Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 2: The Human Soul
1. The Soul as Social
Whitehead is remarkable among recent philosophers for his insistence that man has, or is, a soul. Furthermore, he is convinced that this doctrine has been of utmost value for Western civilization and that its recent weakening systematically undercuts the understanding of the worth of man. The understanding of the human soul is one of the truly great gifts of Plato and of Christianity, and Whitehead does not hesitate to associate his own doctrine with these sources, especially with
Plato.(AI, Ch. II)
Nevertheless, Whitehead’s understanding of the human soul is different from those of Platonism and historic Christianity and is one of his most creative contributions for modern reflection. If we are to understand any aspect of Whitehead’s doctrine of man, we must begin by grasping his thought on this subject.
Perhaps the most striking differentiating feature of Whitehead’s doctrine
of the soul is that it is a society rather than an individual actual entity. A moment’s reflection will show that this position follows inevitably from the distinction between individuals and societies explained in the
preceding chapter. Individuals exist only momentarily. If we identified the soul with such an individual, there would be millions of souls during the lifetime of a single man.
But when we speak in Platonic or Christian terms, we think of a single soul for a single man. If we hold fast to this usage, and Whitehead basically does so, (MT 224. However, since for Whitehead identity through time is an empirical question, he allows for the possibility of a plurality of souls in a single organism.) then we must think of the soul as that society composed of all the momentary occasions of experience that make up the life history of the man. The soul is not an underlying substance undergoing accidental adventures. It is nothing but the sequence of the experiences that constitute it.
In contrast to some Christian views of the soul, it should also be noted at the outset that Whitehead’s understanding of the soul applies to the higher animals as well as to man. Wherever it is reasonable to posit a single center of experience playing a decisive role in the functioning of the organism as a whole, there it is reasonable to posit a soul. For the soul is nothing but such a center of experience in its continuity through time. The use of the term "soul" carries no connotation in Whitehead of preexistence or of life after death. There is no suggestion that the soul is some kind of supernatural element which in some way marks off man from nature and provides a special point of contact for divine activity.
The soul is in every sense a part of nature, subject to the same
conditions as all other natural entities. (Although this is Whitehead’s usual terminology in his later writings, in such earlier works as CN and occasionally in his later writings he speaks of nature in a more restricted sense.)
Nevertheless, the soul is a very remarkable and a very distinctive type of society, and among souls the human has still further remarkable distinctiveness. In this section we will attend to the peculiar character of the soul in general, and in the following section we will focus on the distinctiveness of the human soul in relation to subhuman souls.
The soul is remarkable, first, because it is a society composed of an extraordinary type of occasion. This type of occasion was barely
introduced near the end of the preceding chapter. Whitehead calls it the
presiding or dominant occasion of a complex animal organism. In vegetables and perhaps in very simple animals no such dominant occasion occurs, but in the higher organisms, especially where a fully developed central nervous system and brain is found, there is strong indication of centralized control of many aspects of the animals behavior. We find such centralized control present in our individual human experience, and we have immediate introspective awareness of the conscious experience that functions in this control.(PR 164. See also PR 74; MT 231.) There is every reason to suppose that the higher
animals have similar immediate enjoyment of themselves as centers of experience.(PR 164.)
The dominant occasions of experience are extraordinary in that they are almost certainly the only occasions of experience that are conscious.
Consciousness Whitehead identifies as a factor in the subjective form of some prehensions or feelings.(PR 246.) But it must be remembered that it occurs only where a high level of mentality or originality is present.
Further, it depends upon a complex integration of conceptual and physical feelings involving highly developed contrasts.(PR 369-372.) No other type of occasion of experience would appear capable either of so high a level of mentality or of such complex integration of
conceptual and physical feelings.
The dominant occasion can rise to such heights of experience only because the entire body is so organized as to make this ‘possible. It is so constructed that there is a constant flow of novelty from all its parts to the brain. In the brain there are many living occasions which in turn contribute their novelty to the dominant occasion located among them.(PR 166-167, 516.)
In the case of humans, and presumably of the higher animals as well, these dominant occasions are so ordered as to constitute enduring objects. Enduring objects are societies in which only one member occurs at a time.This arrangement of occasions can be spoken of as serial order or personal order.(PR 50-51) But the enduring objects composed of dominant occasions, that is, souls, are extremely different from other enduring objects, such as the molecule that has been our example heretofore. The molecule maintains itself through time by endless repetition, by trivializing of novelty or mentality, and by thus existing in an almost totally physical form. By contrast, the most striking feature of the soul is its aliveness or mentality.
Just as decisive is the contrast of the soul with the living occasions previously encountered in the empty space of the cell.These occasions lack all continuity and even social relatedness. They constitute,
Whitehead tells us, a nonsocial nexus within the cell.(PR 152.) The dominant occasions of the animal, on the other hand, have serial or personal order of the kind definitive of enduring objects, thereby maintaining a high degree of continuity through time.
This synthesis of endurance and life leads Whitehead to employ a distinct term, "living person." (PR 163) A living person is a soul.(AI 271. The term "soul" rarely appears before AI, but there and in MT it is frequent.) It is a type of enduring object, but I will follow Whitehead’s usual practice of using the latter term to refer to the far more numerous societies that achieve endurance by the sacrifice of life. We must ask, then, what makes endurance possible without sacrifice of novelty, life, and mentality.
This problem will be treated at some length below in section 4.
However, a brief introduction is needed here. To explain the peculiar way in which continuity is maintained without sacrifice of originality, we must introduce a distinction between two types of "simple" physical feelings.(PR 355, 375.)A simple physical feeling is one in which a single actual occasion is felt. Such an actual occasion must be
prehended by the new occasion in terms of some selected eternal object embodied in it. When the eternal object selected for this purpose was embodied in the physical pole of the actual occasion felt or prehended, that is, when it expresses how that actual occasion prehended its
predecessors, then the simple physical feeling is " pure." (PR 375-376.
Unfortunately, Whitehead also speaks of pure feelings as those not involving both physical and conceptual feelings. Such double use of terms adds to the difficulties experienced by the student.) But when that eternal object is embodied in the mental pole, that is, when it expresses some novelty in the self-determination of the actual occasion prehended, then the prehension is "hybrid." (PR 376.) In ordinary enduring objects hybrid prehensions play almost no role. In living persons hybrid
prehensions are decisive.(PR 163.)
Hybrid prehensions preserve for the future the flashes of novelty that have occurred in the past. The new occasion adds its own novelty, thus compounding the richness of the inheritance of successive occasions.
With some peculiar completeness each member occasion of the living person sums up the past of the society,(PR 244, 531.)contributes its
own novelty and passes away.
In the identifying of the soul, the emphasis has been placed upon the special connectedness of the successive dominant occasions in the
animal organism. This is proper, and we must return later to the difficult question of the self-identity of the soul or person through time. It is equally important to note the profound involvement of the soul with the body (PR 182 ff.; AI 241-243; MT 218-219) and its relationship with other souls.
The body and specifically the brain, is the immediate environment of the soul. (See sec. 6, for discussion of the locus of the soul.) Because of the apparent primacy of the sense data perceived outside of the body, this immediacy of the bodily environment is sometimes neglected.
Actually, what the soul immediately experiences or prehends are the occasions of experience of the entities immediately adjacent in the brain. These in turn prehend other contiguous occasions and so on throughout the body. This experience of the body is the primal datum for the soul.
This contribution of the feelings of the body to the soul is a major part of what Whitehead calls causal efficacy. The causal efficacy of the body for the dominant experience is always dimly in the background of that experience. But within the body there are organs designed to give the soul needed information for adjusting the body to its environment.
These are the specialized sense organs. Their experiences also have causal efficacy for the soul, but to a distinctive degree they lead to a special kind of activity within the soul. In the introduction, we saw how sensuous experience of the external environment (in the mode of
presentational immediacy) arises out of physical prehensions by the soul (in the mode of causal efficacy) of contiguous events within the brain.
Thus the body mediates to the soul a knowledge of the outside world, but even here the information is fundamentally about the body and its states, and only secondarily about the more distant sources of the bodily stimuli.
The doctrine of the two modes of perception, causal efficacy and
presentational immediacy,( Cf. PR 255 ff.) has immense importance for Whitehead’s philosophy. Through it he justifies an ontological realism rare in our day. He synthesizes our knowledge of physiology with the immediate deliverances of experience and shows the many ways in which error can enter our judgment. He also brings the scientific vision
of a world of electrons and molecules into intelligible relation with the world given us in visual experience. All this, however, is beyond the scope of the present work. The point here is to show how seriously Whitehead takes the relation of the dominant occasions, which constitute the soul, to the organism over which they preside, while refusing simply to identify or merge soul and body.
In addition, Whitehead is open to the evidence that there may be relations among souls not mediated by occasions spatially between them. For example, if there is empirical indication of mental telepathy, Whitehead sees no philosophical difficulty in incorporating such
relations into his system. The general philosophical principle is that every new occasion takes account of every occasion in its past. So far as this principle is concerned, every past occasion, near or far in time or space, might be directly prehended by every becoming occasion.
Factually, however, in our cosmic epoch, this does not seem to occur.
Rather, physical influences are brought directly to bear on the new occasion only by those immediately contiguous to it. To state this in more technical terms, simple physical feelings of the pure variety are limited to contiguous occasions. These, in turn, mediate the physical influence of other occasions. This is, however, only a probable, and in any case contingent characteristic of our world to be affirmed on the basis of scientific inquiry. It affords no basis for either affirming or denying that the mental aspect of noncontiguous occasions can be directly prehended. Whitehead’s own judgment is that there are, in fact, immediate prehensions of the mental poles of noncontiguous occasions.
He gains empirical support for this judgment both from "peculiar instances of telepathy, and from the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse." (PR 469.) He thinks that the inevitable mixing of these hybrid prehensions of other souls with the mediated experiences of the same souls explains why it is so difficult for consciousness to focus on clear instances of unmediated
prehensions.
The soul is, then, in immediate contact with some occasions of
experience in the brain and with the mental poles of the experiences of other souls. (Presumably the mental aspects of other types of occasions might also be directly prehended, but this would be trivial.) Indirectly, but intimately, the soul also prehends the whole society that constitutes its body and still more indirectly, but still very importantly, the wider environment that is the whole world. At the same time, the soul
contributes itself as an object for feeling by other souls, the contiguous
occasions in the brain, and indirectly by the whole future world.
Whitehead’s understanding of the relational character of the soul is still more radical than this suggests. One could understand all that has been said thus far to mean that the soul is first something quite definite and then receives the influence of its world. But the soul, or rather each occasion of its life, like every other actual occasion of experience, is relational or social in its essence.
An actual occasion is a new synthesis of its past. Everything that it is, except its own sheer actuality and subjectivity, it receives from beyond itself. It becomes only in this receiving.( Whitehead makes this point forcefully by stressing that an actual occasion is as much a "superject"
of its prehensions as a subject. (PR 43.) The more it receives, the more it can become. Insofar as it is closed to its world, it impoverishes itself.
The multiplicity of the other occasions entering into the composition of the new occasion is so great that the problem in understanding an actual occasion is not so much how it as an individual enters into social
relations but how all the relations that make it up achieve the unity of subjective immediacy and satisfaction.
This point is sufficiently important to an understanding of a doctrine of man to justify further elaboration. If we begin with the idea of self- contained entities, relations are necessarily accidental or external. The entity can be characterized first, and then we consider how it is related to other entities. This is a natural procedure when we are thinking of the corpuscular societies around us, such as tables and chairs. The table seems to be a self-contained entity, enduring through time and only externally affected by being moved to another part of the room. This is an exaggeration, but for common purposes we get along very well with this point of view. However, modern science has shown us that the table is not finally understood as a single entity but rather as a society of entities exceedingly different in character from the smooth, hard, passive, still, impenetrable surface we seem to experience. It is these actual entities to which Whitehead directs our attention in his
philosophy. These entities, he tells us, must be thought of as
happenings, occurrences, or occasions rather than as lumps of inert matter. Furthermore, each of these happenings seems to reflect the whole state of the universe as it impinges upon that happening and then to become a part of the universe impinging upon subsequent
happenings. Each occasion is a synthesis of the universe as it is grasped from that perspective and contributes to the universe its own
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.])