (1969, 69). We have this approach in quantum mechanics where electrons and other subatomic particles are not viewed as physical in the normal, ordinary sense, Cobb states, but, rather, as successions of events or happenings (1969, 70).

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Cobb proceeds to describe the ordinary sense of ‘physical’ as the naïve sense of the term, and he argues that we are better off calling it a by-product of the interactions between energy-events. The latter also describe divine events, he states (Cobb 1969, 70–71). As he puts it, “The believer cannot think of God as physical in the old sense, but when we have probed behind the physical to the kind of reality which gives rise to it, we have stripped the physical of most of those which once caused us to contrast God’s spirituality with it” (1969, 71). As Cobb also puts it in an essay on the soul, “the meaning of physical and mental when applied to events or experiences is quite different from their meaning when applied to substantial things . . . The physical aspects of events are their relations to other events. The mental aspects are their relations to unrealized possibilities” (1987, 218). But why think of divine events akin to how energy events function? It is one thing to avoid the traditional notion of physicality when it comes to God’s reality, which is necessary in order to avoid a category mistake, but it is another thing to imagine God as an energy event. After all, the scientifc context that gives energy-events intelligibility cannot be applied to the divine reality on methodological grounds. Giving the scientifc context logical priority and situating God in it is what I mean by a logical inversion. Again, the issue is not the use of technical language to explicate religious discourse but, rather, not giving the religious context the frst word on the matter. Reversing contexts of intelligibility dislocates the reality of God from its natural home and, as a result, both theism and atheism are also dislocated from their natural homes. The religious sense of God loses its intelligibility here. Although there is a normative aspect to Cobb’s response to atheism, namely that apart from belief in God there is little ground for hope and that our concerns for our responsibilities and motives, and for our neighbors, become arbitrary (1969, 63), the metaphysical nature of his argument, following Whitehead, is what matters for the question of logical inversions and philosophy’s responsibility here. For him, the microcosmic energy-events comprising the building blocks of reality include not only physical but also mental and spiritual realities such as the mind and God. This is problematic even when Cobb depicts God as a very special kind of energy-event. As the chief exemplifcation of creativity and the ontological principle, he states, God’s experience is made up of energy-events that are fully conscious and fully existent everywhere and at all times (1969, 76–78). From this perspective, God’s standpoint is all-inclusive relative to the whole world in the same way that the human mind is all-inclusive relative to the whole body. This is what panentheism is according to Cobb, which is different from pantheism and traditional theism (1969, 80). But while it is true that we cannot think of God based on external criteria of thinking—as if God were a three-dimensional object subject to

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sense perception—where is the context for thinking of God as a subject of ­experience and of thoughts and emotions that act on the basis of non-sensory experience (1969, 72–74)? Like Whitehead, Cobb is willing to look at biblical discourse to substantiate the metaphysical picture allowed by metaphysics. Thus, he mentions the Bible when speaking of God as a subject of thoughts and emotions (1969, 72), and he volunteers a religious interpretation of certain common references to God, such as “up there” or “out there” or “within us.” He argues that the frst reference means God “is incomparably greater than we are,” the second reference that we experience God in God’s remoteness, and the third that our relation with God is “a profoundly intimate one” (1969, 77). These are excellent suggestions that show what it means to pay attention to religious grammar and how to avoid logical inversions. Anything metaphysical about God—or, better, anything about the ontology of God—ought to be extracted from this kind of frst-order discourse. But the same philosophical courtesy should be extended to the Psalmist fool who said in his heart that God does not exist. What I have shown in this chapter is that, religiously speaking, one may speak of the fool and of atheists as suffering from religious blindness to God’s presence in the world, and the absoluteness from which such expression sprouts shows itself in how believers appropriate God’s reality: thanking God for their lives, seeing that all good, beautiful, and charitable things are owed to God, etc. But, again, these religious expressions are not philosophical elucidations of the concepts of belief and unbelief, or of how God interacts with the world. The latter ought to be descriptive, not normative, evaluations. A philosopher might say that “When religious people speak of atheism as blindness to God’s presence in the world, they mean . . . .” But when a philosopher speaks in the same normative way a religious believer speaks about blindness, this becomes a case of confusing the religious for the philosophical. Whitehead’s view of God is such that God’s reality is understood as a form of metaphysical existence that cannot be questioned in regard to its necessary existence, and it is conceived as one that attempts to penetrate the lives of the atheists, regardless of how the latter perceive God’s role in their lives. Unlike his language about the humanitarian ideal of democratic harmony and how it failed in the history of humanity, Whitehead’s language here is descriptive, not normative. But the logical inversion remains in the act of giving the metaphysical priority over the religious. Fortunately, Whitehead is not consistent in this practice, as I have shown. When he writes normatively, as the following passage shows, we get a better look at the idea of atheism as a form of religious blindness to God’s reality: Life can only be understood as an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment allow. But the aim is always beyond the attained fact. . . .

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Inorganic nature is characterized by its acceptance of matter of fact. In nature, the soil rests, while the root of the plant pursues the sources of its refreshment. In the Western empire there was no pursuit. Its remnants of irritability were devoid of transcendent aim. (Whitehead 1933, 81)

I read this paragraph to mean that the secular world is blind to the t­ ranscendent, divine aim that gives people purpose, novelty, and intensity of harmony. This is a normative judgment since the aim Whitehead has in mind is his aim, not an objective aim that all would come to see as their right aim. Whitehead considers India the exception to this spiritual blindness, stating that people there did respond religiously to the divine persuasion toward harmony, peace, beauty, and goodness (1967, 160). Whitehead refers to this divine persuasion as an act of grace, saying that Plato had already anticipated it (1967, 160). To conclude, in this chapter I demonstrated the inevitable link between atheism and causality in Whitehead’s philosophy, and therefore the fallacy of logical inversion, in three gradual steps. I frst showed how Whitehead’s method of investigating the reality of God creates the problem of logical inversion by commencing such investigation independently of the religious context in which that reality belongs. I then elucidated the problem through a discussion of Whitehead’s conception of God’s various functions in the world, functions that are claimed to be both religious and non-religious. I further illustrated the problem by discussing the religious notion of creation, demonstrating that it should not be understood along causal considerations and that the causality imposed on it is the upshot of giving logical priority to the metaphysical account of creation over religious accounts. In particular, I invoked biblical and Bhagavat-Gitan ideas of creation to elucidate the futility of treating them causally. Whitehead’s metaphysical understanding of the God-world relation is such that he locates the initial, purposeful aims for the world in God’s primordial nature. Since the causal reception of these aims is not affected by people’s mode of belief or unbelief, I showed how atheism for Whitehead turns into a form of blindness to God’s causal infuence at the receptive level of people’s perception in the mode of causal effcacy. God’s infuence at that prehensive level is absolute. But this account of God’s causal action in the world ignores the logical priority that belief and unbelief have for understanding not only the reality of God but also that of atheism. The practice has logical priority over the theory when it comes to understanding atheism, I argued. From this perspective, whereas the grammar of belief allows speaking of atheism as a form of religious blindness to God’s reality (i.e., as a normative judgment), the logical inversion Whitehead commits generates a metaphysical form of blindness that does not account for the realty of atheism as the practice of living without a role for God in it.

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If philosophy’s responsibility to sense is accepted as its primary ­function, then, in the case of atheism, this responsibility reveals itself in giving ­grammatical priority to religious discourse. As we have seen, this requires going the bloody hard way and the latter way is not often taken. Although some p­ hilosophers claim they can go the bloody hard way while practicing philosophy normatively (Cottingham 2015, xi), the risk is simply too high.

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NOTES 1. In Religion in the Making, Whitehead describes religious experience as the kind of experience that “does not include any direct intuition of a defnite person, or individual” (1926, 61). Rather, there is an apprehension of value, an ideal that is permanent and harmonious, and one that results from God’s causal but impersonal immanence in the world (1926, 17–18). By the time Whitehead wrote Process and Reality, God receives a personal character and Whitehead describes the divine ­immanence as a cure for pure chaos, one that results from God’s appetition for a novel future for the world (1929b, 110–11, 32–33). As John Smith rightly states, the early Whitehead “denied that we have an intuition of a personal God; a personal God is a matter of inference and interpretation” and the idea of it enters Whitehead’s ­metaphysics through the door of rational refection and justifcation (Smith 1965, 433; see Whitehead 1926, 62–63). The point here is that the metaphysical God is a ­principle of “limitation” or “concretion,” as Whitehead puts it (1925, 174–78; 1929b, 244), and would not have corresponded to the God of religion had Whitehead not changed his mind about the personality of God (and therefore the moral nature of God). The result of God’s existence is directiveness and novelty for the world, which Whitehead takes to be a form of goodness (1926, 153) but, as with Hume’s God in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, nothing can be said about God’s nature from this. Only later does God become “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands” (1929b, 351), a description that God receives after normative thoughts about suffering and redemption occur to Whitehead and whereby God is seen in a mutually affective relation with the world’s entities. 2. In the account of creation in Genesis, chaos is replaced with order, darkness is differentiated from light, and God sees that this is good. Whitehead comes close to this religious narrative when he explains that “to create” means (1) to put order in the world by means of valuation and (2) to see goodness into this order. Order, alongside novelty, are the outcome of appropriating God’s initial aims, or God’s ideal objectives, into one’s subjective aims. In fact, the purpose of God, Whitehead states, “is the attainment of value in the temporary world” (1926, 100) and, as he also states, “Apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world” (1929b, 247).

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Animalizing Philosophy with Derrida and J. M. Coetzee

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ANIMALIZING PHILOSOPHY? In this concluding chapter, I discuss philosophy’s responsibility to sense and intelligibility in the context of its treatment of the question of nonhuman animals. As with previous chapters, Whitehead takes a signifcant place in the discussion, and his main dialogical companions here include Jacques Derrida and J. M. Coetzee, but also Cora Diamond, Peter Singer, Frans de Waal, and other thinkers who touch on the diffculty of philosophy in f­ulflling its hermeneutical responsibility to nonhuman animals. I distinguish the ethical responsibility that people owe nonhuman animals, which I consider to be normative, from the philosophical responsibility to analyzing and ­clarifying grammars linked to the lives of nonhuman animals and their relations to humans. Philosophy’s responsibility to nonhuman animals is not moral, I argue. What brings Whitehead, Derrida, and Coetzee together is their shared ­critique of the tendency to abstract the complexity and diversity of nonhuman animals into something called ‘the animal’. All three thinkers consider this form of abstraction reductionistic and all call for a difference of degree rather than kind between humans and nonhuman animals. But there are important differences between them on philosophy’s role in this regard. As I show below, whereas Derrida’s and Coetzee’s critiques of philosophy on this topic entail the view that literature is a better tool than philosophy for allowing nonhuman animals to speak for themselves, Whitehead prefers philosophy over literature on this point. From his perspective, the kind of critique in which Derrida and Coetzee are engaged is refected in his critique of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and this is something that is beyond the limits of literature. 193

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As the title of this chapter indicates, I seek to animalize philosophy but, as should be expected, without normativizing it. I argue that it is possible to avoid the kind of reductionism that Whitehead, Derrida, and Coetzee discuss by immersing philosophy in seeing animalistic knowledge—or bodily ­knowledge—as a legitimate grammar. To animalize philosophy from this perspective is not to essentialize the grammar of animalistic forms of ­knowledge, but simply to open up the latter for a potential source of intelligibility in regard to nonhuman animals. As with the other endeavors in this book to not take short cuts when doing philosophy, this openness requires going the bloody hard way.

ANIMALS AND THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS

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Whitehead, Philosophy, and Nonhuman Animals As we have seen in previous chapters, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness entails treating what is abstract as if it were a concrete reality. Since physical objects are abstracted aggregations of events that include primary and secondary qualities, as well as the actualities prehending these qualities, taking them to be the concrete realities that are responsible for our main knowledge of the world is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. As Whitehead puts it, “the order of nature cannot be justifed by the mere observation of nature” (1925, 51). The same goes for our feelings regarding the natural world. Whitehead considers these feelings to be unitary abstractions that emerge from the multiplicity of prehensions involving the past, the contemporary world in which we live, and even future possibilities. Treating these feelings as if they were the ultimate concrete facts connecting us to ourselves, others, and the world that surrounds us would also be a case of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness has applications beyond how we perceive, feel, and know the natural world, other beings, and ourselves. Since the fallacy is “the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete” (Whitehead 1926, 51), any abstract simplifcation of any ultimate reality into merely the perceptual, affective, or conceptual constructs exemplifying it would be a case of misplaced concreteness. Thus, to treat the plurality and diversity of the different interests, feelings, and various forms of reasoning in nonhuman animals as if they were uniform in nature, and to speak of something called “the animal” or to suggest that all nonhuman animals aim only to survive and nothing else, would be examples of misplaced concreteness.

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Interestingly, Whitehead assigns the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to both humans and nonhuman animals, albeit in different degrees. Both species are subject to the inevitable abstractions of sense perception when their members interact with other members of the same species or with members of another species, or when the interactions are with the natural world. Sense perceptions conceal perceptions in the mode of causal effcacy and, thus, all bodily experiences that are more concrete than the abstractions of sensory perceptions. This pertains in particular to nonhuman animals that rely on sense perception for knowledge of their immediate environment. “Dogs smell, eagles see, and noises attract the attention of most of the higher animals,” Whitehead writes; “Also their consequent modes of behaviour suggest their immediate assumption of a substantial world around them” (1933, 218). Thus, although Whitehead states that “Mankind is distinguished from animal life by its emphasis on abstractions” (1938, 123), it is clear that the substantialist assumption about the natural world in nonhuman animals is the result of their sensory perceptions. Humans simply employ higher abstractions—language, mathematics, and so on—including the abstraction of treating nonhuman animals as if they were uniform in their abilities and functions. But, since the tendency to abstract the facts of the world distorts the true nature of reality, Whitehead states that we need to rescue humans from it: “Thus,” he writes, “we have to rescue the facts as they are from the facts as they appear” because although abstractions are “a necessity of thought,” with this necessity comes the possibility of distorting what the facts are (1933, 154–55). The mission of rescuing here falls to philosophy and, as it appears, only humans require rescuing for Whitehead. For nonhuman animals, the abstractions to which they are subjected as a result of their sensory perception are not conceptual and do not affect them on a practical level. They need the abstractions to survive and, clearly, they cannot be rescued from something that does not arise for them on a conceptual level. They neither have philosophy nor the kind of science that teaches them they are dealing with abstractions. For humans, the abstractions are a necessity of mind in the sense that, without them, the complexity of reality would be intolerable. But, since they mislead us if we mistake them to be the ultimate descriptive and explanatory truths about reality, philosophy helps by providing corrections to how we should see the world. The correction I am concerned with in this chapter pertains to how we should see, that is, how we should know and understand, nonhuman animals. The point Whitehead makes, which is also the point made by Derrida and Coetzee, is that the difference between humans and nonhuman animals is one of degree, not kind. For Whitehead and Coetzee, as I show below, this similarity of kind includes

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degrees of moral presence in both humans and nonhuman animals. But for Whitehead, philosophy is that which is mainly responsible for offering this correction, not literature. “In animals,” Whitehead writes, “We can see emotional feeling, ­dominantly derived from bodily functions, and yet tinged with purposes, hopes, and expression derived from conceptual functioning” (1938, 27). Here, conceptual functioning does not include linguistic concepts and, for Whitehead, language allows humans to transcend their animalistic nature. Thus, although “the dominant dependence on bodily functioning” still exists in humans, “the life of a human being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which unrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions” (1938, 27). Interestingly, in referencing the “unrealized ideals” that humans can tap into, Whitehead admits that the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals is, in one sense, beyond that of degree. As he puts it, “the extent of the degree makes all the difference” and, with humans, “The Rubicon has been crossed” (1938, 27). The last statement about crossing the Rubicon is a powerful ­acknowledgment of how the human capacity to imagine and entertain unrealized ideals allows humans to transcend some of the limits that nonhuman animals face. I think Whitehead could have taken this acknowledgment one step further to show that people’s epistemic relation to the world transcends causality, but he does not. On the positive side, since his acknowledgment was not meant to create a gap between the different species, he is different from traditional philosophers who write on nonhuman animals as if they are devoid of souls, intelligence, and morality. What Whitehead says about the moral similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals has received recent empirical support from the sciences of ethology and primatology. In the next section, I discuss the work of the primatologist Frans de Waal to show how this is the case. Whitehead saw the natural world to be made up of inorganic and organic aggregations, the former of which without a centralized or a dominant impetus beyond survival. In most cases, however, organic existence receives a centralized and individualized expression beyond such impetus. This expression includes morality, which Whitehead describes, in metaphysical terms, as one example of novelty. He writes the following in this context: “Mankind and the animals with analogous abilities are distinguished by their capacity for the introduction of novelty. This requires a conceptual power which can imagine, and a practical power which can effect” (Whitehead 1925, 30). Morality is not mentioned in these remarks, but it is one example of the kind of novelty that goes beyond the preservation of physical existence, and Whitehead does not hesitate to extend it to nonhuman animals (1938, 28).

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Philosophy, Science, and Nonhuman Animals One important conclusion to emphasize in Whitehead’s distinction between humans and nonhuman animals is that although the fallacy of misplaced concreteness might be committed by both species, human beings have the ability to discover it and correct it. This ability is rooted in the capacity of human beings for civilized existence, which is exemplifed in their engagement in scientifc, philosophical, and advanced moral reasoning, among other achievements that are not available to nonhuman animals. “Among living things on this planet, so far as direct evidence reaches,” Whitehead writes, “Science and Philosophy belong to men alone. They are both concerned with the understanding of individual facts as illustrations of general principles” (1933, 140). He also writes: “Civilized beings are those who survey the world with some large generality of understanding” (Whitehead 1938, 4). Not including morality in what belongs only to civilized beings is a sign that it is not excluded from nonhuman animals, of course. In fact, Whitehead states that humans typically understand the world in terms of three concepts that are absent from the animal world: space, time, and God (1938, 102–103). Religion exists only at the human level (1938, 28), and since nonhuman animals rely on concrete exemplifcations for their intelligence to work, they cannot generate mathematical ideas related to space and time (1961, 194). “The hermit thrush and the nightingale can produce sound of the utmost beauty,” Whitehead writes, “But they are not civilized beings. They lack ideas of adequate generality respecting their own actions and the world around them” (1938, 3). Again, morality is not excluded from nonhuman animals in the way religion is. It is this ability to generalize ideas, particularly in philosophy, that Whitehead associates with abstractions beyond the ones conveyed in the ­fallacy of misplaced concreteness at the animalistic level. The higher nonhuman animals that entertain notions, hopes, and fears lack civilization, Whitehead states, because the generality of their mental functioning is defcient (1938, 4). Thus, nonhuman animals enjoy structure—they “can build nests and dams: they can follow the trail of scent through the forest” and they can enjoy social relations—but humans understand structure, abstracting it from the welter of details presented to them and are able to create civilization (1938, 76–77). It is unfortunate that philosophy’s ability to offer intelligibility to ­nonhuman animals is couched in its ability to generalize ideas, rather than in its elucidatory engagement in grammatical analysis. But, as we have seen in previous chapters, these two activities are not always mutually exclusive for Whitehead. There is also a normative component to his descriptive engagement with nonhuman animals. When arguing that nonhuman animals cannot be assigned moral responsibility in the way humans are, for example,

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he adds that the love they show, as well as “their devotion, their beauty of ­performance, rightly claim our love and our tenderness in return” (Whitehead 1938, 4). It might be diffcult for some to argue that this beautiful judgment does not belong in philosophy, but that is exactly what needs to be argued to prevent the collapse of philosophy into a normative area of human interest. Although I do not have the space to develop this idea here, I think that reducing philosophy into a discipline that competes with other normative disciplines on how to explain the world is a case of misplaced concreteness. The fact that Whitehead’s position receives confrmation from the sciences of ethology and primatology does not account against the argument that philosophy should remain descriptive rather than normative. These are two separate issues, but I do think that the primatologist de Waal would endorse Whitehead’s position on the difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Returning to the question of morality, he, like Whitehead, argues that mammals express emotional and moral feelings, but he is more specifc about these feelings. For example, he states that empathy is one of these feelings and he grounds his judgment on the scientifc research that he and other primatologists conducted. Mammals have empathic brains that give them the ability to be altruistic, de Waal states, and since empathy is considered one evolutionary source of morality, it makes sense to think of nonhuman animal morality as the source of a more complex human morality (2013, 3–6). De Waal means to suggest a difference of moral degree between humans and nonhuman animals, and he argues that empathy for both species is rooted in physiological and other involuntary responses that are pre-rational (2006, xii–xiii, 24–25). De Waal rejects philosophical and evolutionary arguments that treat morality as simply a veneer for amoral or immoral nature rooted in an immoral animal world, an argument produced by Thomas Huxley, among others (2013, 34–37). If we accept scientifc anthropomorphism as a valid research tool regarding what nonhuman animals are made of, and how they feel, he states, then we can see that animalistic behavior is as intentional on a nonhuman level as it is on a human level (de Waal 2006, 63). De Waal’s approach allows us to see nonhuman animals without anthropocentric biases that measure their responses on the basis of criteria meant for human responses. He notes, for example, that ape faces are as distinct as human faces, and that we should expect apes to recognize these distinct faces if we are to attribute to them things such as empathy, but we should not expect apes to recognize different human faces (2013, 15). The latter is an anthropocentric bias. “Just like us,” de Waal writes, “monkeys and apes strive for power, enjoy sex, want security and affection, kill over territory, and value trust and cooperation” (2013, 16). But these conclusions are reached on the basis of scientifc ­anthropomorphism, which

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is l­egitimate, not on the basis of anthropocentric criteria of judgment. The same goes for whales. Research has shown that, just like humans and bonobos, they have spindle cells, which is a special type of neuron thought to be involved in empathy, self-awareness, self-control, humor, and other human characteristics (de Waal 2013, 80). Scientifc anthropomorphism allows us to say they are capable of empathy. De Waal does not deny that there are major differences between human morality and that found among nonhuman animals: “We strive for a ­logically coherent system and have debates about how the death penalty fts arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be morally wrong. These debates are uniquely human. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves,” he writes (2013, 18). But he suggests that the desire to belong, to get along, and to love and be loved is something we share with other social primates, and that these characteristics create the conditions for the need to preserve harmony when facing resource competition, which is the source of fairness and justice in both nonhuman animals and humans (2013, 228–34). De Waal’s point is simply that nonhuman animals have moral sentiments (2013, 17). Humans show frst- and second-order fairness. The frst kind is also found in dogs and capuchin monkeys, and it is displayed in protests against getting less than others do during feeding time or play. The second kind fairness is not found in dogs and capuchin monkeys, but is found in chimpanzees. It involves promoting equity between chimpanzees—for example, when some chimpanzees refuse to accept grapes, which are highly valued among them, when other chimps get only carrots (De Waal 2013, 232–34). It is interesting that the scientifc research corroborates the idea, suggested by Whitehead but also by Derrida and Coetzee as I elaborate below, that the difference between humans and nonhuman animals is a difference of degree rather than kind. De Waal resorts to conceptual analysis when discussing the kind of empathy found in nonhuman animals, making sure his readers do not think he means to equate that empathy with human empathy, but only to show a degree of difference between them. This proves that he requires grammatical elucidation to make his case for why the difference between humans and nonhuman animals is one of degree rather than kind. Put differently, the scientifc intelligibility he provides presupposes the grammatical intelligibility that philosophy provides. I mentioned in the frst section above that a comparable acknowledgment of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility can be found in Derrida’s refections on nonhuman animals. Like Whitehead, Derrida is a critic of abstractions and, regarding nonhuman animals, he ties philosophy’s responsibility with the need to correct misplaced forms of concreteness by moving

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away from reducing the radical diversity of animal life into an essentialist category called ‘the animal’. Derrida argues that when we acknowledge the bias in philosophy for making abstract reason, rather than embodied knowledge, the medium through which both humans and nonhuman animals come to know the world, we then have the opportunity to discover the problem and dismantle it. For him, too, when this is done, philosophy’s responsibility to nonhuman animals would be fulflled and, like Whitehead and de Waal, he incorporates conceptual analysis when necessary. But, like Coetzee, Derrida thinks literature might be the better tool to exemplify the misunderstanding concerning the boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals, and then to rectify that misunderstanding. As for Coetzee, he demonstrates the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when discussing the strong tension between philosophy and literature on the question of how to understand nonhuman animals. Philosophy is shown to be divorced from both the ordinary life and intelligibility when its treatment of nonhuman animals is investigated, argues Coetzee, because it subjects the latter to criteria of judgment that are foreign to their natural lives. In this, he and de Waal are in agreement. In particular, subjecting nonhuman animals to the typical criteria of language-, intelligence-, and emotions-possession as a way of understanding them and, also, judging their moral and survival worthiness, is a case of misplaced concreteness, Coetzee would say. He criticizes philosophy for this kind of dislocating rationalization, and he promotes literature as the better tool for putting humans back in touch with their animality and with the understanding that they are different in degree, not kind, from nonhuman animals. In the next section, I turn to the details of Derrida’s and Coetzee’s views on nonhuman animals while connecting their critique of philosophy with the question of its responsibility to intelligibility.

DERRIDA AND COETZEE ON ANIMALIZING PHILOSOPHY Derrida and the Animals that We Are In “The Animal That Therefore I am,” Derrida launches a full-scale critique of philosophers who do not let nonhuman animals speak for themselves and who essentialize them into a misleading category of identifcation called “the animal” (Derrida 2002). Having beneftted from interacting with a cat in his own household, where he allowed himself to be seen by her, as he puts it, he comes to the conclusion that cats respond and not only react instinctively to what surrounds them (Derrida 2002, 374–77). Derrida then complains that the

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above philosophers, among them Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan, philosophized about nonhuman animals without letting themselves be seen by them. This is the reason, he volunteers, that they have not combatted the essentialist tendency to divide the animal world into humans, on the one side—in the plural form, where each human gets a personality and the ability to respond to others—and “the animal,” on the other side, in the singular form, as if all nonhuman animals constitute a single category of existence with a single character (Derrida 2002, 383). Put in the language of ordinariness, Derrida complains about philosophy’s tendency to take a distance from people’s ordinary lives with nonhuman animals, where responding to them, and them responding to people, are acts that constitute their identities as genuine others with whom people can have a relationship. Derrida describes this philosophical distance from being experienced by a nonhuman animal as a form of “limitrophy,” a term which he uses to characterizes ideas and interpretations that generate, maintain, emerge from, or complicate the limits between different spheres, including the sphere between humans and nonhuman animals (2002, 397–98). A bad limitrophy exists when nonhuman animals are not given the chance to speak for themselves, or to auto-biogra-paraphrase themselves, as Derrida puts it, and therefore to not show that, in their actions, they ordinarily respond and not only react to that which surrounds them (2002, 417). A good limitrophy would be one where philosophy complicates the traditional, negative limits between humans and nonhuman animals, and in such a way that the latter are no longer abstracted into the category of “the animal.” In shattering the idea that the notion of “the animal” is intelligible, and in letting nonhuman animals speak for themselves, philosophy would fulfll its responsibility to the intelligibility of the lives of nonhuman animals. Interestingly, it is nakedness that brings about a change of perspective in Derrida’s thinking. Derrida’s cat, a female cat, gazes at him when he comes out of the shower naked. She does not know, as nonhuman animals generally do not know, that she is naked herself, but, nonetheless, she shows interest in Derrida’s nakedness, which is evident in her concentrated gaze upon his genitals (Derrida 2002, 372). Derrida’s instinctive reaction was to cover his nakedness, and he states that he felt the kind of shame and embarrassment that comes to one when another human being looks at them. But, philosophically, he comes to the conclusion that his instinctive reaction of covering himself is an acknowledgment of the real otherness of the cat, and by implication all nonhuman animals that are capable of responding. This otherness, he suggests, is similar in its logical nature to the otherness of human beings. In both contexts, there is an acknowledgment of an active agent on the other side. The theme of nakedness in Derrida can also be found in J. M. Coetzee, and in a similar fashion to that of Derrida’s. I touch on the topic in some parts of

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the next section while elaborating, frst, on the important issue of how human responses to nonhuman animals are constitutive of what it means to let them speak for themselves and, second, on Coetzee’s critique of philosophy’s treatment of nonhuman animals. I then return with some conclusions about Coetzee’s and Derrida’s perspectives. Coetzee on Letting Nonhuman Animals Speak for Themselves Coetzee and the Hens In the opening paragraph of his autobiographical novel, Boyhood, Coetzee provides an account of his younger self’s visceral response to his mother’s treatment of three hens that she had purchased for their ability to lay eggs. He writes of how the hens did not fourish because the sitting rainwater in the yard turned the poultry-run “into an evil-smelling morass” and the hens developed “gross swellings on their legs, like elephant-skin” (1998, 1). He adds:

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Sickly and cross, they cease to lay. His mother consults her sister . . . who says they will return to laying only after the horny shells under their tongues have been cut out. So one after another his mom takes the hens between her knees, presses on their jowls until they open their beaks, and with a point of a paringknife picks at their tongues. The hens shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. He shudders and turns away. (Coetzee 1998, 1)

Young Coetzee’s response to his mother’s treatment of the hens is set against her speciesist approach, where the hens are taken to be mere tools of production regardless of the pain incurred upon them and in indifference to their rights for survival, pleasure, and the avoidance of pain. Of course, young Coetzee’s response cannot be generalized to be depicted as a necessary universal human reaction—after all, his mother felt differently about the matter and, considering the number of nonhuman animals that are experimented on and slaughtered every day for human beneft, not to forget hunting for pleasure, the logical conclusion is that not all people are repulsed by the act of killing or eating nonhuman animals or by inficting suffering on them. In The Lives of Animals, a fctional philosopher by the name of Norma Bernard makes the same point about the consumption of certain foods. She objects to the idea that disgust is necessary when it comes to eating certain nonhuman animals as opposed to others, giving the custom of eating frogs by the French as one example where the supposed feeling of disgust does not arise (Coetzee 1999, 42). But no universal response is needed to establish that young Coetzee’s response to his mother’s treatment of the hens is akin, in some ways, to

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Derrida’s response to his cat’s response to him. In both contexts, an example of a nonhuman animal that is able to speak for itself, albeit by mediation of a human response, is present. In both contexts, the response of the human to a nonhuman animal is an acknowledgment of the animal’s otherness. As for Coetzee himself, the visceral response that his younger self experienced persisted in the emotional and intellectual life of his adult self. The same response, and a discussion of it in relation to philosophy, makes their appearance in both The Lives of Animals and Disgrace. I discuss these two books in what follows, but, frst, an example from The Lives of Animals belongs here because it involves an echo of the experience Coetzee had with his mother and the hens. As it turns out, Albert Camus had a similar childhood experience to that of Coetzee, and Coetzee brings it up in The Lives of Animals. Elizabeth Costello, the main character of the latter book, mentions the effects of an incident in Camus’s childhood, where he witnessed his grandmother cutting the head of a hen with a kitchen knife and catching its blood in a bowl so that it would not dirty the foor. Costello opined: “The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?” (Coetzee 2001, 63). For Coetzee, this is an example of letting nonhuman animals speak for themselves, one that literature, not philosophy, can deliver.

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A Disgraceful World Disgrace is a novel that depicts the gradual, spiritual transformation in the life of its main character, David Lurie, as a result of a personal trauma involving him and his daughter, as well as his volunteering work in an animal shelter where he assisted in putting dogs to sleep. Initially, at the beginning of the novel, Lurie is presented as someone akin to the aesthete in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existentialism, a divorced professor of communication and literature who lives by the Romantic ideas of William Wordsworth. Temperament, passion, and the natural senses are placed over and above reason and social norms. For example, Lurie’s main intimate relationship at this stage is with a prostitute who ends her relationship with him after he accidentally discovers her real-life identity outside of the brothel. He then initiates a sexual relationship with one of his students in which he almost forces himself on her. This latter incident pre-shadows a more violent, rape scene in the novel involving his own daughter. Three men show up at her house where he was staying, pour gasoline on him, torch him, and lock him up in his daughter’s bathroom after which they proceed to rape her and shoot her dogs.

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Ironically, prior to the rape incident, Lurie explains his Romantic p­ hilosophy to his daughter, stating that he had lived his past life according to the rights of desire that are sanctioned by the god Eros (Coetzee 2000, 89). When his relationship with his student was discovered as a result of a grievance against him at the university, and he was asked to apologize in order to keep his job, he refused because of his Romantic ideas. He stated that his desire for his student was not inappropriate and that he “was enriched by the experience” (Coetzee 2000, 56). Repentance “belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse,” he told the grievance committee and did not seem to have regretted losing his job that led him to leave town and move in with his daughter (Coetzee 2000, 57–58). Philosophy enters the novel indirectly, although it looms large in the background of many of its pages for the careful reader—for example, in Coetzee’s repeated critique of abstractions. For instance, Lurie is portrayed as someone who is dissatisfed with his job as a professor of literature and communication. He had gotten tired of conventional methods of analyzing prose, the kind “measured by the yard,” as he puts it, and repeatedly mentions his dream of wanting to write an opera about love that involves the life of the Romantic poet Lord Byron (Coetzee 2000, 4ff.). Literature comes in various forms, obviously, but Lurie is presented as someone who found the formal, reasoned, and calculated analysis in conventional literature boring and unhelpful. Somehow, this form of analysis is seen as something philosophical in orientation but Coetzee’s attack on philosophy is more powerful in his presentation of Wordsworth and Byron. These two poets drew signifcant attention to the limits of perception and understanding in their poetry, and it is clear that Coetzee wants to connect this with philosophy. Lurie describes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” as a poem about a certain disappointment that the poet feels upon fnding the famous Alpine Mont Blanc soulless. Furthermore, Wordsworth wanted to show the limits of perception on our part, Lurie indicates, particularly if we do not feel the mountain but analyze it (Coetzee 2000, 25–26). This indirect attack on philosophy is also found in how Lurie reads Byron’s “Lara,” which depicts Lucifer as someone who suffers from a madness of the heart because of his impulsive actions. Yet, contra reason and rational analysis, the poem is an invitation on Byron’s part for people to understand and even sympathize with Lucifer while knowing all along that there are rational limits to their sympathy (Coetzee 2000, 33–34). If we juxtapose Lurie’s dissatisfaction with analysis alongside his attention to the limits of perception, understanding, and even sympathy, this could count as a critique of the kind of philosophy that takes analysis and empiricist perception as the foundation of understanding. Furthermore, the fact that poetry, rather than philosophy, is that which points out these limitations

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while offering itself as an invitation to overcome them could be taken as a Coetzeean attempt to substitute poetry for rational philosophy in shedding light on human life (and, later, on nonhuman animal life). In one exchange between Lurie and his daughter, Lucy, about the safety of her living alone in her countryside house, for example, she mentions that she had the dogs to deter intruders but that, in the case of a break-in, having two people instead of one would not make a difference. Lurie’s response is: “That’s very philosophical”; and Lucy’s own attack on philosophy comes clear in the following remark: “Yes. When all else fails, philosophize” (Coetzee 2000, 60). But, as in Derrida’s case, a change occurred in Lurie’s attitude when he came face to face with wild ducks and goats in the countryside where his daughter lives, away from the almost animal-free Cape Town. Here, a different passion than lust emerges in Lurie and he does not feel the need to philosophize. It is the kind of experiential passion that leads him, later in the novel, to have a bond with two goats that were destined to be butchered for a wedding feast. He is distressed that they are neglected for several days before the feast, without water, and tells himself they are most likely twins that were destined since birth for the butcher’s knife, adding, realistically, “When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last one of them, their fesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry” (Coetzee 2000, 123). Overall, Coetzee depicts Lurie as someone who passes beyond the Kierkegaardian stage of aesthetic existence and who gains a heightened state of moral grace that fnds its home in an emotional-moral link with various nonhuman animals. Lurie comes to express disgust with how the lives of nonhuman animals do not count in a world dominated by human interests. After the rape incident, we are told that “A shadow of grief falls over him: for Katy [his daughter’s bulldog], alone in her cage, for himself, for everyone. He sighs deeply, not stifing the sigh” (Coetzee 2000, 79). Lurie’s concerns are certainly moral, but his existential responses to ­nonhuman animals refect their status as others albeit, again, without universal agreement on the issue. In fact, the lack of agreement proves that Lurie’s responses are normative, not philosophical. Furthermore, the grim perspective he displays in regard to the reality of the mentioned goats, combined with the pity he feels for the dogs that were shot with indifference by the three rapists, as well as the dogs at the animal shelter he assisted in putting to sleep, is not rationalized through a philosophical theory of life. Rather, it is expressed simply as something existentially felt and known. The knowledge that comes from it, if we are to call that knowledge at all, is not epistemic in the philosophical-empiricist sense of the word but is the kind of knowledge that we encountered in Derrida.

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When Lurie does refect on his feelings, he sounds philosophical, telling himself that the bond he felt with the goats was not one of affection but of sadness. He begins to rationalize things and denies that humans are akin to nonhuman animals or that they can be friends with them (Coetzee 2000, 74). This philosophical denial is contradicted, I think, in Lurie’s relationship with a three-legged dog who loves music, a dog that he procrastinated putting down until the last minute. This relationship could be described as a form of friendship, the kind of relationship that makes him stop by the side of the road one day and weep uncontrollably after putting the dog to rest (Coetzee 2000, 219). Bur there is also non-philosophical refection on Lurie’s part, and when it occurs it comes across as sympathetic—for example, when he wonders whether or not dogs really suffer from boredom (Coetzee 2000, 62) or when he becomes convinced that dogs that are put to sleep know their time has come. “Despite the silence and the painlessness of the procedure,” he thinks to himself, “despite the airtight bags in which they tie the new made corpses, the dogs in the yard smell what is going on inside. They fatten their ears, they droop their tails, as if they too feel the disgrace of dying” (Coetzee 2000, 143). Considering Coetzee’s mockery of philosophy—“When all else fails, philosophize”—even when Lurie is presented as someone who knows the limits of what can be said about nonhuman animals (e.g., that they could not be said to possess “properly individual lives”) (Coetzee 2000, 123)—his language when he makes this judgment is not that of a philosopher or an intellectual. Rather, Lurie, and by implication Coetzee, thinks as a non-philosophical poet does, someone who feels rather than reasons about the inner lives of nonhuman animals, but without the limitations of abstract perception and understanding. If philosophy is to be responsible, one could imagine Coetzee saying, it needs to be akin to poetry. This is also how he presents the issue through Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals, but alongside other signifcant issues related to the nature of philosophy and its responsibilities to nonhuman animals. Philosophy, Literature, and the Lives of Animals Costello gives two lectures on nonhuman animals, one involving philosophy and one involving poetry, and in both lectures one fnds a serious critique of philosophy’s misrepresentation of the inner lives of nonhuman animals. Descartes’s misguided view that nonhuman animals have no souls is situated along the same logical line as Aquinas’s view, echoed in Kant, that we should abstain from inficting suffering on nonhuman animals due to the potentially harmful consequences this might bring on other human beings (Coetzee 2001, 22–23). In these cases, reason is taken to be the measure by which we can say

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whether or not nonhuman animals have souls or are worthy of being given an intrinsic rather than an instrumental value. More specifcally in regard to Aquinas, his idea that nonhuman animals are not created in the image of God and that they are devoid of reason, so that no sin is involved in using them for human beneft, is depicted, again with other philosophical views, as a sickness of the soul (Coetzee 2001, 20). This attack on ­intellectualizing people’s relation with nonhuman animals echoes the attack Coetzee presents in Disgrace and, had the language of “misplaced concreteness” been available to Coetzee, I am certain that his main character, Costello, would have most likely used it. For a few exceptions in the history of philosophy, David Hume being one example, one could hardly dispute the fact that philosophy has not been kind to the true nature of the variety of nonhuman animals. I mean this in the descriptive sense that philosophy has not fulflled its responsibility to the intelligibility of the inner lives of nonhuman animals. But Coetzee’s main character, Costello, seems to fnd intellectualization as such to be a sign of sickness, and this is obviously a controversial issue. Costello admits that she is not a philosopher of mind and that her purpose, although she cannot help but use reason to make her point, is to show that philosophy’s reliance on reason prevents nonhuman animals from speaking for themselves (Coetzee 2001, 23ff.). She describes herself, in her own words, as “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak” (Coetzee 2001, 26). She compares herself to Red Peters in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” an educated ape who became civilized, akin to a human being, in order to escape his prison (Coetzee 2001, 18). Costello does not mean to suggest that nonhuman animals should be like humans, but in response to a query of clarity about her intentions at the end of her lecture on philosophy, Costello says that she wants people to open and listen to their hearts and not to enunciate principles of explanation (Coetzee 2001, 36). Intellectualization is the problem, which is the reason Coetzee wants to show her wounds rather than rely on reason to make her case for why people suffer from blindness—not just moral, but also philosophical—regarding nonhuman animals. Her disregard for philosophizing is so strong that she utilizes a sensitive topic to stir an emotional response from her audience. Admitting that the subject of the Holocaust is of a sensitive moral nature, Costello makes an analogy between the status of nonhuman animals in our human world and that of Jews during the Holocaust. She claims that she cannot help but think that, in both contexts, people exercised willful ignorance toward the suffering of others—the Jews during the Holocaust and ­nonhuman animals in our contemporary world—and, further, that this ignorance is a

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sickness of the soul (Coetzee 2001, 19–22, 34–35). Philosophy, she states, suffers from the same sickness, or blindness, of the soul in its various attempts to justify, or even deny, the moral permissibility of treating nonhuman animals as tools for human beneft. In contrast, she claims that poetry, or at least some poetry, is capable of letting animals speak for themselves and, therefore, of offering intelligibility to their lives (Coetzee 2001, 50–58). As expected, the analogy between the Holocaust and the animal slaughterhouses raises eyebrows in Costello’s audience and, interest­ ingly, the objections are not merely normative but also philosophical. Abraham Stern, an aging Jewish poet who teaches at Appleton College where Costello delivers her lectures, objects to the analogy she makes on philosophical grounds even though, ironically, he is not a philosopher. He does not attend the dinner in her honor but sends her a message accusing her of making the mistake of saying that since Jews were slaughtered like animals, this means that animals are now treated like the Jews were treated during the Holocaust. For him, this would be similar to the argument that since we are created in the image of God that makes God similar to us. These inversions do not make sense, he forcefully argues (Coetzee 2001, 49–50). But Stern misses the evocative aspect of Costello’s point, and she, in fact, does not respond to his argument. When he uses philosophy to make his point about the analogy between Jews and nonhuman animals, he offers the kind of explanatory reasoning Costello rejects. I return to this point when discussing Peter Singer’s response to Coetzee’s book below. But, clearly, Coetzee wanted to incorporate an unsuccessful philosophical response into a literary piece about the folly of philosophy’s reliance on reason to treat the topic of nonhuman animals. This is probably also the idea he had for incorporating another philosophical response to Costello’s lecture in the second section of the book—this time from Thomas O’Hearne, a fctional philosopher. O’Hearne begins by historicizing the argument for nonhuman animal rights, claiming that the need to be kind and compassionate to nonhuman animals is a recent Western idea not to be generalized as a transcultural fact. He then claims to bring in scientifc research on the topic and argues that the research has shown how nonhuman animals are no better than speechimpaired human beings in terms of their cognitive performance. Since they do not understand the importance of life and death, we can neither say that life is as important to nonhuman animals as it is to humans nor that the fear of death or extinction that people feel exists for them as well. His philosophical conclusion is that nonhuman animals belong to a different legal and ethical realm than humans do, and that it is permissible to kill them for their fesh and to experiment on them for human beneft (Coetzee 2001, 64).

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Costello’s response to O’Hearne is that kindness should be rooted in the kindness that exists between humans and nonhuman animals—in the sense that, evolutionarily speaking, we are of the same kind as they are (Coetzee 2001, 62). From this perspective, whether or not Costello commits a logical fallacy in comparing nonhuman animals to Jews, which I think she does, seems beside the point although, morally speaking, there should not be anything wrong in comparing the suffering of nonhuman animals to human suffering. The main issue, again, is whether or not philosophical argumentation is the proper context for discussing the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. John McDowell puts it rightly when he asks: would anyone really debate whether or not the Holocaust was permissible if Jews were treated with kindness and consideration before their extermination? “Such a judgment,” he states, “could be seriously advanced only in the somewhat crazy environment of academic philosophy” (McDowell 2008, 131). As can be seen, Costello tries to avoid doing philosophy at all cost. Her argument that there is no difference of kind between humans and nonhuman animals is not based on philosophical analysis. It is, rather, the result of observation and intuition. Like Derrida’s response to the cat and Coetzee’s response to the hens, Costello fnds herself responding to nonhuman animals in the same way. The technique she uses, or that Coetzee makes her use, is that of appealing to the hearts of her audience. This is the purpose of the Holocaust analogy, I believe. After all, when she takes this analogy further, she feels her way into the follow-up. For example, she imagines visiting friends who use soap in their bathrooms and lampshades in their living rooms that were made of Jewish bodies without giving a second thought to the horrors of doing so. The horror she imagines is felt by the reader on an existential-moral level, not at the level of reason. Coetzee seems to be saying that her imagination is needed in philosophy. If philosophy is to do its job, Coetzee seems to suggest, then it should avoid focusing on the criteria of reasoning and language-speaking to depict the relation between humans and nonhuman animals. Rather, it should give the response Costello does. Coetzee knows that not all philosophers subscribe to the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Cartesian-Kantian picture of nonhuman animals, but it is the general attitude of most philosophers that Coetzee seems to fnd problematic. When Costello makes the point that she is not a philosopher of mind, for example, she clearly has Thomas Nagel in mind as someone who does not let nonhuman animals speak for themselves but, simultaneously, as someone who represents the general attitude in the feld of philosophy of mind. His conclusion in “What’s It Like to be a Bat?” that we cannot access the inner subjectivity of animals, whether human or nonhuman, follows from his turning knowledge into an abstraction rather than something embodied, Costello rightly states (Coetzee 2001, 32). “Nagel strikes me as an intelligent

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and not unsympathetic man,” she states; “He even has a sense of humor. His question about the bat is an interesting one, but his answer is tragically ­limited” (Coetzee 2001, 129). Similarly, Costello’s critique of Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, etc., is, by extension, a critique of all theologies and philosophies that rely either on the scriptures or on certain exclusivist ideas of reason and language that put a difference of kind between humans and nonhuman animals. Costello is right and these philosophers clearly commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when it comes to nonhuman animals. Her reference to the tragic limitation of Nagel’s philosophy is also true of other philosophies, and it gets its sense in a very powerful language that is worth quoting in full:

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For instants at a time . . . I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It flls me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it. All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract—All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can. When I know, with this knowledge, that I am going to die, what is it, in Nagel’s terms, that I know? Do I know what it is like for me to be a corpse or do I know what it is like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time. (Coetzee 2001, 130)

Costello emphasizes her point by dislocating it from the context of formal logic—“All human beings are mortal,” “I am a human being,” “therefore I am mortal”—and concludes that “if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?” (Coetzee 2001, 131). If we let nonhuman animals speak for themselves, and we can do so, Costello claims, when we treat knowledge as something embodied in their actions rather than in their possession of reason, self-consciousness, a soul, or language, then there are no limits to our “sympathetic imagination” (Coetzee 2001, 35). Costello does not deny that nonhuman animals do not have the kind of consciousness people have, but only that this fact entitles us to treat them as instruments or that we can say that we “understand” the world better than they do (Coetzee 2001, 44–45). It is important to mention here that Coetzee’s critique of intellectualizing the lives of nonhuman animals is not limited to philosophy but includes poets who represent nonhuman animals without letting them speak for

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themselves. Examples here include traditional ways of speaking of the lion in terms of courage and the owl in terms of wisdom. “Even in Rilke’s poem,” Costello states in reference to “The Panther,” “the panther is there as a stand-in for something else,” namely as an embodiment of atomic energy and is presented in the language of elementary particle physics. She contrasts Rilke’s scientifc description of the panther with Ted Hughes’s description of the jaguar, where the jaguar comes alive through its movement and gaze, beyond the restrictions of its cage (Coetzee 2001, 50–51). For Costello/Coetzee, Hughes provides a record of engagement with the jaguar, not an abstract idea about it. Ironically, perhaps, the novel ends with a subtle expression of how our lives with nonhuman animals reveal a certain inexplicability about human existence, and how literature, again, is better than philosophy in mediating this truth. Costello had already expressed in the novel how she feels helpless when it comes to understanding herself and, on the way to the airport to be dropped off, she tells her son that she feels like an alien among human beings, unable to understand them or herself. As her son “inhales the smell of cold cream, of old fesh,” he blurts: “There, there. It will soon be over” (Coetzee 2001, 69). It is not a very promising ending in terms of offering a solution either to the problem of how to live with nonhuman animals or to the problem of how to achieve philosophy’s responsibility of letting them speak for themselves. But both Costello’s confession and her son’s words contain an implicit acknowledgment that certain things in life, including our interactions with nonhuman animals, are inexplicably paradoxical. We feel one thing and do another, or we know what needs to be done but choose otherwise—all without a clear understanding as to why we do so. Cora Diamond groups these kinds of diffculties under the term “the diffculty of reality,” and she connects them with the diffculty of doing philosophy proper. Philosophy might have to always face a battle with these kinds of diffculties, particularly since the normative, in this case the moral, is ingrained in our very being. I explore this issue in Diamond’s response to Coetzee’s work next.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE INEXPLICABLE Cora Diamond on the Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy In her discussion of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Diamond points out that the responses that were published together with Coetzee’s novel— essays by the ethicist Peter Singer, the cultural critic Marjorie Garber, the

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historian of religion Wendy Doniger, the primatologist Barbara Smuts, and the ­introduction by the political theorist Amy Gutman—focused on something other than its main point. The latter, for her, is the woundedness of Elizabeth Costello and her hauntedness about people’s inability to understand themselves and the lives of nonhuman animals (Diamond 2008, 47–48). Philosophers tend to simplify and reduce the complexity of people’s existential relationships with nonhuman animals, Diamond states, either to the moral issue of how to treat nonhuman animals or to the question of whether or not they have language, intelligence, and emotions. This is what happens in the abovementioned responses, she states. Diamond thinks that to read The Lives of Animals as if it were an argument for an ethical treatment of nonhuman animals does not match up with Costello’s intentions. For Costello, “it is as problematic to treat this supposed ‘issue’ as an ‘ethical issue’ for serious discussion” and, Diamond adds, “one can hardly, I think, take for granted that the lectures can be read as concerned with that ‘issue,” and as providing arguments bearing on it” (2008, 51). I alluded to this point above when mentioning the diffculty that philosophy faces in unpacking the complexity and inexplicability of human life in the face of the suffering that people infict on nonhuman animals. Costello does not want to be lumped together with the tradition of argumentation, according to Diamond, and she is “immensely conscious of the limits of thinking, the limits of understanding, in the face of all that she is painfully aware of” (2008, 52). This is similar to the kind of limitation suggested in Byron’s poem “Lara,” where Byron asks us to do the incomprehensible, which is to sympathize with Lucifer’s madness. No argument on the basis of philosophical reason could be given to justify this kind of invitation, one might say, and I think that philosophy’s responsibility here is to simply to point out these kinds of limitations. Philosophy analyzes any existent grammar whatsoever, and it clarifes confusions and restores sense where sense has been lost, but it also deals with meta-philosophical issues, such as the nature of philosophy itself and, in connection with the latter, the diffculty of doing philosophy. There is no grammatical analysis of ordinary discourse in the latter activities but discussions about what makes sense, and does not make sense, in regard to meta-philosophical issues. Diamond says that Costello’s presentation of herself as a wounded animal, where her woundedness is not obvious, cannot be presented in the manner of a traditional philosophical argument but has to be presented in a way that shows what lies beyond comprehension or explication. Costello points out an obstacle of the will, rather than the intellect, in the willful ignorance of humans to see their animality. Put differently, this animality is as incomprehensible and inexplicable to people as the reality of death is in life but,

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obviously, not in the sense that people cannot see that they will die one day or that they are animals, evolutionarily speaking. Diamond uses several examples to illustrate her point, describing it as something that touches on “the diffculty of reality,” which is an expression she borrows from John Updike. For example, she discusses Ted Hughes’s poem “Six Young Men,” which is about a photograph of six men who died six months after the photograph was taken during the First World War. For Diamond, the poem discusses the puzzle of “the impossibility of anyone’s being more alive than these smiling men, nothing’s being more dead” and, therefore, of the inexplicability of death (2008, 44). She adds that this puzzle is an expression of the diffculty of reality because it refers to something in reality that resists our ways of thinking of it and, therefore, makes it inexplicable. In the above case, referring to the reality of death alongside smiling expressions of being alive is the puzzle. Espen Dahl puts it nicely when he states that Hughes’s poem is an example of a register of the sublime, where the sublime has to do with the incomprehensibility of the simultaneous liveliness and deadness of the young men (2014, 51). Dahl thinks this incomprehensibility exists in other cases discussed by Diamond—for example, in how there is mystery in beauty and goodness that lead us to say they “should not exist” (2014, 54). To appreciate the diffculty that Diamond discusses requires seeing the mentioned puzzle as a philosophical diffculty, but what happens if philosophy sticks to the descriptive task of offering intelligibility where sense exists? In the case of Hughes’s puzzle, the task would be to refect on the grammar of normative expressions such as “the inexplicable” or “the mysterious” or “the puzzling” or “how could this be the case,” and so on. Commentators on Coetzee’s book may not have seen this emphasis in it, but their blindness is as analyzable by philosophy as the grammars emphasized by Diamond. In regard to nonhuman animals themselves, the task would be to shed light on the mentioned inexplicability rather than, as Diamond rightly states, offer theories as to why we should not mistreat them. The latter belongs to normative ethics, I might add, but not philosophical ethics. I mentioned above that Costello thinks embodied knowledge gives us a glimpse of what it means to experience death. But it is important to add that she wants to show this to be the case rather than argue for it in the way philosophers do. If we can feel our way through death—being a corpse—then we can think and feel our way through what it is like to be a bat, Costello says against Nagel (Coetzee 2001, 35). This is not deductive reasoning, but embodied knowledge. “For instants at a time,” she writes, “I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It flls me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it” (Coetzee 2001, 32). It is diffcult not to be moved by these words, and this reaction is not the result of reasoning

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but embodiment. But let us remember that a lethal critique of what most philosophers do is not a crushing critique of philosophy itself. Making this assumption would be itself an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, namely the thinking that the various philosophies that exist can defne what philosophy itself is. One could engage in a discussion, or a critique, of philosophical t­ endencies from within philosophy itself, as I am doing in this book—even when claiming that philosophy should conduct itself in one manner rather than another, as I am also doing in this book—but this would not be the kind of reductionism that accuses all philosophers of thinking in a similar manner about nonhuman animals. There is something inexplicable about our animality when we consider it in the context of our mistreatment of nonhuman animals, and Coetzee’s suggestion, through Costello, is that we need to inhabit our own bodies and aim to achieve embodied knowledge if we want to truly understand them and let them speak for themselves. Costello can point to this fact as a novelist and, I am suggesting, philosophers can do it, too, if their philosophies are animalized. By the latter I mean that philosophy would allow nonhuman animals to speak for themselves, listening to and elucidating what is being said—albeit, as I mentioned when discussing Coetzee’s and Camus’s hens, through human voices—without a normative agenda. The hens in both Camus’s and Coetzee’s households speak for themselves by shrieking out their pain and suffering. Philosophers cannot, or should not, voice the same suffering through repetition, or by writing about it in the way Camus and Coetzee do, but they can analyze its expressions in the works of these writers. Philosophers can also clarify the grammars of “speaking for oneself” or “auto-biogra-paraphrasing” oneself in regard to nonhuman animals. But, again, what they should not do is normativize ethical change in people’s behavior. To clarify my point further, I discuss the normative perspective of the ethicist Peter Singer in the next section. But Diamond has more to say that is of relevance here, and I discuss it before moving to the next section. In presenting her wound rather than argue for it philosophically, Costello speaks as a nonhuman animal does, Diamond rightly states. In Derrida’s language, she is both naked and not naked; she hides a wound under her clothes but every word she speaks, as she herself puts it, shows that naked wound. From this perspective, argumentation is one way of escaping what it means for us to be living animals, to be truly embodied, and to see the bodily life of others (Diamond 2008, 53). What Costello does, Diamond further elaborates, is ask us, as a poet, a non-philosopher, to inhabit a body in order to confront the diffcult reality of what we do to nonhuman animals (2008, 59). This is how embodied knowledge works and philosophy only defects from this truth for Costello. As I stated above, being normative is one reason for this kind of

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defection. But, in my view, philosophy proper is able to avoid this kind of defection when it is descriptive rather than normative. Costello expresses her point beautifully when she states that reason is neither the being of the universe nor that of God, but only that of human beings (Coetzee 2001, 22–23). Using Derrida here, philosophical reason is that which creates limitrophy, the limiting of the philosopher’s ability to know nonhuman animals as they really are. What I suggested above is that limitrophies can be either good or bad. A good limitrophy would show the difference of degree—rather than kind—between humans and nonhuman animals through an elucidation of the grammar of ‘kindness’, as Costello herself does as a novelist. Diamond brings up other examples to shed light on what Coetzee was doing in the novel with Costello. For instance, there is Ruth Kluger’s response of astonishment during the Holocaust to the kindness extended to her by a strange woman—unfathomable in the context in which it occurred (2008, 61). Another example is the mystery of beauty to which Czeslaw Milosz alludes in the architecture of trees and voices of birds. There is also the disturbing reference to the two poor children in Mary Mann’s “Little Brother,” who have no toys to play with and end up playing with the corpse of their stillborn brother. The story, says Diamond, shoulders us out from how we normally think of the ethical; it presents the diffculty and resistance of reality to our ordinary modes of thinking (2008, 58). One can only add here that Diamond’s careful attention to the story is brilliant, but what is the philosophical conclusion to draw from this? Philosophy is a form of defection that Costello sought to avoid and, in agreement with her, Diamond thinks that philosophy cannot shed light on the complexity of human life in relation to nonhuman animals. How can it do so, Diamond asks, in face of the suffering we infict on nonhuman animals? Diamond does not endorse skepticism but she agrees with Costello that the answer to the puzzle of human existence cannot be a rationalized, or a theorized, philosophical argument. This is true but animalizing philosophy, in the way I am using the term here, could help in avoiding this kind of argumentation. It would shift the discussion to analyzing the grammars of “complexity,” “inexplicability,” “kindness,” “humanity,” “animality,” and so on. In pointing out its sheer descriptive responsibility, philosophy opens the door for normative, non-philosophical, considerations to take place. After all, we have theology, ethics, literature, and others forms of aesthetics to engage in normative thinking and production. Diamond pays good attention to the philosophical diffculty of pointing out that what is obvious does not always reveal itself as obvious (2008, 77). Philosophically put, this is understandable, and whereas literature could show and give expression to the obvious, philosophy would offer a clarifcation

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of what is being said. In his commentary on the piece by Diamond (and on Stanley Cavell who also responds to Diamond), John McDowell describes this diffculty as one akin to a beaver that fnds dam-building beyond its powers (McDowell 2008, 134). Diamond herself references Simone Weil here, stating her position that, in some circumstances, human thought is unable to acknowledge certain realities that entail a form of non-being—for example, in cases of affiction, precariousness, or loss of control (2008, 75). These are beautiful illustrations of the diffculty that philosophy faces, but I do not think they render it hopeless. Cavell agrees with Diamond on the need to move away from ­theoretical considerations regarding the inexplicable. Although he does not think philosophy itself is a therapeutic endeavor—it “cannot say sin,” as he puts it (Dahl 2014, 115)—he still wants it to recover, and recuperate, the ordinary life when its mysteries are found inexplicable (Cavell 2008, 96). He is in agreement with Coetzee when he claims that philosophy is always in competition with other therapeutic endeavors in recovering the human from skepticism—for example, its competition with poetry and literature in general. In his case, Cavell thinks that philosophizing in the context of the ordinary helps us defeat skepticism and other philosophical problems, such as the problem of accessing the external world and other minds. As we have seen in his discussion of Emerson and Thoreau, Cavell thinks that philosophy could turn the ordinary into something extraordinary without taking words out of their ordinary homes. I am in agreement with Cavell on this point but do not think that philosophy should be seen as a discipline that competes with other human endeavors on how to offer the best therapy for existential problems. Keeping the philosophical task of clarifcation steady is what is needed here. I mentioned above that Peter Singer is a normative ethicist who does not fnd any diffculty in turning philosophy into a normative discipline. Diamond fnds his response to Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals to also defect from the inability of language, thinking, and philosophizing to capture the reality of animal suffering. I want to bring Singer here in order to show that although I am sympathetic to the idea that the kind of philosophical ethics presented in his thinking has limits, there is more to his philosophizing than producing a theory about animal rights. Since he practices normative ethics and is not merely descriptive, his philosophy has made a huge difference in people’s understanding of the suffering of nonhuman animals. Peter Singer on Reason, Nonhuman Animals, and the Poetic I agree with Diamond that Singer’s focus on the question of whether or not Costello’s position against philosophy is good for the rights of nonhuman

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animals misses the gist of the critique that Coetzee has of philosophy. Singer points out that Costello’s critique of reason is too radical: “I feel, but I also think about what I feel,” he states, and, therefore, “We can’t take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism” (Singer 2001, 88–89). Although Singer thinks that Costello is on the right side in being vegetarian and in showing “how limited and restrictive some famous scientifc inquiries into the minds of apes have been,” her “radical egalitarianism” comes at the unjustifed expense of philosophy, he states (2001, 86). Costello is not open to any latitude in treating nonhuman animals and humans differently when it comes to the positive consequences of these actions, Singer states, and she does not see that not all nonhuman animals have the same interests (2001, 87). For Singer, Costello’s mistrust of reason as a proper philosophical tool to approach the topic of the lives of nonhuman animals is the reason for her radical position. One philosopher who comes to the defense of Peter Singer against Diamond is Ian Hacking. His position is that reality does not depend on how we see things but vice versa. This form of realism should be welcomed by Diamond whose view on the diffculty of reality suggests, at least in some cases, that others who do not acknowledge the diffculty are blind to it and to the way the truth is independent of how people see it. But, to repeat, her point about Singer is that his position is not focused on the diffculty of reality but on the single issue of how to be fair to the lives of nonhuman animals. Hacking seems to also be blind to Diamond’s focus. He claims that something must be wrong with anyone who is not appalled by the way we treat nonhuman animals (Hacking 2008, 151). Still, Hacking’s point here is that we need to change how people think about, and live with, nonhuman animals, and he fnds Singer to have effected more of this change than anyone else. Like Jeremy Bentham, Singer says that the question is not whether ­nonhuman animals can reason or talk but whether they can suffer, and that we reach this conclusion through critical thinking (Singer 2009, 7). Of course, as we have seen, Costello herself confesses that she cannot do without reason, but she is under the impression that the kind of reason she uses is the one rooted in embodied knowledge, not philosophy’s abstract knowledge. She is right. Her reason is experiential and empathetic reason, one might say, the kind of reason that allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of nonhuman animals and let them speak for themselves. In making this point, I am not defending Costello’s, or Coetzee’s, critique of philosophy, however. As I argued above, I think that animalizing philosophy can do justice by nonhuman animals and people’s relationships with them without committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But I do think that Singer misreads her position on reason. He is also not as radical as she is when it comes to respecting the intrinsic value of nonhuman animals

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In his response to Costello’s position, for example, he says regarding pigs that are meant for food in factory farms: “Let’s assume that pigs are leading a happy life and then painlessly killed. For each happy pig killed, a new one is bred, who will lead an equally happy life. So killing the pig does not reduce the total amount of porcine happiness in the world. What’s wrong with it?” (Singer 2001, 89). Although Singer situates his argument on painless killing in the context of inevitability—that is, only when the killing of nonhuman animals is necessary—most likely Costello would have rejected it. As Diamond says, this kind of thinking does not address the issue of the inexplicability of human interaction with nonhuman animals. The same goes for his idea that experimentation on nonhuman animals is morally justifable only when “the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would also be justifable” (Singer 20091, 85). Neither option would be accepted by Costello, and she would fnd Singer’s argument abstract, not embodied. Keeping in mind that Singer is not only vegetarian but also an advocate of developing political and economic policies that contribute to eliminating the slaughterhouses of food agribusinesses, experimentation on nonhuman animals, and even zoos, the above has to be read in the right context. He does not believe that it would be practical to experiment on brain-damaged humans, for example, because it would have to be a rare case and, most likely, limited to one person (Singer 2009, 85). He is not then really advocating for experimenting on brain-damaged humans but only using the reference to do something that Costello herself was doing in the novel—thats is, in her use of the Holocaust metaphor. Neither does he advocate eating meat for the sheer pleasure of eating since that would be a trivial good in comparison with the loss of an animal’s life. In other words, Singer is not sanctioning a blind principle of measuring consequences of actions relative to good and bad ones, regardless of other considerations. He states, for example, that students of biology and related felds should refuse to engage in experiments on nonhuman animals at universities (Singer 2009, 94). As can be imagined, he also states that people should vote for political parties that are open to refusing funding to academic and other institutions that experiment on nonhuman animals in cases where the benefts are trivial (Singer 2009, 94). This is doable, says Singer, as is the ability to refuse purchasing food products that come from slaughterhouses and other facilities that are clearly inficting pain and suffering on nonhuman animals. We only need to remind ourselves, continually, of the sources of our food and also of the misinformation about the nutritional value of alternative foods that are not associated with agribusiness, he states. If the above makes sense, then Singer would be sympathetic to Costello’s critique of those who willfully ignore the infiction of suffering on, and the killing of, nonhuman animals. This is what I mean by saying that there is more to his ethics than a theory of animal rights. He is as normative

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as Costello is regarding the suffering of nonhuman animals although, as­ indicated above, he is not against painless killing of them, or experimentation on them, if the outcome is of higher value. Again, the normative aspect of Singer’s thinking is akin to the normative aspect of Costello’s thinking. The issue is that whereas she refuses to use philosophy to make her point against our misunderstanding of ourselves in relation to nonhuman animals, Singer does not seem to have a problem using philosophy to correct their mistreatments. Had the issue of the inexplicability of our lives been brought up to him in more explicit terms, I am certain he would have said that philosophy is needed in that latter context as well.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS Although I think Coetzee’s attack on philosophy is unjustifed, I can see how literature would be more effective in generating change in people vis-à-vis the nonhuman animal world. Elsewhere I argued that David Foster Wallace had good reasons to move beyond philosophy into literature in order to make normative judgments and suggestions about existential issues such as boredom, dullness, and even eating lobsters (Ramal 2014; Wallace 2005). Wallace appreciated the contemplative, non-normative, and non-interfering nature of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but he realized that, as a writer who wanted to make heads throb heart-like, narrative philosophy is the better way to go. “Narrative philosophy” is somewhat of a vague category to use because it could include widely diverse writers and existential thinkers under its label, including Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Ursula K. Le Guin, and even Coetzee (Ramal 2014, 179–80). Perhaps “philosophical narrative” is the better term to use here, but the point is to show that normative thinking cannot be easily undertaken within philosophy proper. I am not certain how Coetzee would have responded to the suggestion that philosophy ought to play only a hermeneutical role in clarifying both the lives of humans and nonhuman animals. My perspective is that had this view of philosophy, which, admittedly, is not as old as philosophy itself, been adopted by Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Singer, and other thinkers criticized by Coetzee, the dangers of reducing philosophy into a normative discipline would not have occurred. By implication, most criticisms against philosophical discussions of nonhuman animals would not have occurred. As I suggested in this chapter, I admire most of what Singer does as a normative ethicist. It is diffcult to imagine what the animal liberation movements around the world would have looked like without his writings. Even the recent attempts to secure the legal category of ‘personhood’ to individual primates owe some debt to his work (Hegedus and Pennebaker, 2017). But

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his utilitarian perspective is as normative in agenda and orientation as all the other moral theories still debated in contemporary philosophy: virtue ethics, deontology, divine command theory, natural law ethics, the ethics of care, and so on. Singer is very straightforward on this point when he states that he does not engage with morality from a neutral perspective. For example, writing in November 1971 about the inadequate responses of wealthy nations to the then recent devastating effects of a cyclone on East Bengal, where deaths were mounting due to lack of shelter, food, and medicine, he states: “What are the moral implications of a situation like this? . . . I shall argue that the way people in relatively affuent countries react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justifed; indeed, the whole way we look at moral issues . . . needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society” (Singer 2006, 456). He then adds: “In arguing for this conclusion I will not, of course, claim to be morally neutral. I shall, however, try to argue for the moral position that I take, so that anyone who accepts certain assumptions, to be made explicit, will, I hope, accept my conclusion” (Singer 2006, 456). Singer has carried the same non-neutral passion with him to try and end the suffering of nonhuman animals, arguing in various forms against the speciesist biases of humanity without appeals to any presumed objective criteria of judgment. This is the kind of attitude one hopes to fnd in normative ethics, but, as I have been suggesting through the book and in this chapter, philosophy proper is better off avoiding normativity altogether. In applying the fallacy of misplaced concreteness to the question of nonhuman animals, I showed that Whitehead offers a way out of the theoretical approaches critiqued by Coetzee and Derrida, among others. But the lack of grammatical analysis in this context, and the emphasis on philosophy’s generalizations as the means by which the difference of degree between humans and nonhuman animals is revealed, keeps Whitehead within a normative agenda. He takes the right steps in animalizing philosophy, and thus avoids reducing nonhuman animals into mere objects of experience, but without the needed grammatical approach to make philosophy fully animalized. As I also mentioned in the section on Derrida, his critique of the essentializing limitrophies that other philosophers have provided is consistent with Whitehead’s critique of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. After all, the fallacy entails treating abstract realities, or appearances, as if they were the ultimate facts when that is not the case. The diversity of nonhuman animals has appeared in the literature, philosophical and otherwise, as “the animal,” which is an abstraction, not the fact. This is the reason, as I mentioned in the section on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, that Whitehead wanted to rescue the facts from how they appear. Unlike Derrida and Coetzee, he still

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thinks that philosophy is the proper tool to do the rescuing. We can all learn from Whitehead when he states that philosophy must not fall victim to the kind of dogmatism that makes it think of itself as absolutely clear, obvious, and irreformable (1933, 223). In my brief conclusion next, I revisit this point in the larger context of the aim of this book.

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Conclusion

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Final Thoughts

In the preface I mentioned that the current climate in philosophy is hostile to the idea that philosophy should concentrate its efforts on the i­ntelligibility of our ordinary scientifc, political, religious, aesthetic, and ethical lives. Most philosophers think that philosophy would be irresponsible if it limited itself to the hermeneutical tasks of clarifying discourse and holding people accountable to sense and intelligibility. What is required of philosophy, they argue, is to give normative guidance to people about how to live their lives meaningfully and responsibly. We have seen in this book how philosophers as varied as Socrates, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Rosen, Singer, Rorty, and Cavell, among others, either make similar claims about philosophy or infuse normative objectives with their hermeneutical efforts. What I tried to show in this book is how mixing the normative and logical aspects of philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility infringes on the ­neutrality of philosophy. The reasons for wanting to be normative are certainly noble, as is the case in Rorty’s hope for a better future when his idea of a democratic life has been achieved, or in Cavell’s idea of offering acknowledgments of oneself and others to fght doubts about the importance and interestingness of the ordinary life, or in Whitehead’s recommendation of the humanitarian ideal as a means to achieve harmony and peace between people. But when philosophy takes sides in normative debates it risks forgoing one of its essential tasks as a critical activity, which is to do justice by all viewpoints, including those that philosophers fnd undesirable or abhorrent. Both democracy and oligarchy are real, for example, and to do justice by their reality, or their sense, philosophy should avoid telling people that one is better than the other. Philosophers who analyze these various realities might lean toward one way of life rather than another, but that would be their private business, not their philosophical business. The same goes for the debate 223

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regarding faith and atheism. Both are real and their realities, or the senses they have, require elucidation for the sheer fact that they exist. When brave, philosophy restricts its task to that of providing this kind of elucidation and, therefore, to offering the needed intelligibility for the radical ways in which things are oftentimes different. I mentioned at the end of the last chapter that we can learn from Whitehead’s views on philosophy how to temper the expectation that ­philosophy is always clear or that it is irreformable. As a public practice, philosophy needs to maintain its neutrality, which is a diffcult task. To clarify, the neutrality here is that of a method, not a theory or a belief, and methods are not always clear and they could use reform and development when the circumstances call for it. For instance, I suggested when discussing Whitehead’s analysis of certain metaphysical terms, ‘importance’ being one example, that they could function as grammatical terms. By the latter I mean terms that enjoy a certain generality that elucidates multiple ordinary terms, in this case particular values in various human activities that are characterized by the ordinary word ‘important’. My point here is that philosophers engaged in grammatical analysis could learn something about the idea of generality from metaphysics, where the generality does not have to be necessarily theoretical, and where metaphysicians could come to see that non-grammatical generalities are problematic. Like all people, philosophers grow up to appreciate and adopt certain values over others and, also like all other people, they might invoke their normative reasons for why they prefer one set of values over another. Certainly, their training in philosophy might give them an edge over others in avoiding obvious fallacies in their arguments, but since there are no objective grounds on which certain values are better than others—as Rorty, Cavell, and others have shown so well—philosophy cannot be neutral in being normative and in defending certain values over others. As a reminder, Rorty wanted to move beyond philosophical questions about knowledge and truth when discussing the idea of hope for the future. In a sense, he was not doing philosophy when he spoke of hope instead of knowledge, and this is consistent with his frequent description of himself as an intellectual rather than a philosopher. If anything, his views resemble those of David Foster Wallace, who also wanted to go beyond philosophy to tackle some of the existential issues he thought philosophy cannot preach about. To say that the neutrality of philosophy is one of method rather than a belief or an opinion is akin to saying that the diagnostic method adopted by medical doctors when treating their patients is neutral. When a doctor recommends a certain diet or exercise, for example, the recommendation is not part of the diagnosis. It is part of the treatment. Whether or not doctors care about their patients should not affect their method of diagnosing an illness. I

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am not saying that there are no doctors who might play with the method of diagnosis because of a certain prejudice they may have—for example, if they do not believe what the patient is telling them or, as history has proven, if they ignore anatomical differences between the sexes. My point is that the medical procedure itself of diagnosing illnesses can be neutral, at least relative to the contemporaneous standards of how medicine ought to be practiced. Like doctors, philosophers can make recommendations about what they think is meaningful or beautiful in life, or about how to live one’s life, but these recommendations are not themselves philosophical. They are normative, and are typically rooted in a particular moral, religious, or aesthetic way of thinking. When Whitehead mentions that the loyalty of dogs to their human companions requires our love and admiration, there is nothing philosophical about this point. Whitehead’s autobiographical notes are mixed with descriptive and normative remarks, but when he mentions the lessons he learned about the meaning of existence from his wife, these are somewhat philosophical and have a role to play in his philosophy. One of the points I repeatedly made throughout the book is that the ­temptation to take short cuts in philosophy without appreciating philosophical diffculties has negative consequences for philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility. I mentioned that to follow Wittgenstein’s advice by going the bloody hard way when doing philosophy is one way to avoid short cuts, and that the latter includes focusing on grammatical analysis and avoiding the temptation to make philosophy a normative discipline akin to that of normative ethics or normative theology. I also mentioned that Whitehead’s metaphysical attention to ordinariness, whether that of experience, perception, or nature, is an example of going the hard way, albeit, regrettably, not always with equal attention to the need for grammatical analysis. But Whitehead’s frequent resort to normativity, on the one hand, and to ungrammatical generalizations, on the other hand, does not contribute to intelligibility. On the contrary: in the case of reality as such, for example, he was led to theorize about the notion of being in the world as if it were a form of power that does not shed light on ordinary ways of being in the world; in the case of the humanitarian ideal, he was led to speak of a common good that is objective in nature when, in reality, such objectivity does not exist. Both Hilary Putnam and Cora Diamond address the question of the ­diffculty of philosophy. Putnam rightly exemplifes this diffculty in overcoming the temptation to offer, or revise, theories concerning the topic of realism. In this case, it is the avoidance of generating theories that is diffcult, as is the case in philosophical ethics. I lauded Peter Singer’s attitude toward ethics in this book because he is upfront about how he has a normative agenda of wanting to alleviate, even eliminate, the unnecessary suffering of nonhuman animals. His utilitarianism is a case of normative ethics, I suggested, but

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if someone wants to insist that his utilitarianism is a case of philosophical ethics, the latter would be diffcult to justify and it could only lead to reducing philosophy into a battle between different theories of ethics rather than to keeping its hermeneutical nature intact. Diamond presents a different angle on the idea of the diffculty of philosophy and how to appreciate it. In steering the discussion away from the moral question of the well-being of nonhuman animals in Coetzee’s work, and in putting the emphasis on the diffculty of how to account for the grammar of the ordinarily mysterious and unpredictable in life, she exemplifes how philosophy needs to remain non-normative in its orientation to philosophical problems. Although Diamond’s writings on nonhuman animals are not always neutral, the examples she gives of philosophy’s diffculties in analyzing grammars associated with ordinary behavior that does not ft our expectations—not just the horrifying case of the two siblings who played with their other sibling’s corpse as they would play with a toy, but also the case of Costello’s struggles to understand her behavior, and that of her fellow human beings, in relation to nonhuman animals—exemplify the need for philosophy to be neutral and for philosophers to go the bloody hard way without any short cuts. Another point to mention here is that those who typically insist on turning philosophy into a normative discipline, thinking that, otherwise, it is a useless activity do not typically provide an argument as to how philosophy would be different from other normative disciplines. To say that philosophy needs to contribute to the solution of the world’s problems is a normative, valuative claim, not a philosophical claim, even when reasoned arguments are given for the latter. After all, the arguments typically provided here are appeals to our moralities and emotions—for example, “Don’t you agree that we should rescue the marginalized in society from their oppression?” Or, “Don’t you think that the criterion of suffering is more important than that of intelligence or language when considering our morality toward nonhuman animals?” My point is that agreeing with these reasoned arguments would inevitably be an agreement with the importance of the ethical criteria of judgment used to make the argument. When I fnd myself thinking that I should not infict suffering on nonhuman animals, and that pleasuring my palate at their expense is morally wrong, my thinking is not based on a philosophical argument. It is based on my fnding myself feeling empathetic toward nonhuman animals, and on being horrifed by what happens at animal slaughterhouses. There is no philosophical “therefore” from the moral response, so to speak. If one still insists on the need for philosophy to be normative, what is needed in that case is a non-normative argument as to how philosophy could still be different from normative practices if it engages in the same normative

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suggestions as theirs. Unsurprisingly, this kind of argument is absent in the literature. In addition to emphasizing the diffculty of appreciating the need to separate the normative from the descriptive task in philosophy, I tried to draw attention in the book to the fact that philosophy’s responsibility to intelligibility cannot be had without taking ordinary forms of existence into consideration. Philosophy becomes relevant to life, I argued, not when it defends certain values over others but when it clarifes the ambiguous concepts and ideas used in relation to these values and to everyday life. People often employ language in their everyday conversations without thinking about the meaning of what they say, and if the references they assign to their words have no purchase, the conversations cannot go on. They become pseudo conversations, whether the topic is democracy, the economy, the universe, God, nonhuman animals, or anything else. If atheism is defned as the rejection of God’s existence, for example, regardless of whether or not people who live their lives without God engage in such rejection, then the conversation cannot go further. But people might be able to see that their conversations cannot go on when they receive puzzled looks from others about what they say—for example, in the case of a conversation about atheism, when someone is told: “This is not what I mean when I say I do not believe in God.” When this kind of conceptual resistance is registered by those who talk nonsensically, there is hope for genuine conversations to ensue with the help of philosophy. As I suggested at one point, philosophical work can be undertaken by non-philosophers if the analysis itself is clarifcatory of the concepts under consideration. Philosophy helps by showing the need to look at everyday life, at the ordinary, to see whether or not what people say makes sense. But what is important to mention here is that philosophy cannot allow the ordinary to be seen one-sidedly, and that we should call out those who do so, as I did, for example, with Michel de Certeau’s critique of Foucault and with Whitehead’s interpreters who only focus on his negative critique of ordinary language. If non-philosophers are to engage in philosophical work, they need to adhere to this important neutrality. The one-sided treatments of ordinariness provide another example of the lack of appreciation for philosophical diffculties. They are philosophical short cuts into the question of the ordinary. Again, normative treatments of the ordinary, or for that matter the extraordinary, are not typically comprehensive in orientation. They are preferential, and philosophers could point out their partiality if they focus on their responsibility to intelligibility. Although I would not think that Stanley Rosen is a philosopher who takes the easy way in his metaphysical treatment of the question of the ordinary, his idea of the extraordinary as something that cannot be ordinary is an example of one-sidedness. As I suggested in chapter 1, the idea of the extraordinary still

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plays a grammatical role as something ordinary within ordinary contexts—for example, the extraordinary performance of an ordinary musical event. To be philosophically responsible here is to situate the intelligibility of this concept of extraordinariness in its ordinary contexts, not externally to them. One last thing to mention here is that in suggesting that some philosophers take a shortcut in their treatments of philosophical problems, I do not mean to accuse them of doing so on purpose. The search for the nature of ‘all things’ among the Presocratics was obviously undertaken with utmost seriousness. If Rhees is correct that Thales’s hyder was not meant as liquid water but as a term that refers to the three forms in which water appears in nature—liquidity, gaseousness, and solidity—then we have in Thales a serious philosophical attempt at explanation. Although it is diffcult to attribute the same seriousness to the ideas of air and fre, the real issue with most of the Presocratics is their treatment of a philosophical question in a quasi-scientifc manner, as both Whitehead and Aristotle rightly stated. There is obviously an oversight on their part regarding how to do philosophy proper. The suggestion to go the bloody hard way and to not take short cuts is simply a reminder of the need to look more attentively at all sides of the issue at hand. I employed a signifcant number of pages in this book to point out what can be learned from Whitehead regarding the subject of the ordinary, but also to show where I think he went wrong when relying on causal interpretations to offer intelligibility on the subject. I also provided occasional reminders to Whitehead’s interpreters about how not to be one-sided regarding his views on the ordinary and the nature of philosophy. Of course, I could be the one who is misinterpreting Whitehead, whether when I argued that he oscillates between trusting and distrusting the ordinary or when I alluded to a similar oscillation in him regarding the descriptive and normative tasks of philosophy. I also realize that many of the things I stated are controversial, but I hope to have shown that no intentional short cuts were taken by me.

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———. 2009. Animal Liberation: the Defnitive Classic of the Animal Movement, updated edition. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Smith, John E. 1965. “Philosophy of Religion and Process Philosophy.” In Religion, edited by Paul Ramsey, 430–48. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Taylor, A. E. 1953. Socrates: The Man and His Thought. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. ———. 1955. Aristotle, rev. ed. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Todd, Mabel Loomis, ed. 1894. Letters of Emily Dickinson. Volume 1. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers. Urmson, J. O. 1965. “J. L. Austin.” The Journal of Philosophy 62: 499–508. ———. 1967 “The History of Analysis.” In The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, edited by Richard Rorty, 294–301. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press. Wallace, David Foster. 2005. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Little, Brown & Company. ———. 2011. The Pale King: An Unfnished Novel. New York/Boston/London: Back Bay Books. Warnock, Mary. 1969. Ethics Since 1900. London: Oxford University Press. Westermann, Claus. 1963. “God and His Creation.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 18(3): 197–209. Whitehead, Alfred N. 1917. “The Organization of Thought.” Science 44(1134): 409–19. ———. 1919. An Enquiry Concerning Natural Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, ———. 1925/1967. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1926/1996. Religion in the Making. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 1927/1995. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effects. New York: Capricorn Books. ———. 1929a/1958. The Function of Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ———. 1929b/1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffn and Donald W. Sherburne. London: Macmillan. ———. 1933/1967. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1938/1968. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1947. Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library. ———. 1961. The Interpretation of Science: Selected Essays, edited by A. H. Johnson. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Winch, Peter. 1990. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and Rush Rhees. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ———. 1969. On Certainty, translated by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Blackwell.

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———. 1970/1967. Zettel, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ———. 1975. Philosophical Remarks, edited by Rush Rhees. Translated by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1978. Remarks on Colour, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe. Translated by Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schattle. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles, CA: University of Californian Press. ———. 1980a. Culture and Value, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman. Translated by Peter Winch. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1980b. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. London: Blackwell. ———. 1993. “Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough.” In Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951, edited by James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, 118–51. Indianapolis, IN: Hacking Publishing Company. ———. 1994/1956. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, rev. ed., edited by G. H. von Wright, Rush Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Zuckerman, Phil. 2006. “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patters.” In The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, 47–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Ambrose, Alice, 68–69, 77, 79 animals. See non-human animals Aristotle, xvi, xvii, xix, xxi, 1, 14, 17, 22–23, 31–32, 34–35, 37–43, 45–47, 49–50, 52, 54, 57n2, 58nn6–7, 58–59n8, 59nn9–11, 59–60n12, 60nn14–15, 61nn16–18, 80, 89, 98, 122, 164, 171–72, 176, 181, 187, 210, 219, 228 atheism: Baggini, Julian, on, 161; Buckley, Michael, on, 159–60, 185, 187; Cobb, John B., Jr. on, 176–78, 188–90; defning, the method of, xxiv–xxi, 160–61, 163, 181–82, 189, 191; Diderot and D’Holback on, 159; and the fallacy of logical inversion, 157–59, 161–64, 167, 187–91; Febvre, Lucien, on, 159; and God, the logical priority of, xxiv–xxv, 163, 167, 171–72, 174–75, 187, 189–91; Hyman, Gavin, on, 159, 173, 185; as the inability to explain God, the outcome of, 159; as a negative experience of God, xxiv; 185–86; positive versus negative forms of, 160–64, 166, 171, 186–87; pragmatic, 160, 187; as a product of modernity, 159, 185; as religious and metaphysical blindness, xxiv–xvi,

159, 160, 164–67; similarity between Whitehead, Flew, and Dawkins on, xxiv, 157; sociological accounts of, xxiv, 170–71; Whitehead on God and, xxiv–xxv, 69, 157–59, 164–70, 171–92 Austin, J. L., xix, xxii, xxiii, 1–7, 8, 71, 79, 104, 106–7, 151–53 being as such: Aristotle on ousia and, xvi–xvii, xxi, 34–42, 59n11; Cobb, John B. Jr., on, 50–51; and conceptual intelligibility, 84–85; confusion about the language of, 91; Faber, Roland, on, 51; as a generic idea, intelligible applications of, 39; and God. See God; Hartshorne’s inconsistency regarding, 49–52; and metaphysics, Hartshorne on, 49, 61n20; and ordinary existence, xxi– xxii, 14–15, 33–34, 45–57; Plato on, xxi, 37–42, 48, 54; the Presocratics on, 34–48, 57n4, 58n6, 228; as the ultimate metaphysical problem, 17, 37, 45, 93; Whitehead on, xxi, 14–15, 17–18, 31–57 Bergmann, Gustav, xxi, 64–68, 71, 90 Berkeley, George, 122n4, 125, 129, 155n1

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The Bhagavad Gita, 183–85, 191 biases: anthropocentric, 198–99; linguistic and subjectivist. See empiricism; normative, xvi–xvii, xix, xxv, 11, 22–23, 45–46, 105, 172, 181, 184; speciesist, 220 Bradley, F. H., 52, 85 Butler, Judith, 27 Camus, Albert, 203, 214, 219 causality: and the continuity within nature, 75–77, 100, 117, 129, 133; effcient, fnal, formal, and material, xvi, 35, 46, 58n6, 60nn13, 15, 61n17, 75, 96–98, 105, 110–11, 122, 132, 165, 170, 172, 185–86; and empiricism. See empiricism; and God, 164–70; 172, 185–86, 191, 196; and grammatical explanations, 96–103, 107; and intelligibility. See intelligibility; Ramsey, Frank, on the referential view of, 138–39; and refexive action, 96–97; versus reasons and motives, 122n3 Cavell, Stanley, 71–72, 149–55, 216, 223–24 Cobb, John B., Jr.:50–51, 95, 99, 102, 104, 125, 127–29, 133–34, 175–82, 188–90 Coetzee, J. M., xix, xxv–xxvi, 76, 193–94, 195, 199–200, 201–21 Copi, Irving, 65–68; 71, 83 Creativity, xxii, 27, 47–48, 50–54, 84–85, 128, 172, 178–80, 184, 189 Dawkins, Richard, xix, xxiv–xxv, 157– 66, 171, 173, 185–87 De Certeau, Michel, xix, 9–11, 227 Dennett, Daniel, 59n10 Derrida, Jacques, xix, xxv–xxvi, 151, 152n4, 193–95, 199–202, 203, 205, 209, 214–15, 220 Descartes, René, 80, 117, 129–30, 177, 201, 206, 210, 219

De Waal, Frans, 193, 196, 198–200 Dewey, John, 27 Diamond, Cora, xix, 138–39, 193, 211–18, 225–26 Emmet, Dorothy, 119 empiricism: and causality, xx–xxiii, 98, 103–16, 119–20, 122n3, 126–27, 133–40; Coetzee’s critique of, 204–5; defnition of, 124; linguistic and subjective biases in, 98, 101, 105, 129–30; rejection of, Whitehead and Wittgenstein, xxiii, 123–24, 126, 145, 146–49; Russell’s relation to, 64, 139–40; and skepticism. See skepticism; Whitehead and, xxii–xxiii, 73, 93–96, 98–99, 101–4, 114–19, 121, 124–25, 129–35, 137; Wittgenstein and, 123, 126, 137–42, 145–46 experience and knowledge: bodily, 80, 93–94, 102–3, 117, 123, 133, 147–48, 165, 195–96; causal, xx, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 13, 17, 72–73, 75, 95–99, 101, 103–10, 114, 116–18, 124–27, 129, 136–38, 148–49, 172, 182–83, 186, 195; conscious, 86, 96, 101–2, 104, 105–6, 110, 115, 129–32, 134, 148, 166, 178, 189–90, 210; extraordinary, 6; Locke on demonstrative and intuitive, 125; ordinary, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 5–7, 12–13, 17, 44–45, 56, 66, 75–76, 93–97, 101–2, 107–9, 112, 148, 152, 179; religious, xxiv, 164–66, 171–72, 178–82, 186, 189–90, 192n1; varieties of, 43–44, 46, 56, 102, 110– 11, 127, 179–83, 186, 189–90; what can be, 91, 96, 108, 116, 149–50, 186, 205 the extraordinary: Cavell on philosophy’s responsibilities and, 150, 152–53, 216; and ordinariness, 6, 8–9, 152, 216, 227; the ordinary meaning of, 74–75; Rosen on

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philosophy and, 4–7, 13, 16, 152, 227–28; Whitehead on, 13–14, 16

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Faber, Roland, 51, 132–33, 182–83, 186 Flew, Anthony, xix, xxiv–xxv, 157–65, 171, 173, 180–81, 185–87 Frazer, James, 21, 57n1 freedom: ethical, 23–24, 26; subatomic, 16–17, 44, 60n13, 75, 131–32, 143 God: and being as such, 43–48, 50–51, 58n5, 61n16, 173; as a causal agent, 167–70, 184–85; as concealed from appearances, 186; confusion about, x, 18–22; an Einsteinian, the nature of, xxiv, 162, 180; as an engineer, 182; as an essential element in religious feelings, 166, 181–82; and evolution, 171, 182; and the fallacy of logical inversion, xxiv, 157–59, 161–64, 172–75, 183, 185, 187–91; as a formative force in the universe, xxv; Hume on the nature of, 192n1; as a mediating agent, 42; metaphysical and religious functions of, 46, 60n15, 162, 166, 177, 180–83, 191; and metaphysics. See metaphysics; the natural home of, 162, 173, 189; philosophical cuts regarding, Whitehead’s avoidance of, 174; and physicality, avoiding a category mistake, 183, 189; as a regulative agent of infuence, xxiv, 160, 187; similarity of function with philosophy, Whitehead on, 158; and then grammar of ‘immanence’, 25, 55, 61n19, 84, 88, 173–74, 192n1 grammar: of ‘the animal’, xxv, 193–94, 200–201, 203, 211, 220; and ‘breakfast’, ‘lunch’, and ‘dinner’, the concepts of, 110; of the color ‘white’, 141; of creation, 167–70, 183–85, 191, 192n2; of ‘friendship’ with nonhuman animals, 206; of

‘giddiness’, 112; of ‘kindness’, with nonhuman animals, 209, 215; and Krishna, 183–85; and languagegames, 3, 147–48; of memories, 75, 86, 98, 102, 104, 110–11, 127; and metaphysics, 25–27, 69–70, 77–90, 96–104, 110, 118–19, 140–42, 144–55, 155n3; of ‘the other’, 145, 201, 203; of ‘stone’, Wittgenstein and Whitehead on, 2, 44–45, 94; and ‘train-arrival’, the language of, 117–18; Wittgenstein on subliming, 140–41, 146–48 Hacking, Ian, 91, 217 Hanfing, Oswald, xx, 3–4, 5, 122n4 Hardy, G. H., 146 Hartshorne, Charles, 49–52, 61n20, 86 hermeneutics and responsibility, ix, xiv, xvii, 2–5, 8, 10, 21, 23, 26, 31, 43–45, 65–66, 87–90, 93–95, 97–99, 105, 108, 111, 115–16, 120, 123, 137, 149–55, 163, 193, 219, 223, 226 Hocking, W. E., 35 Hume, David, xix, 103–4, 106, 114–15, 117, 124–25, 129, 138–40, 148, 192n1, 207 intelligibility: and accessing the external world, 114–19, 122n4, 216; and accuracy, 83; and ‘importance’, the grammar of, 42, 55–56, 63, 84–85, 88, 224; and ordinariness. See ordinariness; on philosophy’s violation of, ix, xviii, 3, 76, 78; Plato’s Ideas and, 42; and prehension, the evidence of, 85–86, 103–4, 126–27, 130, 137, 148; the Presocratic abandoning of, xvi; the starting point of establishing, 34, 43, 51, 87–88, 101, 114–19, 121, 162, 167, 182; of symbolic reference in causal terms, 105–14; and Whitehead’s coinage of words, xxi, 82, 86–87, 89–90

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James, William, 41, 85, 130 Johnson, A. H., 179–80, 182

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Kant, Immanuel, 106, 115, 124, 125–26, 151, 206, 209–10, 219 Kierkegaard, Søren, xviii, xix–xx, 18– 22, 23, 26–28, 153, 203, 205, 223 language: as an artifcial form of symbolism, 18, 67, 72, 105; contextual use of, xxi–xxii, xxiii, 71, 88, 96; ideal and formal, xxi, 13, 57, 64–67, 81, 83, 92n1, 93; metaphysicalized use of, 90; ordinary, xiii, xxi–xxiii, 4–6, 12–18, 27, 31–34, 36, 49, 57, 63–74, 76–84, 87, 90–91, 92n6, 93, 101, 105–7, 121, 149, 165, 180, 227; philosophy and the importance of, 41, 91–92; Plato and, 17, 35, 41; and primal reactions, 142–44; private versus public uses of, 120, 141–42, 145; and reality, various links between, 41, 64, 68, 70, 89–90, 102–3, 105–6, 110, 112–13, 120, 126, 139–46; scientifc, xvi, 8, 13, 15–16, 18, 32–33, 68, 75, 149, 199; and Socrates, as a philosopher of ordinary, xx, 3–4; technical, the use of, xvi, 52, 81, 85, 110, 134, 148, 165, 179–80, 189 literature and philosophy: the abstract and the concrete in, 207, 210–11; the differences between, xxvi, 29, 76, 92n6, 150–51, 152–54, 181, 193, 196, 200, 203–4, 206–11, 215–16, 219; and frst principles, 92n6; and human life, the inexplicability of, 211–16, 218–19; and intellectualization, 207, 210; Nussbaum, Martha on the ordinary in, 153–54; ‘the obvious’ in relation to, 12, 64, 70, 212, 215 Locke, John, xvii, xix, 45, 122, 125, 129

logical inversion, the fallacy of, 10, 157–59, 162–64, 167, 172, 174–75, 179, 183, 185, 187, 189–91 Marx, Karl, xvi McDowell, John, 209, 216 metaphysics, xxi, xxii–xxiii, 4–5, 11, 15, 22–23, 28, 35, 40, 43–44, 46–47, 48–49, 54, 60nn12–13, 61n17, 61n20, 82–90, 98, 101, 103, 106, 118–19, 123, 129, 132, 152, 163, 165–67, 171–77, 190, 224; as an asymptotic activity, 43, 84, 92n5; defnition of, 22, 43, 49, 61n20; distrusting, xxii; and God, 46–47, 167, 171–76, 190; and intelligibility, xxiv, 44, 54, 82–90, 100–101, 106, 118, 152; normative, xx, 15, 28; and the ordinary, xxiv, 4, 11, 44; as scientifc in orientation, 98, 103, 132, 165; Wittgenstein and Whitehead on, xxiii, 123 misplaced concreteness, the fallacy of, xxv, 60n13, 154, 193–200, 207, 210, 214, 217, 220 non-human animals: and anthropomorphism, scientifc, 198–99; and boredom, the grammar of, 206; cognitive performance and, 208–9; Derrida, Jacques, on, 195, 199–203, 205, 209, 214, 215; the Holocaust, the analogy with the slaughtering of, 207–9, 218; and knowing death, the grammar of, 208, 210; and misplaced concreteness, the fallacy of, xxv, 193, 194–200, 207, 210, 217, 220; moral presence in, 195–96; Nagel, Thomas and, 209–10, 213; philosophical and moral blindness regarding, 207–8; reductionism regarding, avoiding, 193–94, 214; and speaking for oneself in, the grammar of, 202–11, 214; Whitehead on, xxv–xxvi, 193–

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200; and willful ignorance, 207–8, 212–13, 218 Nussbaum, Martha S., 153–54

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ordinariness: and atheism, 157–60, 163, 165, 175–78, 182, 189; and Austin on, 1–3, 4, 106–7, 151–52; and Cavell, 149–55, 216, 223; and De Certeau, 9–11; and empiricism. See empiricism; and Foucault, 9–10; and intelligibility, xviii, xix, 1–4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 21, 40, 44, 71, 91–92, 96, 99, 104, 106–7, 119, 121, 123, 146, 151–52, 154, 189, 227; the meaning of, 1–4, 7–9, 21, 74–75; and the natural, 1, 13, 16, 18, 34, 55–56, 67, 72–76, 79, 92n4, 105, 131, 134, 140, 147–48, 179, 189, 200; and the Presocratics and, xvi, 5; and Rosen, xx, 4–7, 16, 227; the scientifc and, 7, 16, 32, 113; and Socrates, xvii, xx, 3–5, 7; and Whitehead, xviii, xix–xxiii, 11–18, 28, 31–33, 40, 55, 63, 70–71, 76–77–79, 81–84, 91, 134, 146–49, 228; and Wittgenstein, 1–3, 4, 126, 138, 147–49, 151 Phillips, D. Z., xv, 112, 135, 142–44, 154 philosophy: animalizing, 193–94, 200– 202, 214–15, 217, 220; as defection, a form of, 214–15; on democracy and oligarchy, 223; the disinterested nature of, xv, xvii–xxi, 3–5, 7, 10, 14, 18, 22–29, 36–37, 45, 57, 59, 63, 89–90, 124, 141, 153–54, 159, 165, 174, 177, 190, 198, 207, 213, 215–16, 227–28; and dogmatism, 43, 60n13, 221; as an extraordinary activity. See the extraordinary; frst, 37–38, 46, 59n9, 61n16, 92n3; going the bloody hard way in, ix, xiii–xv, xvi–xix, xxii, 14, 75–76, 101–3, 107, 138, 154–55, 155n2, 159, 192–94, 211–17, 225–28; ideal-language,

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xxi, 13, 64–70, 79, 83, 90, 92n1, 93; and literature. See literature and philosophy; the neutrality of, xv–xvi, 224, 227; ordinary-language, xxi– xxii, 11–12, 21, 64, 68–69, 71–72, 152; and the perfect dictionary, the fallacy of, 12, 64, 81, 83 Plato, xix, xxi, 7, 14, 17, 23–25, 32, 34–38, 40–42, 45–46, 48–49, 54–55, 57nn2–3, 58n7, 58–59n8, 60n14, 83, 85, 119, 191 The Presocratics, xiii–xiv, xvi, xxi, 5, 32, 34–38, 57n4, 58n6, 228 Putnam, Hilary, xiv–xvi, 125, 180–81, 225 Ramal, Randy, 59–60n12, 159, 219 realism: Aristotelian form of, 125, 131; moral, 25, 217; naïve and critical forms of, 106, 121, 124–28, 133–34; ordinary and organic forms of, 126, 129, 132–34, 139, 146–48; philosophical, rejection of, 144 religion, ix, xxiv, 19, 26–29, 45, 55–56, 59n10, 88–89, 153, 157–58, 160–62, 166–87, 192n1, 197 Rhees, Rush, xiii–xiv, xvi, xx, 4–5, 58n6, 91, 139–40, 154, 228 Ricoeur, Paul, 7–8 Rorty, Richard, xix, 27, 64, 68, 87, 94–95, 125, 130, 153, 223–24 Rosen, Stanley, xix–xx, 4–8, 11, 13, 16, 152, 223, 227 Russell, Bertrand, 13, 40, 50, 52, 56, 63–64, 67, 90, 135–36, 139–40, 162 Scotus, John Duns, 173 Singer, Peter, 193, 208, 211, 214, 216– 20, 223, 225 skepticism: cases of justifed, xvii, xxii; Cavell on, 149–55; the empiricist roots of, Whitehead on, 123; epistemological and ontological forms of, 136, 150; Hume on, 114–15, 124–25; philosophy’s battle

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against, xxiii, 3, 20, 22, 123, 136, 142, 149, 153–54; and the private language argument, 142; Russell on refuting, 135–36; varieties of, 134–37; Wallace, David Foster, and, 149–50; Whitehead’s opening himself to, xix, 33–34; Wittgenstein and Whitehead on, xxiii Socrates, xiii, xvii–xx, 3–5, 7–8, 21, 26–28, 70, 77, 153, 223 Taylor, Charles, 159

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Urmson, J. O., 113 Wallace, David Foster, 149–50, 219, 224 Warnock, Mary, 29 Weyl, Hermann, 17 Whitehead, Alfred North: on analysis, the importance of, 26; and analytic philosophy, xviii, xx, xxiii, 11–12, 18, 31, 64, 81, 91; autobiographical notes of, xxi, 14, 31–33, 49, 54–56, 63, 225; on cosmology, adequate, 37, 40, 44–47, 95, 98, 168–69; as a descriptive and/or a normative philosopher, xv, 14, 22, 24, 27–28, 89, 124, 158, 225, 228; on the extraordinary. See the extraordinary; on God. See God; the grammatical and metaphysical, oscillation between, xxii, 14, 89, 167, 181, 228; on the humanitarian ideal, xix, xxi, 14, 22–28, 31, 33, 63, 83, 190, 223, 225; and the idea of a responsible cosmology, 98–99; inconsistencies in, xviii, xxii, 14, 51–52, 102, 117,

149; 175, 178; on language and metaphysical knowledge, 84–85; the metaphysical humility of, 40, 42–46; on metaphysical principles, using the imagination, 44, 70–71, 87; on the observational and conceptual orders, 116–19, 145; and the ordinary, trusting and distrusting, xviii–xxii, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 28, 31, 33–34, 36, 53–54, 55, 57, 59–71, 76–82, 90, 93, 105, 149, 228; and ordinary ways of being in the world, xxi, xxiv, 14, 46, 49–57, 179, 225; on organic mechanism, 35; and philosophical speculation, Francis Bacon versus, 45; as a postmodern thinker, 95; on quantum mechanics and relativity theory, 15–17, 32, 37–38, 75, 78; Smith, John, on the early, 192n1; and truth, the question of, 15–17, 25, 36, 63, 69–70, 80–82, 89–90, 94–95, 99, 104, 113, 129–31, 133, 137–38, 155n2; and ultimate reality, Justus Buchler on, 52–53 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: on arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, 2; and concept formation, 142–44; on conceptual elucidation, 126, 143; on language, going on holiday, xvi; on ‘language-game’, 3, 147–48; on logical and empirical propositions, 138; on ‘pain’, the intelligibility of the concept of, 2, 108–9, 140, 142–45; on reactions and judgment, agreements of, 2, 126, 143–44; on realism as a battle cry, 138 Zuckerman, Phil, 170–71

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About the Author

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Randy Ramal is currently a visiting researcher at Arizona State University, where he is working on a project related to radical pluralism. From 2016 to 2019, he held visiting research and teaching positions at Claremont School of Theology and the University of Zurich. Prior to that, he was a contractual Assistant Professor of Theories and Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, where he also completed his doctoral work with D. Z. Phillips. Randy is the author of twenty-one articles and chapters in scholarly journals and books in the felds of philosophy, religion, ethics, and literature. He is the editor of Metaphysics, Analysis, and the Grammar of God (Mohr Siebeck, 2010).

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