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The Philosophy of the Present
Supplementary Essay 4: The Objective Reality of Perspectives
IV
THE OBJECTIVE REALITY OF PERSPECTIVES
The grandiose undertaking of Absolute Idealism to
bring the whole of reality within experience failed. It failed because
it left the perspective of the finite ego hopelessly infected with subjectivity
and consequently unreal. From its point of view the theoretical and
practical life of the individual had no part in the creative advance
of nature. It failed also because scientific method, with its achievements
of discovery and invention, could find no adequate statement in its
dialectic. It recognized the two dominant forces of modern life, the
creative individual and creative science only to abrogate them as falsifications
of the experience of the absolute ego. The task remained unfulfilled,
the task of restoring to nature the characters and qualities which a
metaphysics of mind and a science of matter and motion had concurred
in relegating to consciousness, and of finding such a place for mind
in nature that nature could appear in experience. A constructive restatement
of the problem was presented by a physiological and experimental psychology
that fastened mind inextricably in an organic nature which both science
and philosophy recognized. The dividend which philosophy declared upon
this restatement is indicated in William James's reasoned query "Does
Consciousness exist?" The metaphysical assault upon the dualism
of mind and nature, that has been becoming every day more intolerable,
has been made in regular formation by Bergson's evolutionary philosophy,
by neo-idealism, by
(162) neo-realism, and by pragmatism. And no one can
say as yet that the position has been successfully carried.
I wish to call attention to two unconnected movements which seem to
me to be approaching a strategic position of great importance-which
may be called the objectivity of perspectives. These two movements are,
first, that phase of behavioristic psychology which is planting communication,
thinking, and substantive meanings as inextricably within nature as
biological psychology has placed general animal and human intelligence;
and second, an aspect of the philosophy of relativism which Professor
Whitehead has presented.
Professor Whitehead interprets relativity in terms of events passing
in a four-dimensional Minkowski world. The order in which they pass,
however, is relative to a consentient set. The consentient set is determined
by its relation to a percipient event or organism. The percipient event
establishes a lasting character of here and there, of now and then,
and is itself an enduring pattern. The pattern repeats itself in the
passage of events. These recurrent patterns are grasped together or
prehended into a unity, which must have as great a temporal spread as
the organism requires to be what it is, whether this period is found
in the revolutions of the electrons in an iron atom or in the specious
present of a human being. Such a percipient event or organism establishes
a consentient set of patterns of events that endure in the relations
of here and there, of now and then, through such periods or essential
epochs, constituting thus slabs of nature, and differentiating space
from time. This perspective of the organism is then there in nature.
What in the perspective does not preserve the enduring character of
here and there, is in motion. From the standpoint of some other organism
these moving objects may be at rest, and what is here at rest will be,
in the time (163) system of this other perspective,
in motion. In Professor Whitehead's phrase, in so far as nature is patient
of an organism, it is stratified into perspectives, whose intersections
constitute the creative advance of nature. Professor Whitehead has with
entire success stated the physical theory of relativity in terms of
intersecting time systems.
What I wish to pick out of Professor Whitehead's philosophy of nature
is this conception of nature as an organization of perspectives, which
are there in nature. The conception of the perspective as there in nature
is in a sense an unexpected donation by the most abstruse physical science
to philosophy. They are not distorted perspectives of some perfect patterns,
nor do they lie in consciousnesses as selections among things whose
reality is to be found in a noumenal world. They are in their interrelationship
the nature that science knows. Biology has dealt with them in terms
of forms and their environments, and in ecology deals with the organization
of environments, but it has conceded a world of physical particles in
absolute space and time that is there in independence of any environment
of an organism, of any perspective. Professor Whitehead generalizes
the conception of organism to include any unitary structure, whose nature
demands a period within which to be itself, which is therefore not only
a spatial but also a temporal structure, or a process. Any such structure
stratifies nature by its intersection into its perspective, and differentiates
its own permanent space and time from the general passage of events.
Thus the world of the physical sciences is swept into the domain of
organic environments, and there is no world of independent physical
entities out of which the perspectives are merely selections. In the
place of such a world appear all of the perspectives in their interrelationship
to each other.
I do not wish to consider Professor Whitehead's Bergsonian (164)
edition of Spinoza's underlying substance that individualizes itself
in the structure of the events, nor his Platonic heaven of eternal objects
where lie the hierarchies of patterns, that are there envisaged as possibilities
and have ingression into events, but rather his Leibnizian filiation,
as it appears in his conception of the perspective as the mirroring
in the event of all other events. Leibniz made a psychological process
central in his philosophy of nature. The contents of his monads were
psychical states, perceptions, and petites perceptions, which
were inevitably representative of the rest of the reality of the universe
of which they were but partially developed expressions. The represented
content of all monads was identical, in so far as it was clear and distinct,
so that the organization of these perspectives was a harmony preestablished
in an identity of rational content. Professor Whitehead's principle
of organization of perspectives is not the representation of an identical
content, but the intersection by different time systems of the same
body of events. It is, of course, the abandonment of simple location
as the principle of physical existence, i.e., that the existence of
a physical object is found in its occupancy of a certain volume of absolute
space in an instant of absolute time; and the taking of time seriously,
i.e., the recognition that there are an indefinite number of possible
simultaneities of any event with other events, and consequently an indefinite
number of possible temporal orders of the same events, that make it
possible to conceive of the same body of events as organized into an
indefinite number of different perspectives.
Without undertaking to discuss Professor Whitehead's doctrine of the
prehension into the unity of the event of the aspects of other events,
which I am unable to work out satisfactorily, from the summary statements
I have found in his writings, I wish to consider the conception of a
body (165) of events as the organization of different
perspectives of these events, from the standpoint of the field of social
science, and that of behavioristic psychology.
In the first place, this seems to be exactly the subject matter of
any social science. The human experience with which social science occupies
itself is primarily that of individuals. It is only so far as the happenings,
the environmental conditions, the values, their uniformities and laws
enter into the experience of individuals as individuals that they become
the subject of consideration by these sciences. Environmental conditions,
for example, exist only in so far as they affect actual individuals,
and only as they affect these individuals. The laws of these happenings
are but the statistical uniformities of the happenings to and in the
experiences of A, B, C, and D. Furthermore the import of these happenings
and these values must be found in the experiences of these individuals
if they are to exist for these sciences at all.
In the second place, it is only in so far as the individual acts not
only in his own perspective but also in the perspective of others, especially
in the common perspective of a group, that a society arises and its
affairs become the object of scientific inquiry. The limitation of social
organization is found in the inability of individuals to place themselves
in the perspectives of others, to take their points of view. I do not
wish to belabor the point, which is commonplace enough, but to suggest
that we find here an actual organization of perspectives, and that the
principle of it is fairly evident. This principle is that the individual
enters into the perspectives of others, in so far as he is able to take
their attitudes, or occupy their points of view.
But while the principle is a commonplace for social conduct, its implications
are very serious if one accepts the objectivity of perspectives, and
recognizes that these perspectives (166) are made
up of other selves with minds; that here is no nature that can be closed
to mind. The social perspective exists in the experience of the individual
in so far as it is intelligible, and it is its intelligibility that
is the condition of the individual entering into the perspectives of
others, especially of the group. In the field of any social science
the objective data are those experiences of the individuals in which
they take the attitude of the community, i.e., in which they enter into
the perspectives of the other members of the community. Of course the
social scientist may generalize from the standpoint of his universe
of discourse what remains hopelessly subjective in the experiences of
another community, as the psychologist can interpret what for the individual
is an unintelligible feeling. I am speaking not from the standpoint
of the epistemologist, nor that of the metaphysician. I am asking simply
what is objective for the social scientist, what is the subject matter
of his science, and I wish to point out that the critical scientist
is only replacing the narrower social perspectives of other communities
by that of a more highly organized and hence more universal community.
It is instructive to note that never has the character of that common
perspective changed more rapidly than since we have gained further control
over the technique by which the individual perspective becomes the perspective
of the most universal community, that of thinking men, that is, the
technique of the experimental method. We are deluded, by the ease with
which we can, by what may be fairly called transformation formulae,
translate the experience of other communities into that of our own,
into giving finality to the perspective of our own thought; but a glance
at the bewildering rapidity with which different histories, i.e., different
pasts have succeeded each other, and new physical universes have arisen,
is sufficient to assure us that no (167) generation
has been so uncertain as to what will be the common perspective of the
next. We have never been so uncertain as to what are the values which
economics undertakes to define, what are the political rights and obligations
of citizens, what are the community values of friendship, of passion,
of parenthood, of amusement, of beauty, of social solidarity in its
unnumbered forms, or of those values which have been gathered under
the relations of man to the highest community or to God. On the other
hand there has never been a time at which men could determine so readily
the conditions under which values, whatever they are, can be secured.
In terms of common conditions, by transformation formulae, we can pass
from one value field to another, and thus come nearer finding out which
is more valuable, or rather how to conserve each. The common perspective
is comprehensibility, and comprehensibility is the statement in terms
of common social conditions.
It is the relation of the individual perspective to the common perspective
that is of importance. To the biologist there is a common environment
of an ant-hill or of a beehive, which is rendered possible by the intricate
social relationships of the ants and the bees. It is entirely improbable
that this perspective exists in the perspectives of individual ants
or bees, for there is no evidence of communication. Communication is
a social process whose natural history shows that it arises out of cooperative
activities, such as those involved in sex, parenthood, fighting, herding,
and the like, in which some phase of the act of one form, which may
be called a gesture, acts as a stimulus to others to carry on their
parts of the social act. It does not become communication in the full
sense, i.e., the stimulus does not become a significant symbol, until
the gesture tends to arouse the same response in the individual who
makes it that it arouses in the others. The history of the growth of
language (168) shows that in its earlier stages the
vocal gesture addressed to another awakens in the individual who makes
the gesture not simply the tendency to the response which it calls forth
in the other, such as the seizing of a weapon or the avoiding of a danger,
but primarily the social rôle which the other plays in the cooperative
act. This is indicated in the early play period in the development of
the child, and in the richness in social implication of language structures
in the speech of primitive peoples.
In the process of communication the individual is an other before he
is a self. It is in addressing himself in the rôle of an other that
his self arises in experience. The growth of the organized game out
of simple play in the experience of the child, and of organized group
activities in human society, placed the individual then in a variety
of rôles, in so far as these were parts of the social act, and the very
organization of these in the whole act gave them a common character
in indicating what he had to do. He is able then to become a generalized
other in addressing himself in the attitude of the group or the community.
In this situation he has become a definite self over against the social
whole to which he belongs. This is the common perspective. It exists
in the organisms of all the members of the community, because the physiological
differentiation of human forms belongs largely to the consummatory phase
of the act.
The overt phase within which social organization takes place is occupied
with things, physical things or implements. In the societies of the
invertebrates, which have indeed a complexity comparable with human
societies, the organization is largely dependent upon physiological
differentiation. In such a society, evidently, there is no phase of
the act of the individual in which he can find himself taking the attitude
of the other. Physiological differentiation, apart from the direct relations
of sex and parenthood, (169) plays no part in the
organization of human society. The mechanism of human society is that
of bodily selves who assist or hinder each other in their cooperative
acts by the manipulation of physical things. In the earliest forms of
society these physical things are treated as selves, i.e., those social
responses, which we can all detect in ourselves to inanimate things
which aid or hinder us, are dominant among primitive peoples in the
social organization that depends on the use of physical means. The primitive
man keeps en rapport with implements and weapons by conversation
in the form of magic rites and ceremonies. On the other hand the bodily
selves of members of the social group are as clearly implemental as
the implements are social. Social beings are things as definitely as
physical things are social.
The key to the genetic development of human intelligence is found in
the recognition of these two aspects. It arises in those early stages
of communication in which the organism arouses in itself the attitude
of the other and so addresses itself and thus becomes an object to itself,
becomes in other words a self, while the same sort of content in the
act constitutes the other that constitutes the self. Out of this process
thought arises, i.e., conversation with one's self, in the rôle of the
specific other and then in the rôle of the generalized other, in the
fashion I indicated above. It is important to recognize that the self
does not project itself into the other. The others and the self arise
in the social act together. The content of the act may be said to lie
within the organism but it is projected into the other only in the sense
in which it is projected into the self, a fact upon which the whole
of psycho-analysis rests. We pinch ourselves to be sure that we are
awake as we grasp an object to be sure that it is there. The other phase
of human intelligence is that it is occupied with physical things. Physical
things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act.
This is (170) initiated by a distant stimulus and
leads through approximation or withdrawal to contact or the avoidance
of contact. The outcome of the act is in consummation, e.g., as in eating,
but in the behavior of the human animal a mediate stage of manipulation
intervenes. The hand fashions the physical or perceptual thing. The
perceptual thing is fully there in the manipulatory area, where it is
both seen and felt, where is found both the promise of the contact and
its fulfilment, for it is characteristic of the distant stimulation
and the act that it initiates that there are already aroused the attitudes
of manipulation,-what I will call terminal attitudes of the perceptual
act, that readiness to grasp, to come into effective contact, which
in some sense control the approach to the distant stimulation. It is
in the operation with these perceptual or physical things which lie
within the physiological act short of consummation that the peculiar
human intelligence is found. Man is an implemental animal. It is mediate
to consummation. The hand carries the food to the mouth, or the child
to the breast, but in the social act this mediation becomes indefinitely
complicated, and the task arises of stating the consummation, or the
end, in terms of means. There are two conditions for this: one is the
inhibition, which takes place when conflicting ways of completing the
act check the expression of any one way, and the other is the operation
of the social mechanism, which I have described, by which the individual
can indicate to others and to himself the perceptual things that can
be seized and manipulated and combined. It is within this field of implemental
things picked out by the significant symbols of gesture, not in that
of physiological differentiation, that the complexities of human society
have developed. And, to recur to my former statement, in this field
selves are implemental physical things just as among primitive peoples
physical things are selves.
(171)
My suggestion was that we find in society and social experience, interpreted
in terms of a behavioristic psychology, an instance of that organization
of perspectives, which is for me at least the most obscure phase of
Professor Whitehead's philosophy. In his objective statement of relativity
the existence of motion in the passage of events depends not upon what
is taking place in an absolute space and time, but upon the relation
of a consentient set to a percipient event. Such a relation stratifies
nature. These stratifications are not only there in nature but they
are the only forms of nature that are there. This dependence of nature
upon the percipient event is not a reflection of nature into consciousness.
Permanent spaces and times, which are successions of these strata, rest
and motion, are there, but they are there only in their relationship
to percipient events or organisms. We can then go further and say that
the sensuous qualities of nature are there in nature, but there in their
relationship to animal organisms. We can advance to the other values
which have been regarded as dependent upon appetence, appreciation,
and affection, and thus restore to nature all that a dualistic doctrine
has relegated to consciousness, since the spatio-temporal structure
of the world and the motion with which exact physical science is occupied
is found to exist in nature only in its relationship to percipient events
or organisms.
But rest and motion no more imply each other than do objectivity and
subjectivity. There are perspectives which cease to be objective, such
as the Ptolemaic order, since it does not select those consentient sets
with the proper dynamical axes, and there are those behind the mirror
and those of an alcoholic brain. What has happened in all of these instances,
from the most universal to the most particular, is that the rejected
perspective fails to agree with that common perspective which
the individual finds himself occupying (172) as a
member of the community of minds, which is constitutive of his self.
This is not a case of the surrender to a vote of the majority, but the
development of another self through its intercourse with others and
hence with himself.
What I am suggesting is that this process, in which a perspective ceases
to be objective, becomes if you like subjective, and in which new common
minds and new common perspectives arise, is an instance of the organization
of perspectives in nature, of the creative advance of nature. This amounts
to the affirmation that mind as it appears in the mechanism of social
conduct is the organization of perspectives in nature and at least a
phase of the creative advance of nature. Nature in its relationship
to the organism, and including the organism, is a perspective that is
there. A state of mind of the organism is the establishment of simultaneity
between the organism and a group of events, through the arrest of action
under inhibition as above described. This arrest of action means the
tendencies within the organism to act in conflicting ways in the completion
of the whole act. The attitude of the organism calls out or tends to
call out responses in other organisms, which responses, in the case
of human gesture, the organism calls out in itself, and thus excites
itself to respond to these responses. It is the identification of these
responses with the distant stimuli that establishes simultaneity, that
gives insides to these distant stimuli, and a self to the organism.
Without such an establishment of simultaneity, these stimuli are spatio-temporally
distant from the organism, and their reality lies in the future of passage.
The establishment of simultaneity wrenches this future reality into
a possible present, for all our presents beyond the manipulatory area
are only possibilities, as respects their perceptual reality. We are
acting toward the future realization of the act, as if (173)
it were present, because the organism is taking the rôle of the other.
In the perceptual inanimate object the organic content that survives
is the resistance that the organism both feels and exerts in the manipulatory
area. The actual spatiotemporal structure of passing events with those
characters which answer to the susceptibilities of the organism are
there in nature, but they are temporally as well as spatially away from
the organism. The reality awaits upon the success of the act. Present
reality is a possibility. It is what would be if we were there instead
of here. Through the social mechanism of significant symbols the organism
places itself there as a possibility, which acquires increasing probability
as it fits into the spatio-temporal structure and the demands of the
whole complex act of which its conduct is a part. But the possibility
is there in nature, for it is made up of actual structures of events
and their contents, and the possible realizations of the acts in the
form of adjustments and readjustments of the processes involved. When
we view them as possibilities we call them mental or working hypotheses.
I submit that the only instance we have of prehension in experience
is this holding together of future and past as possibilities-for all
pasts are as essentially subject to revision as the futures, and are,
therefore, only possibilities and the common content which endures is
that which is common to the organism and environment in the perspective.
This in the organism is identified with the spatiotemporally distant
stimuli as a possibly real present, past, and future. The unity lies
in the act or process, the prehension is the exercise of this unity,
when the process has been checked through conflicting tendencies, and
the conditions and results of these tendencies are held as possibilities
in a specious present.
Thus the social and psychological process is but an instance (174)
of what takes place in nature, if nature is an evolution, i.e., if it
proceeds by reconstruction in the presence of conflicts, and if, therefore,
possibilities of different reconstructions are present, reconstructing
its pasts as well as its futures. It is the relativity of time, that
is, an indefinite number of possible orders of events, that introduces
possibility in nature. When there was but one recognized order of nature,
possibility had no other place than in the mental constructions of the
future or the incompletely known past. But the reality of a spatio-temporally
distant situation lies ahead, and any present existence of it, beyond
the manipulatory area, can be only a possibility. Certain characters
are there, but what things they are can only be realized when
the acts these distant stimulations arouse are completed. What they
are now is represented by a set of possible spatio-temporal structures.
That these future realizations appear as present possibilities is due
to the arrest of the act of the organism, and its ability to indicate
these possibilities.
That these possibilities have varying degrees of probability is due
to the relation of the various inhibited tendencies in the organism
to the whole act. The organization of this whole act the human social
organism can indicate to others and to itself. It has the pattern which
determines other selves and physical things, and the organism as a self
and a thing, and the meanings which are indicated have the universality
of the whole community to which the organism belongs. They constitute
a universe of discourse. It is the fitting in of the particular tendencies
into this larger pattern of the whole process that constitutes the probability
of the present existence of the things which any one act implies. Its
full reality is still dependent upon the accomplishment of the act,
upon experimental evidence. It is then such a coincidence of the perspective
of the individual organism (175) with the pattern
of the whole act in which it is so involved that the organism can act
within it, that constitutes the objectivity of the perspective.
The pattern of the whole social act can lie in the individual organism
because it is carried out through implemental things to which any organism
can react, and because indications of these reactions to others and
the organism itself can be made by significant symbols. The reconstruction
of the pattern can take place in the organism, and does take place in
the so-called conscious process of mind. The psychological process is
an instance of the creative advance of nature.
In living forms lower than man the distant perspective may through
sensitivity exist in the experience of the form and the grasping of
this in the adjustments of conduct answer to the formation of the stratification
of nature, but the reconstruction of the pattern within which the life
of the organism lies does not fall within the experience of the organism.
In inanimate organisms the maintenance of a temporal structure, i.e.,
of a process, still stratifies nature, and gives rise to spaces and
times, but neither they nor the entities that occupy them enter as experiential
facts into the processes of the organisms. The distinction of objectivity
and subjectivity can only arise where the pattern of the larger process,
within which lies the process of the individual organism, falls in some
degree within the experience of the individual organism, i.e., it belongs
only to the experience of the social organism.
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