How can a philosophy answer to experience?

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 01 · How an occasion becomes

Imagine you are on a bus when the display changes to “Two minutes late.” You know why: the driver waited while a passenger gathered the apples that had rolled from her torn shopping bag, then let her find a seat. For someone planning a connection, that is useful information. For someone asking why the driver waited, it leaves out the point of the pause.

Nothing is wrong with the clock. The trouble begins only if we assume that, because the timing record is accurate, it tells us everything important about what happened. The driver’s decision, the passenger’s relief and another traveler’s worry about missing a train all belong to the same event. A description can succeed at its task and still leave other questions unanswered.

The scene leads into the opening question of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality: how can we develop ideas broad enough to interpret the many kinds of things we encounter without making the inconvenient parts of experience disappear? Whitehead calls this enterprise speculative philosophy. Speculation, in his sense, is not idle guessing but a disciplined attempt to generalize, followed by a return to the experience the generalization was meant to illuminate. [1]

You can begin the study here; its vocabulary is introduced as the questions call for it. Before asking what Whitehead’s account says about reality, we need to know what would count for or against it. The course lesson “What difference would an idea make in practice?” offers a comparison through Peirce and James, although Whitehead’s method is a distinct proposal, not the completion of their arguments.

By the end, you should be able to explain how Whitehead assesses a speculative scheme and to tell a useful abstraction from an unjustified claim to completeness. You should also be able to frame a criticism that takes the scheme’s achievements seriously.

What a description leaves out

An abstraction attends to certain features and sets others aside. The departure record concerns timing; an account of the driver’s purpose concerns a reason for acting; we could also ask about fuel use or the distribution of seats. Selecting a question is what makes inquiry possible. An attempt to record every detail before saying anything would never get started.

Whitehead’s objection is to what happens when we forget that a selection was made. Neglecting the abstraction involved is what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: a description that captures one aspect of an actual situation is treated as though nothing relevant lay outside it, and a useful measurement acquires an authority it has not earned. [2]

The timing record is incomplete as an account of the driver’s action, but that does not make its statement about the delay false. Equally, a sympathetic account of the driver does not tell us how many passengers missed their connections. Making room for purposes and feelings cannot mean ignoring measurements. What Whitehead demands is an interpretation broad enough to relate these aspects without simply disposing of one of them.

The bus example shows how a limited description can be useful. It does not show that the universe has the structure Whitehead proposes, or that a single philosophical system can do justice to every kind of experience. Those are much larger claims.

Leaving the ground, and coming back

Whitehead does not begin by announcing a handful of indubitable truths and deriving the world from them. The most general principles are what philosophy is trying to formulate. We can reason from proposed principles, but their authority has to be earned by what they help us understand. [2]

We begin instead within experience: in inquiry, perception, practical activity, art, moral concern and the rest of life. We notice something significant, imagine a more general form of it and ask whether that form helps us understand experience beyond the place where we first noticed it. Whitehead compares the movement to the flight of an airplane, which takes off, flies and lands again. The imaginative flight matters, but so does the landing. [1]

Why is imagination needed? We often notice a feature because it is sometimes absent: a delay stands out against the buses that leave on time. If something belongs to every experience, though, we cannot find it by comparing cases where it occurs with cases where it does not. Whitehead asks us to imagine alternatives so that a pervasive feature can become noticeable. That may sharpen observation, but it does not guarantee that we have identified a universal principle.

Take the suggestion that an event becomes more intelligible when we place it among its relations to other events. The driver’s pause makes sense through what came before it and what it allowed to happen. That might lead us to ask whether accounts of apparently self-contained things leave out relations we need in order to understand them. The suggestion gives us a question to pursue; it does not license us to treat every relation as if it were a driver’s intention.

C. Robert Mesle stresses the need to keep the generalization honest: extending an idea takes more than shifting the meanings of its words whenever it reaches unfamiliar territory. Elizabeth Kraus makes a related point about context. A more general conceptual account remains abstract, but the wider real context it helps disclose can deepen our understanding of the particular event. [3] [4]

The return to experience can change both the theory and what we notice. We work out what a proposed scheme implies, then set those implications against the experience it is meant to interpret. Agreement can support the scheme. Partial disagreement can call for a closer look at both the description and the theory, and more serious failure can require restricting the scheme’s range or abandoning its central ideas. Whitehead expressly allows for each of these outcomes. A scheme has to risk finding its limits. [2]

Four demands, and a stronger ambition

An account can avoid contradiction and still leave its central ideas disconnected; it can illuminate one experience and fail to accommodate another. Whitehead separates four demands so that success with one cannot quietly stand in for success with the others. [1]

Logical consistency requires that the account avoid contradiction: it cannot both affirm and deny the same claim in the same respect. Whitehead’s broader demand that a scheme be logical also includes valid inference, so that conclusions follow from what is assumed. Valid reasoning does not, by itself, show that those assumptions are true.

Coherence concerns how the basic ideas depend on one another. For Whitehead they must presuppose one another, so that none has a meaning detached from its place in the scheme. Imagine an account that gives physical things and experiences basic natures, each understandable without the other, and then adds that the two somehow interact. It may contain no formal contradiction, yet the connection has simply been added where an explanation was needed. Whitehead’s stronger demand asks whether the basic ideas themselves require one another. Later we will ask whether his own account of an individual actuality meets it: do the actuality’s relations help constitute it, or have they been attached as an afterthought?

Applicability requires that some experience be interpretable through the scheme; an account with no particular instance would give us little reason to take it seriously. The bus story illustrates what applying an idea would involve, but because it is invented, it supplies no independent evidence that the idea is true.

Adequacy makes the wider demand: no item of experience should lie beyond the scheme’s power to interpret. A theory that makes sense of measurement but leaves the experience of purpose wholly outside its reach has not met that demand, and neither has an account of purpose that cannot accommodate bodily conditions. Adequacy concerns the reach of the general ideas. It does not mean that the philosopher can tell us every detail of every event.

Whitehead then raises the ambition further. The scheme should reveal why its principles must hold throughout experience related to the world immediately encountered, including experience we have not considered. This is his claim to necessity and universality, and it goes beyond a growing collection of successful applications: showing that an idea illuminates several cases does not yet show that things could not be otherwise. [1]

We must therefore keep the ambition apart from the status of our knowledge. Whitehead seeks universal principles while treating our statements of them as revisable, so an account can improve without our possessing a final formulation. The tension is real: a scheme can become more illuminating while its claim to necessity remains unproved.

Words also select

When we return from speculation, we do not find a world already described in a perfectly neutral language. Our descriptions carry interpretations. Even the apparently simple statement that the driver waited picks out a person, an action and a stretch of time as relevant, and leaves much of their context unspoken.

Whitehead thinks philosophical language must sometimes be altered, because familiar words carry assumptions that a new account is questioning. Yet coining a technical term does not complete its meaning: its use in arguments and examples has to show, gradually, what it lets us say. [2]

Learning this vocabulary therefore means asking two questions at once: what does a term distinguish, and does the distinction help explain anything? An unfamiliar use deserves a hearing. Its difficulty is no evidence of depth, however, and a meaning that keeps shifting to escape criticism gives us reason to distrust it.

Finding a way through the book

The five parts of Process and Reality develop one scheme through different kinds of work. Part I, The Speculative Scheme, sets out the method and the central ideas. Part II, Discussions and Applications, brings those ideas to bear on philosophical problems and on experience.

Part III, The Theory of Prehensions, develops the account of how whatever becomes actual takes account of a world beyond itself. Part IV, The Theory of Extension, examines the relations involved in space, time and measurement. Part V, Final Interpretation, returns to permanence and change, to value, and to the relation between God and the world. [5]

This is a map, not a vocabulary test. Whitehead explains in his Preface that topics recur as the scheme gains meaning. A first definition is only a beginning, and later uses can change how we understand it. Our study follows a teaching sequence of its own, returning to the opening standards as the metaphysical claims become more definite.

What could count against the scheme?

A critic can begin by asking whether the scheme contradicts itself or leaves its fundamental ideas disconnected, and then look for a feature of experience it fails to interpret. Suppose an account recognizes purposes when explaining the driver’s decision, while its general description of reality leaves no place for purposes at all. Pointing to that gap does more than complaining that the account feels too narrow: it leaves a defender owing an explanation of how those parts of the scheme can belong together. [1] [2]

Whitehead does not say that every disagreement demands instant rejection. We may have misdescribed the experience, or the theory may need only a limited correction. That flexibility, however, invites a serious objection. If a scheme can absorb any apparent counterexample by changing the interpretation, what could force its defenders to give it up?

A proposed correction should show its work. What difficulty does it resolve? What can we understand now that we could not understand before? Calling every awkward case a deeper form of the same principle answers neither question. Even a clear improvement may leave defenders and critics disagreeing about what counts as understanding. Whitehead’s revisable method makes room for learning, but it also leaves room to evade criticism.

Then there is the problem of rival schemes. More than one coherent, consistent system may interpret the same experience. A rival might agree that the bus event calls for several descriptions while denying that relations constitute the most basic realities; the lesson it draws could be that different inquiries need different abstractions. We can grant Whitehead’s explanatory success and still dispute the move to necessity, and a defender would then need to show what the alternatives leave unresolved. None of this makes every account equally good. It means that illuminating an experience and uniquely establishing a metaphysics are different achievements.

Philosophical adequacy is also a different achievement from a successful experimental prediction. A prediction specifies what should happen under particular conditions, and an outcome can be compared with it. A metaphysical scheme asks which general categories allow such outcomes, their investigation and other kinds of experience to be understood together. Experimental findings can constrain the account, but its broad categories do not, by themselves, specify a distinctive measured result. So a scheme cannot borrow the authority of an experiment merely by calling itself applicable. Its breadth makes decisive comparisons harder; it does not excuse it from answering to experience.

Try two accounts of one event

Imagine a choir rehearsal at which Colette stops the singers partway through a song and asks them to begin the passage again. One account records that the group entered before the pianist had finished the introduction. Another says that Colette wanted the new singers to feel secure about where to enter. Suppose both reports are accurate.

Explain what each account helps us understand and what each leaves open. Does either one’s incompleteness make it false? A listener concludes that because both accounts are useful, a philosophy based on relations must be necessary. Offer a relevant criticism of that conclusion. You need not agree with Whitehead, or remember the name of a fallacy, to answer well.

A possible response

The first account identifies a problem of musical coordination: it helps the choir locate the premature entry and decide what to rehearse. It does not explain why Colette chose repetition as her response, or how the new singers experienced it. The second account makes her purpose intelligible and so helps explain that choice, but it does not tell us exactly where the entry occurred or whether repeating the passage improved it. Colette could have that purpose and fail to achieve it.

Both descriptions can be true, and neither is made false by being incomplete. The first report would be false if the singers had actually entered after the introduction. Leaving Colette’s purpose unmentioned is a different matter: that omission suits a record of musical timing. The overreach would be to claim that timing exhausts the event, so that there was no purpose to explain. Conversely, Colette’s good intention cannot establish that the entrance was musically correct or that the singers felt more secure. Each abstraction has a legitimate task and a limit.

The listener’s conclusion outruns the evidence. The case shows that relations to music, to people and to purposes help us interpret this rehearsal. It does not demonstrate a complete metaphysical scheme, or establish that all experience must have the structure such a scheme proposes, and another account might preserve the same insights with different basic ideas. A useful criticism can therefore grant that these descriptions succeed while asking for an argument for necessity.

One further check would be to listen to the second attempt and ask the new singers what helped them. That could supply evidence about the rehearsal and about Colette’s success, but it would not, by itself, decide between philosophical accounts of reality. A strong response separates these questions and matches each with the kind of support it needs.

From the record to what happened

Return to the bus. The timing record, the driver’s purpose and the effects on the passengers can enter one account without becoming interchangeable descriptions. Holding them together gives us more to explain. That is the beginning of an inquiry into actuality, not proof that one description has finally exhausted it.

Whitehead next asks how the abstractions we use belong to concrete actuality in the first place. His proposal is to begin with complex, interdependent actualities, for which he introduces the term actual occasion. The bus journey is an everyday example to think with, not a demonstration of one such occasion. [6]

The next question, then, is what could count as concrete actuality if its relations and its becoming helped make it what it is.

Sources and limits

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978; the supplied EPUB identifies the first Free Press paperback edition, 1985), for speculative philosophy, its four demands and imaginative generalization. The passage is Part I, chapter I, §§I–II (sections I–II), M4–11: section I distinguishes the criteria and states the qualified universality claim, and section II develops imaginative generalization. M means the original Macmillan pagination, retained in brackets in the corrected EPUB; it is not the corrected edition’s printed page numbering.

[2] Whitehead, Process and Reality, I.I §§III–VI (Part I, chapter I, sections III–VI), M11–26, for misplaced concreteness, the provisional status of first principles and the alteration of language. Section III discusses abstraction, provisional categories and responses to disagreement; §§IV–VI address generalization, language, practice and the breadth of experience. The complete chapter was read with its five author notes and the relevant editorial notes. The lesson paraphrases these arguments and does not adopt Whitehead’s historical judgments about other philosophers as settled findings.

[3] C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), chapter 2, pp. 11–19, with notes 1–3 on pp. 111–112, for accessible commentary on method and language. His speculative physics/consciousness comparison is not used as evidence here.

[4] Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, supplied second edition (Fordham University Press, 1998; electronic edition 2018), chapter 3 §I, “The Nature of Speculative Philosophy,” with notes 1–2, for the point about wider context. EPUB locators: text/part0013.html#ch3_sec1; notes #ch3-fn1 and #ch3-fn2. This copy has no reliable printed-page markers. The account of wider context is attributed to Kraus as commentary; citing her does not mean that the works she cites were read directly.

[5] Whitehead, author’s Preface, M v–x, read completely with its three author notes and the relevant editorial notes, for the five parts and the recurrence of topics. The lesson offers orientation, not an exposition of the full categoreal scheme or of Part IV’s technical arguments.

[6] Whitehead, I.II §I (Part I, chapter II, section I), M27–30, with author notes 1–2 and the relevant editorial notes, for the closing question about abstraction and concrete actuality.

The bus and choir scenes are original teaching examples, and the objections about flexible interpretation and competing schemes are questions developed for this lesson. The examples are not empirical proof or refutation of Whitehead’s cosmology.