Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 3: Man as Responsible Being
5. Duty, Love, and the Initial Aim
Probably one reason Whitehead did not carry out the kind of analysis I have offered in the preceding section is that he felt some distaste for the overrigorous pursuit of righteousness. There is a profound paradox in man’s ethical experience. Man ought always to do the right. Yet the life lived in the constant effort to achieve this ideal, even to the extent of its success, ends in failure. It is right to live in terms of that kind of order the generalization of which will produce the greatest strength of beauty in individual lives. Yet the strenuous effort to live in just that way leads to a certain rigidity, insensitivity, and pride that militate against the achievement of beauty both in oneself and in others. We can never rightly reject the ethical principle of disinterestedness in reflection and action, for it is the very essence of rightness of conduct. Yet we must look for some way of transcending it, or of including it in a higher synthesis.
In this connection Whitehead points us to love, which is, he says, "a little oblivious to morals." Unlike morality, "it does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present." (PR 521.) Beyond suggestive hints such as this, Whitehead does not elaborate the fascinating and difficult question of the relation of love and ethics. We must pursue the discussion a little further, guided only indirectly by his statements.
Love and ethics are in real tension with each other, but they cannot be regarded as contradictory. Love is of utmost importance for ethics. Only as there is love of one’s own future self and love also for other persons, and finally, for humanity as a whole, can there be any meaning to the ethical imperatives. Yet the ethical imperatives always transcend the actual love felt, demanding a recognition of the appropriateness of love, and hence, of action appropriate to love, far beyond the existing
capacities of personal and imaginative concern. To reject ethics in the name of love, meaning by that, love actualized and not love owed, will in almost every case narrow the horizons of action and dismiss from relevance the enemy, the stranger, and even the long-absent friend.
Furthermore, love is unjust. We love, and always will love, some more than others. We constantly, and rightly, must check our love in the interest of fairness. If love as normal human concern dominates our lives, all too often it will be ourselves who are its object, and the long and tortuous process, whereby ethical thought and feeling have led us beyond preoccupation with ourselves, may be undone.
Furthermore, many of the decisions we make in life, and must make, are far too impersonal to be facilitated or motivated by love. Whitehead points out that the beauty of the idealism of the New Testament ethic depended in part upon the fact that those who affirmed it originally had no responsibility for the stability and preservation of the society to which they belonged. They could propound demands expressive of pure love and even in some measure embody them, whereas if the
responsible leaders of that society had followed them, all order would have collapsed.(AI 19-21.)
We cannot solve the tensions between righteousness and love simply by subordinating the former to the latter. But at the same time, we cannot solve them by subordinating love to righteousness. We cannot advance beauty in the world by loving only when we ought to love and because
we ought to do so. Perhaps we can increase love by dutifully nurturing it, but the finest flowering of love depends upon spontaneity as well. We do not want people to love us only out of a sense of duty.
Without the spontaneity of love, beauty loses its strength. We can become brittle, resentful of the spontaneities of others, self-righteous.
We can become incapable of genuinely contributing to the beauty of other lives, no matter how hard and dutifully we try. We will be
compelled by our very sense of duty to seek to cultivate the spontaneity our dutifulness has caused to wither.
Duty and love, then, require each other and yet exist in tension with each other. In this respect, they are like the aim at immediate intensity and at intensities beyond oneself, or like the achievement of a simpler harmony and the adventure toward another ideal. We cannot do without either, yet they seem constantly to threaten each other. As in the other cases, I suggest that Whitehead would have us accept this situation as that in which we must live while viewing an ideal beyond us in which the tensions are resolved. That ideal’must be a limitless love for man as man, or even for life as life, personalized to every individual, yet
impartial among all. In such a love, duty would be fulfilled.
There is another direction in which Whiteheadian philosophy allows us to look for the resolution of the tension between duty and love.
Freedom, we have noted, lies in the individual occasion’s modification of its own subjective aim.(See previous remarks on this matter.)All the discussion of value, duty, and love as directive of human behavior must finally focus on how we can and should reflectively modify our aims or purposes. As conscious persons we can alter the balance between the aim at immediate intensity and the aim at the relevant future; we can broaden or narrow that future; we can introduce principles and codes of conduct to which we commit ourselves.
Much of this discussion has been taken from Whitehead, and I believe that none of it is contradictory to his intention. Yet Whitehead might tell us that we try too hard, that we are too insistent on lifting our purposes into consciousness and examining them, that such tensions as those between love and duty reflect the frustrations of a life that strives for too much autonomy. This is a speculation, but it is a speculation justified and required by Whitehead’s metaphysics.
The subjective aim originates at the outset of each new occasion.
Indeed, it determines the perspective from which that occasion will prehend the past. In this originative stage it is called the initial aim. In this form the aim is given to the occasion, it is not created or chosen by it. The initial aim of subsequent occasions in the living person will be affected in part by the way in which earlier occasions have modified their aims, but it includes also an element of autonomy.
The initial aim is always the aim at that ideal harmony possible for that occasion.(PR 128, 381.) It is an aim at a balance between the intensity of that occasion’s experience and its contribution beyond itself. When we are dealing with occasions in societies, such as a vegetable, it is clear that the aim is far more directed to the health of the society as a whole than to any immediate realization of intensity in the individual occasion. Occasions in "empty space" may have little aim beyond their own trivial enjoyment. In both these occasions, the capacity for
modification of the aim by the decision of the occasion in question, though real, would be negligible.
In the human occasion the range of freedom is far greater. Also the balance between immediate intensity and the effect upon the future must be far more flexible. Yet according to the metaphysical principle, every human occasion is initiated by an aim at that harmony that is the ideal possibility for that occasion. Sometimes the situation may be such that the best possibility is still evil.(PR 373.)But there can be no better choice.
If this is so, then there must be open to man an attitude quite different from the drive for rational self-determination which we have been considering so far. There must also be open to man a way of life in which each moment is taken as it comes, in terms of the new
possibilities it affords, and in which something given to man, something over which he has no control, is trusted for guidance in the realization of these possibilities. Now immediate enjoyment, now sacrifice for the future; now duty, now love; such alternations might characterize
roughly the quality of self-actualization in successive moments. But the tensions between these alternatives might be resolved at a level beyond man’s power of decision.
In other words, there may, after all, be some reason to trust conscience, intuition, or instinct. Each of these terms has its dangerous connotations.
We know that interiorized parental commands or fear of consequences may be called conscience. Ideas may be intuited as true, purely on the
basis of the pleasure they provide or their satisfaction of some
compulsive need. Instinct may be the wisdom of the body rather than of the soul. Even in these senses conscience, intuition, and instinct often prove good guides, but these should not be confused with the initial aim.
The initial aim is not received from society or other persons, from one’s own past or from the body. It is that new thing which in conjunction with the whole force of the past initiates the process in which a new occasion comes to be. Since we are speaking of a new occasion of human experience, the initial aim is proper to that. It determines
fundamentally the direction in which that occasion of human experience will actualize itself. And within that direction it constitutes an urge toward the highest available ideal.(There is a fuller discussion of this thought later in Ch. IV.)
One could draw from this doctrine the conclusion that man should adopt in his volitional life a maximally passive attitude. Since the initial aim is at the best possible fulfillment beyond man’s powers to understand, and since man’s exercise of freedom seems only to lead to a deviation away from this ideal possibility, there is some prima facie support for this view. However, it does not express White-head’s own attitude toward life, and it does not follow from more careful reflection on the
metaphysical situation.
The initial aim is always at some intensity of feeling. The higher
intensities of feeling require consciousness. Beyond consciousness there is self-awareness, and with self-awareness there comes the awareness of freedom. The movement of man in this direction, long before he could exercise control over his own development, is the effect of the initial aim of his own occasion of experience combined with those in all the occasions making up his body. In a still wider context, we see that it has taken billions of years for this kind of consciousness to come into
existence.
If this is so, then the initial aim must often be at that kind of self- actualization which accepts responsibility for itself and for its world.
The exercise of those dimensions of freedom at which the initial aim aims cannot be contrary to that aim. The greatest intensity of experience may often be dependent upon the greatest efforts at self-modification.
But the fact that we may be called to such heroic self-determination in some occasions of our life does not mean that we may not at other times be called to a more relaxed acceptance of circumstances as they develop
or to a spontaneous love arising quite unforeseen and beyond the bounds of duty. Perhaps it is possible to achieve such sensitivity, unconscious though it must certainly be, that we can hear and heed these changing dictates by which the direction of our lives is given to us.