Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 2: The Human Soul
2. The Distinctiveness of the Human Soul
definiteness of synthesis or satisfaction. Such occasions cannot be understood as first occurring and then being in relation. They are constituted by their relations to the occasions in their past.
The question is whether we should understand the soul after the pattern appropriate to our common dealing with the things of our world or after the pattern appropriate to our understanding of actual occasions as the ultimately real entities of the world. Whitehead’s answer is
unqualifiedly in the latter direction. In each of its momentary occasions the soul is one of these ultimately real entities of the world. It absorbs into itself in each new occasion of its life the total impact of its universe from its special perspective. It differs from other entities in the vastness and complexity of what it can receive from its world and synthesize in its own novel becoming.
In Whitehead’s view, therefore, the soul is not at all like a substance undergoing accidental adventures in time. It is constituted by its
adventures. It can attain richness and depth only through the variety and quality of the entities it encounters and its own willingness and ability to be open to what they can contribute.
This does not mean, of course, that sheer quantity of stimuli is important or that the soul has no use for privacy. A part, and a very important part, of the relations by which each new occasion is
constituted is its prehension of its own past, that is, of past occasions in the life of the same soul. Ultimately, those occasions received their richness of life from beyond the occasions of that soul altogether.
Hence, the individual depends radically upon the society of other souls.
But provisionally there may be every reason to retreat from the
complexity of the environment into one’s own interior life so that one may better be able to be enriched by the larger world.( Cf., e.g.,
Whitehead’s passage on the role of withdrawal in which occurs his famous definition of religion as "what the individual does with his own solitariness." [RM 16-20.])
evidence of some centralized dominance in the animal organism, he assumes that a dominant occasion is present; and to whatever degree such dominant occasions have significant serial order, they jointly constitute a soul. The gulf between a soul, any soul, and living
occasions not organized into living persons is vast, but it must not be confused with the gulf that separates man from the rest of the world.
Our question therefore is, What is distinctive about the human soul? To answer this question, we must get some sense of the kinds of gradations that can be found among souls.
One way of distinguishing among souls is according to the significance to the individual dominant occasions of their serial connectedness with each other. Just as among enduring objects the uniting characteristic may be more or less important, so also with living persons or souls.
Consider, for example, what may be the case with some very low-grade animal organism. Much of the time such an organism may function essentially as a vegetable. Now and then, however, there may be need for some unified coordination of its behavior. The society may
communicate to its brain some special richness of feeling making possible the emergence of a dominant occasion. This occasion may fulfill its function and cease to exist. Subsequently, another need may produce another occasion, but in the extreme case this new dominant occasion may inherit nothing of special importance from its
predecessor. If we were to speak of a soul at all in this extreme case where effective continuity between the dominant occasions is lacking, we would recognize an absolute minimum of significance of this term.
There would be dominant occasions, but they would not be socially ordered to any relevant degree.
Even in more highly developed organisms, it may be that most of the connection between successive dominant occasions is mediated by the central nervous system. One experience may leave its mark upon the brain which then in turn affects a later dominant occasion. Perhaps some insects might be understood in this way. Many persons seem to suppose that all experience of our own past is mediated in this way, that we directly experience only our brain. Whitehead disagrees. In our memory of our immediately preceding experience, we have direct intuition of that experience actively forming the present.(AI 233.) Nevertheless, part of our relation to past experience is undoubtedly mediated by the brain, and to that degree, the ordering that constitutes the society of occasions as the soul has less to do with the outcome.
We may also distinguish between souls according to the relative importance of fresh organic stimuli and past experiences. In general, animals seem to be more fully absorbed in the present than are adult humans. This would suggest that the role of past occasions of their soul in determining the present occasion may be less than the role of fresh occurrences in the bodily environment of the soul. To whatever degree that is the case, the relationship among the dominant occasions that constitutes them conjointly as a soul is less marked and significant.
It is my assumption that along these lines one can argue with
Whitehead’s tacit support that soul is more fully developed in men in general than in animals in general.(Cf. AI 267. "It is not a mere question of having a soul or of not having a soul. The question is, How much, if any?") Presumably, however, there would be exceptions if we were to contrast a mature high-grade animal with a human infant or with an extremely retarded child. These exceptions are not important except to caution us that whatever we say of the difference between men and other animals must be affirmed in terms of gradations and with empirical warrant.
The second and more important basis for comparing men and other animals has to do with the quality of the occasions constituting their souls. Once again we must recognize the extreme range of experiences that can belong to dominant occasions of animal organisms. Even within human experience, we can note wide differences between moments of intense alertness and moments of drowsy
semiconsciousness shading off into unconsciousness. It is difficult on this line to indicate a precise point at which animal consciousness reaches its apex and beyond which only human consciousness can go.
Nevertheless, it is clear that very great differences exist. Whitehead recognizes that all such differences are matters of degree, but that where degree achieves a certain magnitude, the difference amounts, for
practical purposes, to one of kind.(MT 38.) Both a chipped rock and an IBM machine are tools, but the difference of their complexity and
capabilities is so vast that for most purposes we properly regard them as quite different types of objects.
When we ask specifically what distinguishes man from the other
animals, the single clear answer is language.(Even here we may assume that there is no absolute discontinuity between animal and human
communication.) According to Whitehead, language and the human
mind in its distinctiveness are correlative. We may say either that the human mind has created language or that language has created the human mind.(MT 57.) It is language that makes possible thought of any degree of complexity as well as the progressive cumulation of the fruits of thought.(MT 49) In addition to language, Whitehead notes that
morality and religion are distinctive of man. But even here he hedges, for he believes that something like morality can also be observed among the higher animals.(MT 39.)
These efforts to distinguish the human from the animal soul are not of special importance in their details. The important point is that
Whitehead is open to affirming whatever difference the evidence warrants our affirming. He does not allow any a priori affirmations of human distinctiveness. There is no kind of entity present in man that is not present in animals. There is only a peculiarly powerful and complex development of ontologically similar entities.
This view of difference within unity is characteristic of Whitehead’s thought throughout. There are categories descriptive of every entity whatsoever. These are metaphysical categories, and insofar as one succeeds in grasping one of these he has a genuinely necessary truth.
But these metaphysical categories are exemplified in an unimaginable diversity of modes. Whitehead has characterized some of the particular forms and structures important in this cosmic epoch and on the surface of our planet. Among the most important of these are enduring objects.
Thus, when we note that the soul, like the molecule, is an enduring object, we are saying something important about the identity that underlies their diversity. Yet we are not minimizing their diversity.
Likewise, when we show that in animals as well as in men the dominant occasions are grouped together as souls, we have stated something of great significance about the kinship of men with the other animals, but we have left open for further consideration the differences that may or may not exist between them.
The distinctiveness of man is often formulated today in terms of the antithesis of history and nature. We may consider briefly whether Whitehead allows this distinction and how it would apply. We know in advance that there can be no ultimate distinction, for both must be understood as participating in a more inclusive unity.
"Nature" is not a consistently used technical term in Whitehead.
Sometimes it is used as an inclusive term for all that occurs.(AI 99, 237;
MT 214.)In this sense, of course, not even a provisional duality would be possible. History could be conceived only as some portion of nature;
for example, that part in which life or mentality plays a significant role, or as still further limited to the events in which consciousness, or some special form of consciousness, is decisive. Any such definition is possible.
On the other hand, Whitehead sometimes defines nature in terms of that which is typically investigated by the natural scientists.(SMW 171; MT 100, 174. See also AI 265 for an identification of "nature" as "a complex of enduring objects.") In these terms, nature may be sharply contrasted with history, for Whitehead shows the virtual irrelevance to human events of the physicist’s analysis.(SMW 265; MT 185.)The natural scientist abstracts from the meaning, purpose, and subjectivity of things.
He thereby distorts, Whitehead believes, even the physical objects that he treats.(FR, Ch. I.)The effort to treat nature as a mere object of the scientist’s investigation must finally break down, even in the scientist’s own province. When it does, the deeper underlying unity of the reality of physical objects and of historical events can be grasped without minimizing the decisive differences that also obtain.
In concluding this discussion of the distinctively human, we may ask whether there is such a thing as human nature and how it is related to history. If the term "human nature" is used meaningfully, it must point to characteristics common to all human souls and absent from all other animal souls. We are asking now not simply how the human soul differs from the animal soul, but whether in its distinctiveness it is marked by common structures. It is rather clear that if we are demanding some common factor actualized in all human souls, we must be disappointed, for the exceptional case in which that factor is lacking can always be found. If, however, we ask for distinctive potentialities, then something positive can be said.
In the light of the preceding discussion, we can say that language is the fundamental distinctive common mark of the human.(Whitehead makes the striking statement, "Speech is human nature itself." [MT 52])
Presumably the larger brain and other bodily differences underlie this new dimension of the human. Language, in turn, introduces many other possibilities into human life which are remote from that of animals. But language is not a property of the human soul such that the soul
possesses it by virtue of its nature. Rather, what the human soul possesses by virtue of its rich inheritance from the body is the
potentiality for learning and using language. The actualization of this potentiality and of the further possibilities it opens up for men depends upon social relationships. Human nature then, in the first instance, is simply the common potentiality of men (where there is no serious bodily deformation) for language.
It may be, further, that the process of actualizing certain human potentialities always exhibits some common structures. Clearly, in specific terms the actualization varies almost infinitely. The potentiality for language does not include any predisposition toward one language rather than another. There does not seem to be such a thing as a natural language, beyond perhaps a few sounds made by infants. But at a level of sufficient abstraction, it is still possible to discuss structures common to all languages. In a similar way in the area of ethics, for example, as its distinctively human development is made possible by language, almost any act regarded as right in one culture may be regarded as wrong in another. It is idle to appeal to human nature to settle disputes about matters of this kind. Yet at a level of sufficient abstraction there may be some common structures. The question of whether such
structures exist and what they are is always an empirical question, but whatever they may be, in their transcendence of what man shares with the animal they may be thought of as part of human nature.(See Ch. III, esp. secs. 3 and 4.)
Human nature, then, is the set of unique potentialities of the human soul with whatever formal structures may be necessarily involved in their actualization. When we turn from potentiality to actuality and from highly abstract structures to the concrete particularity of actual things, we turn also from human nature to human history. Most of what is distinctively human is extremely diverse in its human manifestations.
This diversity is a matter both of the extent to which the potentialities are developed and of the form which they take in their parallel
development. To understand a particular man is not to understand what he has in common with all other men, or even with all other equally developed men. It is to understand how he has been formed and has formed himself in his historical existence. The decisive characteristic of human nature is historicality, man’s potentiality for being formed by history. (I recognize the altogether inadequate character of these brief remarks on history and the historical character of human existence. It is my intention to discuss this much more fully in a subsequent book on history and Christ. Whitehead’s major discussion of history is found in Al, Part I. A brief treatment of history is found in MT 22-27. That
Whitehead understood the historical character of human existence is clearly indicated in his correlation of civilizations and languages (MT 49) along with the identification of human nature with speech (MT 52) already noted. See the whole discussion of the relation of man to animal and of speech and written language in relation to civilization. [MT 38- 57.])