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The Philosophy of the Present
Chapter I: The Present as the Locus of Reality
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT AS THE LOCUS OF REALITY
The subject of this lecture is found in the proposition
that reality exists in a present. The present of course implies a
past and a future, and to these both we deny existence. Whitehead's
suggestion that, as specious presents vary in temporal spread, one
present can be conceived which could take in the whole of temporal
reality, would seemingly leave to us passage but would eliminate the
past and the future. Whatever else it would be it would not be a present,
for that out of which it had passed would not have ceased to exist,
and that which is to exist would already be in that inclusive present.
Whether this would still leave the character of passage might be doubted,
but in any case the essential nature of the present and of existence
would have disappeared. For that which marks a present is its becoming
and its disappearing. While the flash of the meteor is passing in
our own specious presents it is all there if only for a fraction of
a minute. To extend this fraction of a minute into the whole process
of which it is a fragment, giving to it the same solidarity of existence
which the flash possesses in experience, would be to wipe out its
nature as an event. Such a conspectus of existence would not be an
eternal present, for it would not be a present at all. Nor would it
be an existence. For a Parmenidean reality does not exist. Existence
involves non-existence; it does take place. The world is a world of
events.
There is little purpose or profit in setting up antinomies and overthrowing
the one by the other, or in relegating permanence to a subsistent,
timeless world while the event, in which there is nothing but passage,
is made the substantial element in existent things. The permanent
character that we are interested in is one that abides in existence,
and over against which change exists as well. There is, that is, the
past which is expressed in irrevocability, though there has never
been present in experience a past which has not changed with the passing
generations. The pasts that we are involved in are both irrevocable
and revocable. It is idle, at least for the purposes of experience,
to have recourse to a "real" past within which we are making
constant discoveries; for that past must be set over against a present
within which the emergent appears, and the past, which must then be
looked at from the standpoint of the emergent, becomes a different
past. The emergent when it appears is always found to follow from
the past, but before it appears it does not, by definition, follow
from the past. It is idle to insist upon universal or eternal characters
by which past events may be identified irrespective of any emergent,
for these are either beyond our formulation or they become so empty
that they serve no purpose in identification. The import of the infinite
in ancient and modern mathematical thought illustrates this impotence.
The possibility remains of pushing the whole of real reality into
a world of events in a Minkowski space-time that transcends our frames
of reference, and the characters of events into a world of subsistent
entities. How far such a conception of reality can be logically thought
out I will not undertake to discuss. What seems to me of interest
is the import which such a concept as that of irrevocability has in
experience.
I will not spend time or rhetoric in presenting the moving picture
of the histories that have succeeded each other from the myths of
primitive ages up to Eddington's or Jeans' account of "The Universe
about Us." It is only of interest to note that the rapidity with
which these pasts succeed each other has steadily increased with the
increase in critical exactitude in the study of the past. There is
an entire absence of finality in such presentations. It is of course
the implication of our research method that the historian in any field
of science will be able to reconstruct what has been, as an authenticated
account of the past. Yet we look forward with vivid interest to the
reconstruction, in the world that will be, of the world that has been,
for we realize that the world that will be cannot differ from the
world that is without rewriting the past to which we now look back.
And yet the character of irrevocability is never lost. That which
has happened is gone beyond recall and, whatever it was, its slipping
into the past seems to take it beyond the influence of emergent events
in our own conduct or in nature. It is the "what it was"
that changes, and this seemingly empty title of irrevocability attaches
to it whatever it may come to be. The importance of its being irrevocable
attaches to the "what it was," and the "what it was"
is what is not irrevocable. There is a finality that goes with the
passing of every event. To every account of that event this finality
is added, but the whole import of this finality belongs to the same
world in experience to which this account belongs.
Now over against this evident incidence of finality to a present
stands a customary assumption that the past that determines us is
there. The truth is that the past is there, in its certainty
or probability, in the same sense that the setting of our problems
is there. I am proceeding upon the assumption that cognition, and
thought as a part of the cognitive process, is reconstructive, because
reconstruction is essential to the conduct of an intelligent being
in the universe.[1] This is but part of the more
general proposition that changes are going on in the universe, and
that as a consequence of these changes the universe is becoming a
different universe. Intelligence is but one aspect of this change.
It is a change that is part of an ongoing living process that tends
to maintain itself. What is peculiar to intelligence is that it is
a change that involves a mutual reorganization, an adjustment in the
organism and a reconstitution of the environment; for at its lowest
terms any change in the organism carries with it a difference of sensitivity
and response and a corresponding difference in the environment. It
is within this process that so-called conscious intelligence arises,
for consciousness is both the difference which arises in the environment
because of its relation to the organism in its organic process of
adjustment, and also the difference in the organism because of the
change which has taken place in the environment. We refer to the first
as meaning, and to the second as ideation. The reflection of the organism
in the environment and the reflection of environment in the organism
are essential phases in the maintenance of the life process that constitutes
conscious intelligence.
I will consider the import of consciousness in a later lecture. At
present my interest is only to locate that activity to which cognition
belongs and of which thought is an expression. I am distinguishing
in particular that existence of the world for the individual and social
organism which answers to the more general usage of the term consciousness
from that situation which answers to the term "consciousness
of." It is the latter which, to my mind, connotes cognition.
The distinction between the two falls in with that which I have suggested
between the problem and its setting. The setting within which adjustment
takes place is essential to the adjustment and falls within what belongs
to the "field of consciousness," as that term is generally
used especially when we recognize the implications of that which is
more definitely in the field of consciousness. The term "field
of awareness" is at times used in the same sense, but it is more
apt to carry with it the value of "awareness of" than is
the term "consciousness." In other words, in knowledge there
is always the presupposition of a world that is there and that provides
the basis for the inferential and ideational process of cognition.
This of course restricts cognition or "consciousness of"
to that which has within it an inferential strain.
Now the world which is there in its relationship to the organism,
and which sets the conditions for the adjustment of the organism and
the consequent change in and of that world, includes its past. We
approach every question of a historical character with a certain apparatus,
which may be nicely defined, and this more technically defined material
of documents, oral testimony, and historical remains subtends a given
past which extends backward from the memories of yesterday and today,
and which we do not question. We use the apparatus to answer hypothetically
the historical questions which press upon us, and to test our hypotheses
when they have been elaborated. It is of course understood that any
part of this apparatus and of the past within which it is embedded
may itself fall under doubt, but even the most heroic skepticism in
its very enunciation cannot get away from the memory of the words
and ideas which formulate the skeptical doctrine.
Some such given past is involved in questions bearing upon the past.
And this given past extends the specious present. lt is true that
the ultimate agreement between the meanings of two documents may lie
in experience in a specious present, but only upon the supposition
of the comparison we have previously made of the documents. This comparison
stretches back of us and remains unquestioned until someone points
out an error therein and thus brings it into question, but then only
upon the basis of his and others' past. Take the ingenious suggestion,
of Gosse's father, I believe, that God had created the world with
its fossils and other evidences of a distant past to try men's faith;
and bring the suggestion up to a half an hour ago. Suppose that the
world came into existence, with its exact present structure, including
the so-called contents of our minds, thirty minutes ago, and that
we had some ulterior evidence analogous to Mr. Gosse's fundamentalist
views, that this had taken place. We could examine the hypothesis
only in the light of some past that was there, however meager it had
become. And this past extends indefinitely, there being nothing to
stop it, since any moment of it, being represented, has its past,
and so on.
What do we mean, now, by the statement that there has been some real
past with all its events, in independence of any present, whose contents
we are slowly and imperfectly deciphering? We come back of course
to the very corrections which we make in our historical research,
and to the higher degree of evidence of that which has been discovered
over that which can be offered for the discarded account. Higher degrees
of probability and added evidence imply that there is or has been
some reality there which we are bringing to light. There is thus a
palpable reference to the unquestioned past by means of whose evidence
we investigate and solve the problems that arise. And the very fact
to which I have referred, that any accepted account of the past, though
not now in question, may be conceivably thrown into doubt, seems to
imply some unquestionable past which would be the background for the
solution of all conceivable problems. Let us admit this for the time
being, and ask the further question whether this past independent
of any present does enter at all into our investigations -- I mean
as a presupposition that plays any part in our thinking? If we should
take away this presupposition would our apparatus and the operation
of it in historical research be in any way affected? Certainly not,
if we concern ourselves only with the problems with which historians
in social or scientific history are concerned. Here the reference
is always and solely to the given past out of which a problem has
arisen; and the outlines of the problem and the tests to which presented
hypotheses are subjected, are found in the given past. As we have
seen, this given past may itself at a later date be affected with
doubt and brought under discussion. And yet the possible dubiety of
the given past in no way affects the undertaking. This is another
way of saying that the dubiety of all possible pasts never enters
into the historian's thinking. The only approach to such entrance
is the demand that all past pasts should be accounted for and taken
up into the latest statement. And every past past, in so far as it
is reconstructed, is in so far shown to be incorrect. In the implications
of our method we seem to approach a limiting statement, even if at
infinity, which would fill out all gaps and correct all errors. But
if we are making corrections there must seemingly be some account
that is correct, and even if we contemplate an indefinite future of
research science which will be engaged in the undertaking we never
escape from this implication.
There is another way of saying this, and that is that our research
work is that of discovery, and we can only discover what is there
whether we discover it or not. I think however that this last statement
is in error, if it is supposed to imply that there is or has been
a past which is independent of all presents, for there may be and
beyond doubt is in any present with its own past a vast deal which
we do not discover, and yet this which we do or do not discover will
take on different meaning and be different in its structure as an
event when viewed from some later standpoint. Is there a similar error
in the conception of correction of the past error and in the suggestion
that it implies the absolutely correct, even if it never reaches it?
I am referring to the "in-itself" correctness of an account
of events, implied in a correction which a later historian makes.
I think that the absolute correctness which lies back in the historian's
mind would be found to be the complete presentation of the given past,
if all its implications were worked out. If we could know everything
implied in our memories, our documents and our monuments, and were
able to control all this knowledge, the historian would assume that
he had what was absolutely correct. But a historian of the time of
Aristotle, extending thus his known past, would have reached a correct
past which would be at utter variance with the known world of modern
science, and there are only degrees of variance between such a comparison
and those which changes due to research are bringing out in our pasts
from year to year. If we are referring to any other "in-itself"
correctness it must be either to that of a reality which by definition
could never get into our experience, or to that of a goal at infinity
in which the type of experience in which we find ourselves ceases.
It is of course possible to assume that the experience within which
we find ourselves is included in some world or experience that transcends
it. My only point is that such an assumption plays no part in our
judgments of the correctness of the past. We may have other reasons,
theological or metaphysical, for assuming a real past that could be
given in a presentation independent of any present, but that assumption
does not enter into the postulations or technique of any sort of historical
research.
While the conception of an "in-itself" irrevocable past
is perhaps the common background of thinking, it is interesting to
recur to the statement that I made earlier that the research scientist
looks forward not only with equanimity but also with excited interest
to the fundamental changes which later research will bring into the
most exact determinations which we can make today. The picture which
this offers is that of presents sliding into each other, each with
a past which is referable to itself, each past taking up into itself
those back of it, and in some degree reconstructing them from its
own standpoint. The moment that we take these earlier presents as
existences apart from the presentation of them as pasts they cease
to have meaning to us and lose any value they may have in interpreting
our own present and determining our futures. They may be located in
the geometry of Minkowski space-time, but even under that assumption
they can reach us only through our own frames of reference or perspectives;
and the same would be true under the assumptions of any other metaphysics
which located the reality of the past in pasts independent of any
present.
It would probably be stated that the irrevocability of the past is
located in such a metaphysical order, and that is the point which
I wish to discuss. The historian does not doubt that something has
happened. He is in doubt as to what has happened. He also proceeds
upon the assumption that if he could have all the facts or data, he
could determine what it was that happened. That is, his idea of irrevocability
attaches, as I have already stated, to the "what" that has
happened as well as to the passing of the event. But if there is emergence,
the reflection of this into the past at once takes place. There is
a new past, for from every new rise the landscape that stretches behind
us becomes a different landscape. The analogy is faulty, because the
heights are there, and the aspects of the landscapes which they reveal
are also there and could be reconstructed from the present of the
wayfarer if he had all the implications of his present before him;
whereas the emergent is not there in advance, and by definition could
not be brought within even the fullest presentation of the present.
The metaphysical reality suggested by Eddington's phrase that our
experience is an adventuring of the mind into the ordered geometry
of space-time[2] would, however, correspond to a
preexistent landscape.
There is of course the alternative doctrine of Whitehead that perspectives
exist in nature as intersecting time systems, thus yielding not only
different presents but also different pasts that correspond to them.
I cannot, however, see how Whitehead with the fixed geometry of space-time
which he accepts can escape from a fixed order of events, even though
the "what" of these events depends upon the ingression of
eternal objects arising through the action of God, thus giving rise
to emergence.[3] The point at issue is whether the
necessity with which the scientist deals is one that determines the
present out of a past which is independent of that or any present.
An ordered space-time involves such a metaphysical necessity. From
this standpoint the different pasts of experience are subjective reinterpretations,
and the physicist is not interested in making them a part of the whole
scheme of events. Whitehead's philosophy is a valiant attempt to harmonize
this sort of geometric necessity with emergence and the differences
of varying perspectives. I do not believe that this can be accomplished,
but I am more interested in the answer to the question, whether the
necessity which is involved in the relations of the present and the
past derives from such a metaphysical necessity, that is, from one
that is independent of any present.
I revert here to my original proposition that a reality that transcends
the present must exhibit itself in the present. This alternative is
that found in the attitude of the research scientist, whether he confesses
it in his doctrine or not. It is that there is and always will be
a necessary relation of the past and the present but that the present
in which the emergent appears accepts that which is novel as an essential
part of the universe, and from that standpoint rewrites its past.
The emergent then ceases to be an emergent and follows from the past
which has replaced the former past. We speak of life and consciousness
as emergents but our rationalistic natures will never be satisfied
until we have conceived a universe within which they arise inevitably
out of that which preceded them. We cannot make the emergent a part
of the thought relation of past and present, and even when we have
seemingly accepted it we push biochemistry and behavioristic psychology
as far as we can in the effort to reduce emergence to a disappearing
point. But granting the research scientist a complete victory -- a
wholly rationalized universe within which there is determined order-he
will still look forward to the appearance of new problems that will
emerge in new presents to be rationalized again with another past
which will take up the old past harmoniously into itself.
Confessedly, the complete rationality of the universe is based upon
an induction, and what the induction is based upon is a moot point
in philosophic doctrine. Granted any justifiable reason for believing
it, all our correlations greatly strengthen it. But is there such
a reason? At this crucial point there is the greatest uncertainty.
Evidently the scientist's procedure ignores this. It is not a moot
question with him. It is not a question in his procedure at all. He
is simply occupied in finding rational order and stretching this back,
that he may previse the future. It is here that his given world functions.
If he can fit his hypothesis into this world and if it anticipates
that which occurs, it then becomes the account of what has happened.
If it breaks down, another hypothesis replaces it and another past
replaces that which the first hypothesis implied.
The long and short of it is that the past (or the meaningful structure
of the past) is as hypothetical as the future. jeans' account of what
has been taking place inside of Aldebaran or Sirius Minor during the
past millions of years is vastly more hypothetical than the astronomer's
catalogue of what eclipses will take place during the next century
and where they will be visible. And the metaphysical assumption that
there has been a definite past of events neither adds to nor subtracts
from the security of any hypothesis which illuminates our present.
It does indeed offer the empty form into which we extend any hypothesis
and develop its implications, but it has not even the fixity which
Kant found in his forms of intuition. The paradoxes of relativity,
what Whitehead terms the different meanings of time in different time
systems, reveal the hypothetical nature of the ruled schedules of
the past into which we are to fit the events which our physical theories
unroll behind us. We may have recourse to the absolute space-time
with its coincidences of events and intervals between them, but even
here it is open to argument whether this interpretation of the transformations
from one frame of reference to another is the final one, whether we
have attained the ultimate structure of the physical universe or only
a more powerful mathematical apparatus for reaching higher exactitude
in measurements and calculations, whose interpretation will vary with
the history of mathematical physics. The Minkowski space-time is as
much an hypothesis as the de Broglie wave-constitution of matter.
But the irrevocability of the past event remains even if we are uncertain
what the past event was. Even the reversible character of physical
processes which mathematical equations seem to disclose does not shake
this character of time experience. It may be thinkable that viewed
from some vast distance the order of some of what we call the same
events might differ in different perspectives, but within any perspective
what has passed cannot recur. In that perspective what has happened
has happened, and any theory that is presented must make room for
that order in that perspective. There is an unalterable temporal direction
in what is taking place and if we can attach other processes to this
passage we can give to them as much of certainty as the degree of
attachment justifies. Given a certain value for the velocity of a
moving body in a certain frame of reference, we can determine where
the body will necessarily be. Our problem is to determine just what
it is that has preceded what is taking place so that the direction
of temporal progress may determine what the world is going to be.
There is a certain temporal process going on in experience. What has
taken place issues in what is taking place, and in this passage what
has occurred determines spatio-temporally what is passing into the
future. So far then as we can determine the constants of motion we
can follow that determination, and our analysis seeks to resolve the
happening in so far as may be into motion. In general, since passage
is itself given in experience, the direction of changes that are going
on partly conditions what will take place. The event that has taken
place and the direction of the process going on form the basis for
the rational determination of the future. The irrevocable past and
the occurring change are the two factors to which we tie up all our
speculations in regard to the future. Probability is found in the
character of the process which is going on in experience. Yet however
eagerly we seek for such spatiotemporal structures as carry with them
deducible results, we none the less recognize relations of things
in their processes which can not be resolved into quantitative elements,
and although as far as possible we correlate them with measurable
characters we in any case recognize them as determining conditions
of what is taking place. We look for their antecedents in the past
and judge the future by the relation of this past to what is taking
place. All of these relationships within the ongoing process are determining
relations of what will be, though the specific form of that determination
constitutes the scientific problem of any particular situation. The
actuality of determination within the passage of direct experience
is what Hume by his presuppositions and type of analysis eliminated
from experience, and what gives such validity as it has to Kant's
deduction of the categories.
It is the task of the philosophy of today to bring into congruence
with each other this universality of determination which is the text
of modern science, and the emergence of the novel which belongs not
only to the experience of human social organisms, but is found also
in a nature which science and the philosophy that has followed it
have separated from human nature. The difficulty that immediately
presents itself is that the emergent has no sooner appeared than we
set about rationalizing it, that is, we undertake to show that it,
or at least the conditions that determine its appearance, can be found
in the past that lay behind it. Thus the earlier pasts out of which
it emerged as something which did not involve it are taken up into
a more comprehensive past that does lead up to it. Now what this amounts
to is that whatever does happen, even the emergent, happens under
determining conditions--especially, from the standpoint of the exact
sciences, under spatio-temporal conditions which lead to deducible
conclusions as to what will happen within certain limits, but also
under determining conditions of a qualitative sort whose assurances
lie within probability only-but that these conditions never determine
completely the "what it is" that will happen. Water as distinct
from combinations of oxygen and hydrogen may happen. Life and so-called
consciousness may happen. And quanta may happen, though it may be
argued that such happening stands on a different "level"
from that of life and consciousness. When these emergents have appeared
they become part of the determining conditions that occur in real
presents, and we are particularly interested in presenting the past
which in the situation before us conditioned the appearance of the
emergent, and especially in so presenting it that we can lead up to
new appearances of this object. We orient ourselves not with reference
to the past which was a present within which the emergent appeared,
but in such a restatement of the past as conditioning the future that
we may control its reappearance. When life has appeared we can breed
life, and given consciousness, we can control its appearance and its
manifestations. Even the statement of the past within which the emergent
appeared is inevitably made from the standpoint of a world within
which the emergent is itself a conditioning as well as a conditioned
factor.
We could not bring back these past presents simply as they occurred-if
we are justified in using the expression except as presents. An exhaustive
presentation of them would amount only to reliving them. That is,
one present slipping into another does not connote what is meant by
a past. But even this statement implies that there were such presents
slipping into each other, and whether we regard them from that standpoint
or not we seem to imply their reality as such, as the structure within
which the sort of past in which we are interested must lie, if it
is an aspect of the real past. Passing by the ambiguities which such
a statement carries within it, what I want to emphasize is that the
irrevocability of the past does not issue from this conception of
the past. For in our use of the term irrevocability we are pointing
toward what must have been, and it is a structure and process in the
present which is the source of this necessity. We certainly cannot
go back to such a past and test our conjectures by actually inspecting
its events in their happening. We test our conjectures about the past
by the conditioning directions of the present and by later happenings
in the future which must be of a certain sort if the past we have
conceived was there. The force of irrevocability then is found in
the extension of the necessity with which what has just happened conditions
what is emerging in the future. What is more than this belongs to
a metaphysical picture that takes no interest in the pasts which arise
behind us.
In the analysis which I have undertaken we come then, first,
to passage within which what is taking place conditions that
which is arising. Everything that is taking place takes place under
necessary conditions. Second, these conditions while necessary
do not determine in its full reality that which emerges. We are getting
interesting reflections of this situation from the scientist's criticism
of his own methods of reaching exact determination of position and
velocity and from the implications of quanta. What appears in this
criticism is that while the scientist never abandons the conditioning
of that which takes place by that which has gone on, expressed in
probability, he finds himself quite able to think as emergent even
those events which are subject to the most exact determination. I
am not attempting to previse what later interpretation will be put
upon the speculations of de Broglie, Schroeder, and Planck. I am simply
indicating that even within the field of mathematical physics rigorous
thinking does not necessarily imply that conditioning of the present
by the past carries with it the complete determination of the present
by the past.
Third, in passage the conditioning of that which is taking
place by that which has taken place, of the present by the past, is
there. The past in that sense is in the present; and, in
what we call conscious experience, its presence is exhibited in memory,
and in the historical apparatus which extends memory, as that part
of the conditioning nature of passage which reflects itself into the
experience of the organic individual. If all objects in a present
are conditioned by the same characters in passage, their pasts are
implicitly the same, but if, to follow out a suggestion taken from
the speculations about quanta, one electron out of two thousand sets
energy free, when there are no determining conditions for the selection
of this electron over against the other nineteen hundred and ninety
nine, it is evident that the past as exhibited in the conduct of this
electron will be of a sort that will not even implicitly be the same
as that of the others in that group, though its jump will be conditioned
by all that has gone before. If of two thousand individuals under
disintegrating social conditions one commits suicide where, so far
as can be seen, one was as likely to succumb as another, his past
has a peculiarly poignant nature which is absent from that of the
others, though his committing of suicide is an expression of the past.
The past is there conditioning the present and its passage into the
future, but in the organization of tendencies embodied in one individual
there may be an emergent which gives to these tendencies a structure
which belongs only to the situation of that individual. The tendencies
coming from past passage, and from the conditioning that is inherent
in passage, become different influences when they have taken on this
organized structure of tendencies. This would be as true of the balance
of processes of disruption and of agglomeration in a star as in the
adjustment to each other of a living form and its environment. The
structural relationship in their reciprocal balance or adjustment
arranges those passing processes which reflect backward and lead us
to an account of the history of the star. As Dewey has maintained,
events appear as histories which have a dénouement, and when
an historical process is taking place the organization of the conditioning
phases of the process is the novel element which is not predictable
from the separate phases themselves, and which at once sets the scene
for a past that leads to this outcome.[4] The organization
of any individual thing carries with it the relation of this thing
to processes that occurred before this organization set in. In this
sense the past of that thing is "given" in the passing present
of the thing, and our histories of things are elaborations of what
is implicit in this situation. This "given" in passage is
there and is the starting point for a cognitive structure of a past.
Fourth, this emergent character, being responsible for a
relationship of passing processes, sets up a given past that is, so
to speak, a perspective of the object within which this character
appears. We can conceive of an object such as, say, some atom of hydrogen,
which has remained what it is through immeasurable periods in complete
adjustment to its surroundings, which has remained real in the slipping
of one present into another, or, better, in one unbroken, uneventful
passage. For such an object there would have been unbroken existence
but no past, unless we should revert to the occasion on which it emerged
as an atom of hydrogen. This amounts to saying that where being is
existence but not becoming there is no past, and that the determination
involved in passage is a condition of a past but not its realization.
The relationship of passage involves distinguishable natures in events
before past, present and future can arise, as extension is a relationship
which involves distinguishable physical things before structurable
space can arise. What renders one event distinguishable from another
is a becoming which affects the inner nature of the event. It seems
to me that the extreme mathematization of recent science in which
the reality of motion is reduced to equations in which change disappears
in an identity, and in which space and time disappear in a four dimensional
continuum of indistinguishable events which is neither space nor time
is a reflection of the treatment of time as passage without becoming.
What then is a present? Whitehead's definition would come back to
the temporal spread of the passage of the events that make up a thing,
a spread which is extended enough to make it possible for the thing
to be what it is.[5] That of an atom of iron would
not need to be longer than the period within which the revolution
of each of its electrons around the nucleus is completed. The universe
during this period would constitute a duration from the point of view
of the atom. The specious present of a human individual would presumably
be a period within which he could be himself. From the standpoint
which I have suggested it would involve a becoming. There must be
at least something that happens to and in the thing which affects
the nature of the thing in order that one moment may be distinguishable
from another, in order that there may be time. But there is in such
a statement a conflict of principles of definition. From one standpoint
we are seeking for what is essential to a present; from the other
we are seeking for the lower limit in a process of division. I will
refer to the latter first, for it involves the question of the relation
of time to passage-to that within which time seems to lie and in terms
of whose extension we place time and compare times. The thousandth
part of a second has a real significance, and we can conceive of the
universe as foundering in a sea of entropy within which all becoming
has ceased. We are dealing here with an abstraction of the extension
of mere passage from the time within which events happen because they
become. In Whitehead's treatment this is called "extensive abstraction,"
and leads up to an event-particle as mathematical analysis leads up
to the differential. And an event-particle should have the same relationship
to something that becomes that the differential of a change such as
an accelerating velocity has to the whole process. In so far, extensive
abstraction is a method of analysis and integration and asks for no
other justification than its success. But Whitehead uses it as a method
of metaphysical abstraction and finds in the mere happening the event,
the substance of that which becomes. He transfers the content of what
becomes to a world of "eternal objects" having ingression
into events under the control of a principle lying outside of their
occurrence. While, then, the existence of what occurs is found in
the present, the "what it is" that occurs does not arise
out of happening, it happens to the event through the metaphysical
process of ingression. This seems to me to be an improper use of abstraction,
since it leads to a metaphysical separation of what is abstracted
from the concrete reality from which the abstraction is made, instead
of leaving it as a tool in the intellectual control of that reality.
Bergson refers, I think, to the same improper use of abstraction,
in another context, as the spatialization of time, contrasting the
exclusive nature of such temporal moments with the interpenetration
of the contents of "real" duration.
If, on the contrary, we recognize what becomes as the event which
in its relation to other events gives structure to time, then the
abstraction of passage from what is taking place is purely methodological.
We carry our analysis as far as the control of subject matter requires,
but always with the recognition that what is analysed out has its
reality in the integration of what is taking place. That this is the
result of defining the event as that which becomes, is evident, I
think, in the application and testing of our most abstruse hypotheses.
To be of value and to be accredited these must present new events
springing out of old, such as the expansion or contraction of the
universe in Einstein's and Weyl's speculations on the seeming recessions
at enormous velocities of distant nebulae, or the stripping of electrons
from atomic nuclei in the center of stellar bodies in jeans' speculations
upon the transformation of matter into radiation. And these happenings
should so fit into our experimental findings that they may find their
reality in the concretion of what is taking place in an actual present.
The pasts which they spread back of us are as hypothetical as the
future which they assist us in prevising. They become valid in interpreting
nature in so far as they present a history of becomings in nature
leading up to that which is becoming today, in so far as they bring
out what fits into the pattern that is emerging from the roaring loom
of time, not in so far as they erect metaphysical entities which are
the tenuous obverse of mathematical apparatus.
(22)
If, in Bergson's phrase, "real duration" becomes time through
the appearance of unique events which are distinguishable from each
other through their qualitative nature, a something that is emergent
in each event, then bare passage is a manner of arranging these events.
But what is essential to this arrangement is that in each interval
which is isolated it must be possible that something should become,
that something unique should arise. We are subject to a psychological
illusion if we assume that the rhythm of counting and the order which
arises out of counting answer to a structure of passage itself, apart
from the processes which fall into orders through the emergence of
events. We never reach the interval itself between events, except
in correlations between them and other situations within which we
find congruence and replacement, something that can never take place
in passage as such. We reach what may be called a functional equality
of represented intervals within processes involving balance and rhythm,
but on this basis to set up time as a quantity having an essential
nature that allows of its being divided into equal portions of itself
is an unwarranted use of abstraction. We can hypothetically reconstruct
the past processes that are involved in what is going on as a basis
for the cognitive construction of the future which is arising. What
we are assured of by the experimental data is that we comprehend that
which is going on sufficiently to predict what will take place, not
that we have attained a correct picture of the past independent of
any present, for we expect this picture to change as new events emerge.
In this attitude we are relating in our anticipation presents that
slip into others, and their pasts belong to them. They have to be
reconstructed as they are taken up into a new present and as such
they belong to that present, and no longer to the present out of which
we have passed into the present present.
(23)
A present then, as contrasted with the abstraction of mere passage,
is not a piece cut out anywhere from the temporal dimension of uniformly
passing reality. Its chief reference is to the emergent event, that
is, to the occurrence of something which is more than the processes
that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance,
adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed.
The mark of passage without emergent events is its formulation in
equations in which the so-called instances disappear in an identity,
as Meyerson has pointed out.[6]
Given an emergent event, its relations to antecedent processes become
conditions or causes. Such a situation is a present. It marks out
and in a sense selects what has made its peculiarity possible. It
creates with its uniqueness a past and a future. As soon as we view
it, it becomes a history and a prophecy. Its own temporal diameter
varies with the extent of the event. There may be a history of the
physical universe as an appearance of a galaxy of galaxies. There
is a history of every object that is unique. But there would be no
such history of the physical universe until the galaxy appeared, and
it would continue only so long as the galaxy maintained itself against
disruptive and cohesive forces. If we ask what may be the temporal
spread of the uniqueness which is responsible for a present the answer
must be, in Whitehead's terms, that it is a period long enough to
enable the object to be what it is. But the question is ambiguous
for the term "temporal spread" implies a measure of time.
The past as it appears with the present and future, is the relation
of the emergent event to the situation out of which it arose, and
it is the event that defines that situation. The continuance or disappearance
(24) of that which arises is the present passing
into the future. Past, present and future belong to a passage which
attains temporal structure through the event, and they may be considered
long or short as they are compared with other such passages. But as
existing in nature, so far as such a statement has significance, the
past and the future are the boundaries of what we term the present,
and are determined by the conditioning relationships of the event
to its situation.
The pasts and futures to which we refer extend beyond these contiguous
relations in passage. We extend them out in memory and history, in
anticipation and forecast. They are preeminently the field of ideation,
and find their locus in what is called mind. While they are in the
present, they refer to that which is not in that present, as is indicated
by their relation to past and future. They refer beyond themselves
and out of this reference arises their representational nature. They
evidently belong to organisms, that is to emergent events whose nature
involves the tendency to maintain themselves. In other words their
situation involves adjustment looking toward a past, and selective
sensitivity looking toward a future. What may be called the stuff
out of which ideas arise are the attitudes of these organisms, habits
when we look toward the past, and early adjustments within the act
to the results of their responses when we look toward the future.
So far these belong to what may be termed the immediate past and future.
This relation of the event to its situation, of the organism to its
environment, with their mutual dependence, brings us to relativity,
and to the perspectives in which this appears in experience. The nature
of environment answers to the habits and selective attitudes of organisms,
and the qualities that belong to the objects of the environment can
only be expressed in terms of sensitivities of these organisms. And
the same is true of ideas. The organism, through it (25)
habits and anticipatory attitudes, finds itself related to what extends
beyond its immediate present. Those characters of things which in
the activity of the organism refer to what lies beyond the present
take on the value of that to which they refer. The field of mind,
then, is the larger environment which the activity of the organism
calls for but which transcends the present. What is present in the
organism, however, is its own nascent activity, and that in itself
and in the environment which sustains it, and there is present also
its movement from the past and beyond the present. It belongs to the
so-called conscious organism to complete this larger temporal environment
by the use of characters found in the present. The mechanism by which
the social mind accomplishes this I will discuss later; what I wish
to bring out now is that the field of mind is the temporal extension
of the environment of the organism, and that an idea resides in the
organism because the organism is using that in itself which moves
beyond its present to take the place of that toward which its own
activity is tending. That in the organism which provides the occasion
for mind is the activity which reaches beyond the present within which
the organism exists.
But in such an account as this I have been implicitly setting up
this larger period within which, say, an organism begins and completes
its history as there seemingly in independence of any present, and
it is my purpose to insist upon the opposite proposition that these
larger periods can have no reality except as they exist in presents
and that all their implications and values are there located. Of course
this comes back, first, to the evident fact that all the apparatus
of the past, memory images, historical monuments, fossil remains and
the like are in some present, and, second, to that portion
of the past which is there in passage in experience as determined
by the emergent event. It come (26) back, third,
to the necessary test of the formulation of the past in the rising
events in experience. The past we are talking about lies with all
its characters within that present.
There is, however, the assumed implication that this present refers
to entities which have a reality independent of this and any other
present, whose full detail, though of course beyond recall, is inevitably
presumed. Now there is a confusion between such a metaphysical assumption
and the evident fact that we are unable to reveal all that is involved
in any present. Here we stand with Newton before a boundless sea and
are only gathering the pebbles upon its shore. There is nothing transcendent
about this powerlessness of our minds to exhaust any situation. Any
advance which makes toward greater knowledge simply extends the horizon
of experience, but all remains within conceivable experience. A greater
mind than Newton's or Einstein's would reveal in experience, in the
world that is there, structures and processes that we cannot find
nor even adumbrate. Or take Bergson's conception of all our memories,
or all occurrences in the form of images, crowding in upon us, and
held back by a central nervous system. All of this is conceivable
in a present whose whole richness should be at the disposal of that
very present. This does not mean that the aeons revealed in those
structures and processes, or the histories which those images connote
would unroll themselves in a present as temporally extended as their
formulation implies. It means, in so far as such an unbridled conception
or imagination can have meaning, that we should have an inconceivable
richness offered to our analysis in the approach to any problem arising
in experience.
The past in passage is irrecoverable as well as irrevocable. It is
producing all the reality that there is. The meaning of that which
is, is illuminated and expanded in the face of the emergent in experience,
like (a+b) to the 25th power (27) by the binomial
theorem, by the expansion of the passage which is going on. To say
that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the 4th of July
1776 means that in the time system which we carry around with us and
with the formulation of our political habits, this date comes out
in our celebrations. Being what we are in the social and physical
world that we inhabit we account for what takes place on this time
schedule, but like railway time-tables it is always subject to change
without notice. Christ was born four years before A.D.
Our reference is always to the structure of the present, and our
test of the formulation we make is always that of successfully carrying
out our calculations and observations in a rising future. If we say
that something happened at such a date, whether we can ever specify
it or not, we must mean that if in imagination we put ourselves back
at the supposed date we should have had such an experience, but this
is not what we are concerned with when we work out the history of
the past. It is the import of what is going on in action or appreciation
which requires illumination and direction, because of the constant
appearance of the novel from whose standpoint our experience calls
for a reconstruction which includes the past.
The best approach to this import is found in the world within which
our problems arise. Its things are enduring things that are what they
are because of the conditioning character of passage. Their past is
in what they are. Such a past is not eventual. When we elaborate the
history of a tree whose wood is found in the chairs in which we sit,
all the way from the diatom to the oak but lately felled, this history
revolves about the constant re-interpretation of facts that are continually
arising; nor are these novel facts to be found simply in the impact
of changing human experiences upon a world that is there. For, in
the first place, human (28) experiences are as much
a part of this world as are any of its other characteristics, and
the world is a different world because of these experiences. And,
in the second place, in any history that we construct we are forced
to recognize the shift in relationship between the conditioning passage
and emergent event, in that part of the past which belongs to passage,
even when this passage is not expanded in ideation.
The outcome of what I have said is that the estimate and import of
all histories lies in the interpretation and control of the present;
that as ideational structures they always arise from change, which
is as essential a part of reality as the permanent, and from the problems
which change entails; and that the metaphysical demand for a set of
events which is unalterably there in an irrevocable past, to which
these histories seek a constantly approaching agreement, comes back
to motives other than those at work in the most exact scientific research.
Note to CHAPTER 1[7]
Durations are a continual sliding of presents into each other. The
present is a passage constituted by processes whose earlier phases
determine in certain respects their later phases. Reality then is
always in a present. When the present has passed it no longer is.
The question arises whether the past arising in memory and in the
projection of this still further backwards, refers to events which
existed as such continuous presents passing into each other, or to
that conditioning phase of the passing present which enables us to
determine conduct with reference to the future which is (29)
also arising in the present. It is this latter thesis which I am maintaining.
The implication of my position is that the past is such a construction
that the reference that is found in it is not to events having a reality
independent of the present which is the seat of reality, but rather
to such an interpretation of the present in its conditioning passage
as will enable intelligent conduct to proceed. It is of course evident
that the materials out of which that past is constructed lie in the
present. I refer to the memory images and the evidences by which we
build up the past, and to the fact that any reinterpretation of the
picture we form of the past will be found in a present, and will be
judged by the logical and evidential characters which such data possess
in a present. It is also evident that there is no appeal from these
in their locus of a present to a real past which lies like a scroll
behind us, and to which we may recur to check up on our constructions.
We are not deciphering a manuscript whose passages can be made intelligible
in themselves and left as secure presentations of that portion of
what has gone before, to be supplemented by later final constructions
of other passages. We are not contemplating an ultimate unchangeable
past that may be spread behind us in its entirety subject to no further
change. Our reconstructions of the past vary in their extensiveness,
but they never contemplate the finality of their findings. They are
always subject to conceivable reformulations, on the discovery of
later evidence, and this reformulation may be complete. Even the most
vivid of memory images may be in error. In a word our assurances concerning
the past are never attained by a congruence between the constructed
past and a real past independent of this construction, though we carry
this attitude at the back of our heads, because we do bring our immediate
hypothetical reconstructions to the test of the accepted past and
adjudge (30) them by their agreement with the accepted
record; but this accepted past lies in a present and is subject, itself,
to possible reconstruction.
Now it is possible to accept all this, with a full admission that
no item in the accepted past is final, and yet to maintain that there
remains a reference in our formulation of the past event to a something
that happened which we can never expect to resuscitate in the content
of reality, something that belonged to the event in the present within
which it occurred. This amounts to saying that there is behind us
a scroll of elapsed presents, to which our constructions of the past
refer, though without the possibility of ever reaching it, and without
the anticipation that our continual reconstructions will approach
it with increasing exactness. And this brings me to the point at issue.
Such a scroll, if attained, is not the account that our pasts desiderate.
If we could bring back the present that has elapsed in the reality
which belonged to it, it would not serve us. It would be that present
and would lack just that character which we demand in the past, that
is, that construction of the conditioning nature of now present passage
which enables us to interpret what is arising in the future that belongs
to this present. When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into
them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become;
and if he could, that is if he could reproduce the experience as it
then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not
being in the present within which that use must take place. A string
of presents conceivably existing as presents would never constitute
a past. If then there is such a reference it is not to an entity which
could fit into any past, and I cannot believe that the reference,
in the past as experienced, is to a something which would not have
the function or value that in our experience belongs to a past. We
are not referring to a real past event which would not be the past
event we are seeking. Another way of saying this is (31)
that our pasts are always mental in the same manner in which the futures
that lie in our imaginations ahead of us are mental. They differ,
apart from their successive positions, in that the determining conditions
of interpretation and conduct are embodied in the past as that is
found in the present, but they are subject to the same test of validity
to which our hypothetical futures are subject. And the novelty of
every future demands a novel past.
This, however, overlooks one important character of any past, and
that is that no past which we can construct can be as adequate as
the situation demands. There is always a reference to a past which
cannot be reached, and one that is still consonant with the function
and import of a past. It is always conceivable that the implications
of the present should be carried further than we do actually carry
them, and further than we can possibly carry them. There is always
more knowledge which would be desirable for the solution of any problem
confronting us but which we cannot attain. With the conceivable attainment
of this knowledge we should undoubtedly construct a past truer to
the present within which the implications of this past lie. And it
is to this past that there is always a reference within every past
which imperfectly presents itself to our investigation. If we had
every possible document and every possible monument from the period
of Julius Caesar we should unquestionably have a truer picture of
the man and of what occurred in his life-time, but it would be a truth
which belongs to this present, and a later present would reconstruct
it from the standpoint of its own emergent nature. We can then conceive
of a past which in any one present would be irrefragable. So far as
that present was concerned it would be a final past, and if we consider
the matter, I think that it is this past to which the reference lies
in that which goes beyond the statement which the historian can give,
and which we are apt to assume to be a past independent of the present.
Endnotes
- For a fuller account of this theory of knowledge see "A Pragmatic
Theory of Truth," University, of California Publications in
Philosophy, Vol. 11, page 65 ff.
- "Space, Time, and Gravitation," page 51.
- Mr. Mead's recurrent discussion of Whitehead is based mainly on
"The Principles of Natural Knowledge" and "The Concept
of Nature," with some reference also to "Science and the
Modem World." He did not include "Process and Reality"
in his discussion.
- Cf. "Experience and Nature," chapters 3 and 7.
- Cf. "The Principles of Natural Knowledge," 2nd ed.,
page 22 ff.
- "Identity and Reality" passim.
- These pages were found among Mr. Mead's papers after his death.
They seem to have been written later than the chapter to which they
are here appended, possibly as a result of a critical discussion
of it at the University of Chicago Philosophy Club meeting in January
1931.
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Gordon Ward and Robert
Throop
The Mead Project, Department of Sociology, Brock University, St. Catharines,
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