Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 99 Whitehead's Metaphysics: A Critical Examination. By Edward Pols. (Carbondale: Southern 111. Univ. Press, 1967. Pp. v-ix+195. $6.50) Edward Pols's book is a worthy addition to Whitehead scholarship despite my disagreement with his interpretation of crucial parts of Process and Reality. It was a delight to me to dip into his book and find myself carried beyond Whitehead into a penetrating analysis of the concept of freedom ingredient in Process and Reality. In this respect, the title of the book is a little misleading, since Pols's critical examination concerns Whitehead's concept of freedom . He ferrets this out of the text with great care, which leads him into some of the crucial doctrines of Process and Reality. He reads Whitehead with sympathy and understanding , and students will benefit from his analysis. The basic question of the analysis is to what degree Whitehead's metaphysics allows a genuine place to freedom. Clearly Whitehead intended to do so. Some of the crucial passages bearing on this question are: Categorical Obligation IX, which asserts, "the concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and is externally free" (PR 41); "whatever is determinable is determined, but that there is always a remainder for the decision of the subject-superject of that concrescence" (PR 41); and "however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in the determination of components of a concrescence.., beyond the deterruination of these components, there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe" (PR 75). Pols quite properly, in dealing with this question, gives a wider sense to freedom, what he calls the "factor of freedom," including: "a) indetermination; b) as a correlate of indetermination, novelty, which, reflecting perhaps an optimistic bias, is sometimes identified with creative advance; c) self-causation (or self-creation) in the sense of an aim at a certain 'subjective intensity' of feeling" (p. 21). It is important, I think, at the outset to remind ourselves that creativity, novelty indetermination, origination, and chance need not be the same as freedom. It is a common error to slip from one to the other, and some metaphysical systems depend on moving from one to the other. I believe that Whitehead's Category of Creativity includes freedom in his special sense, but we could have novel creative origination without freedom. Freedom is almost too vague or ambiguous to be of much use to a metaphysician, and Whitehead wisely avoids its frequent use. Pols argues that Whitehead cannot give a proper place to freedom in his system. First, the internal constitution of an actual entity is not free because it is determined by the subjective aim of that actual entity and the subjective aim is derived from a hybrid physical feeling of God's primordial nature, a feeling that occurs in the initial phase of concrescence. Second, the phases of concrescence of an actual entity generate an incompatibility between the hybrid physical feeling of God, providing the subjective aim in the initial phase and the subjective aim as a feeling of a proposition, which could only occur in a late phase of concrescence. Third, also stemming from the phases of concrescence, the internal selfcausation of an actual entity, which brings about modification of the subjective aim, is the result of determinate components or of creativity. But creativity contributes no active power, according to Pols, and the internal constitution of an actual entity is completely governed by a network of internal relations among eternal objects playing various roles, leaving no room for the decision of subject-superject in its final creative reaction which closes concrescence. Fifth, eternal objects are the ultimate ontological elements in Whitehead's system despite Whitehead's repeated claim that actual entities are fundamental (pp. 98-99, 141-142, 157-158, 193-195). Weaving in and out of the entire fabric of Process and Reality, Pols carefully collects his passages to give the evidence for these criticisms. The marshalling of evidence is carried out with due caution, always allowing for subtle differences of meaning, indicating a close reading of the text. This analysis makes the book worth reading regardiess of whether one agrees with...