"Those Negroes and white men will be disalienated who refuse to let themselves be sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in other ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the present as definitive. I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future. It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe''.

FF

"As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process—by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute—the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance''. 

Orwell

Segall

"In obedience to Whitehead’s call for philosophy to reverse the abstractive tendency of the special sciences by exhibiting “the fusion of analysis with actuality,”3 this chapter seeks to understand the technical innovations of Whitehead’s organic doctrine while remaining in close contact with 1 Process and Reality, xiii. 2 James Bradley, “‘The Critique of Pure Feeling’: Bradley, Whitehead, and the Anglo-Saxon Metaphysical Tradition.” Process Studies 14 (2), 1985, 253. 3 Whitehead, “Mathematics and the Good,” in Essays in Science and Philosophy, 113. 2 the concrete historical context granting his inquiry its human significance. The early 20th century brought the decline of British Idealism alongside the rise of new methods of logical analysis. But more was at play in idealism’s wane than just a superior method. While he borrows from both the idealist and analytic schools, Whitehead’s radically novel understanding of relations distinguishes his speculative organicism both from F. H. Bradley’s mystical monism and from Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism. Whitehead processual account of relations is designed to avoid philosophical shipwreck by successfully navigating between the all-consuming whirlpool of the Bradleyan Absolute and the shattering rock shoal of Russellian analysis: All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living—that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. This is the doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute the world. 4 The further explication of Whitehead’s new doctrine of organic relations is enhanced by the historical treatment to follow. A review of the largely political reasons for the eclipse of idealism and speculative philosophy more generally clears the air for a renewed examination of Whitehead’s accomplishment. What Whitehead offers is not a return to naïve realism or preKantian dogmatism, but a participatory descendental ontology initiated into the materialism melting intuitions of Absolute Idealism but unwilling to forego concern for the individually creative and yet relationally intimate appropriation of the dead by the living. “Descendental” is my neologism signaling the inverse of Kant’s transcendental idealist approach. Descendental realism inquires after the necessary and universal conditions of actual rather than merely possible experience.5 It continues the effort toward what Whitehead called a “critique of pure 4 Process and Reality, xiii-xiv. 5 See my Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023). See also Daniel W. Smith, “The Conditions of the New,” in Deleuze and Guatarri Studies, Vol 1, No. 1 (2007), 3ff. 3 feeling”6 that, as I argue below, evades Kantian epistemological antinomies by an appeal to a process-relational ontology. F. H. Bradley was not wrong to discern that a world of actually existing rather than merely apparent finite centers of experience would entail an endless flux wherein experients pass perpetually beyond themselves and into one another.7 Whitehead’s organic realism turns idealism inside out precisely by affirming this relational process, thus hurling Bradley’s timeless monistic Universe into a self-differentiating creative advance, wherein “each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.” 8 In short, Whitehead’s doctrine of the actual occasion as “the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction” is simply a realistic inversion of the Bradleyan Absolute.9 The chapter to follow is divided into five parts. Part I introduces Whitehead’s philosophy of history before recounting the sociological reasons for idealism’s decline in the Anglophone world. Part II revisits Whitehead’s work with Russell on the logical foundations of mathematics in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between abstract pattern and concrete process. Part III introduces Whitehead’s metaphysical generalization of the function of propositions in the actual world. Part IV details Whitehead’s creative repurposing of the concept of feeling found in F. H. Bradley’s idealism. Part V concludes with a brief final interpretation emphasizing Whitehead’s process theological amendments to the Bradleyan Absolute. I: History “You will sometimes hear people say they have no metaphysics. Well, they are lying. Their metaphysics are implicit in what they take for granted about the world. Only they prefer to call it ‘common sense’… When we study consciousness historically, contrasting perhaps what men perceive and think now with what they perceived and thought at some period in the past, when we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself, and not simply changes in the human brain. We are not studying some so-called ‘inner’ world, 6 Process and Reality, 113. 7 J. E. Barnhart, “Bradley’s Monism and Whitehead’s Neo-Pluralism.” Southern Journal of Philosophy (Winter, 1969), 398. 8 Process and Reality, 245. 9 Process and Reality, 200. 4 divided off by a skin or a skull, from a so-called ‘outer’ world; we are trying to study the world itself from its inner aspect. Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world.” –Owen Barfield, “History, Guilt, and Habit”10 “Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.” –Alfred North Whitehead, “Harvard Lectures, Vol. 2”11 Shortly after the above rather Whiteheadian affirmation that consciousness has truck with the totality of things12 , Barfield cites “the Cambridge Realists” Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore as examples of those who sought to obsolesce metaphysical speculation by chaining human knowledge to the sober methods of propositional logic and empirical science. Barfield’s criticism warrants qualification. Though they would distinguish themselves by becoming the school’s sharpest critics, both Russell and Moore began their philosophical careers as students of idealism. And even after they had emptied their quivers into the heart of the idealist worldview, both remained convicted Platonists in their affirmation of universals (Russell at least for the truths of logic and mathematics, and Moore for ethical ideals). Their assault on idealism came in the form of a new analytic mode of thought that equipped them to make explicitly metaphysical arguments concerning the supposed implausibility of the doctrine of internal relations, especially the sort alleged to form the mystical core of F. H. Bradley’s monism. Of course, as any halfway sympathetic reader of Bradley will know, he was hardly a defender of the notion of relations, whether internal or external. As J. Mander explains, his analytically minded critics “simply misunderstood Bradley’s meaning [by accusing him] of thinking all relations are internal, when it is in fact his view that there are no relations at all.” 13 Regardless of Russell or Moore’s incomprehension of F. H. Bradley’s dialectical method of presentation, it is not the case that the Cambridge Realists claimed to have no metaphysics. Russell recounts his historic break from idealism in his memoir, noting that he and Moore’s 10 A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), 131-132. 11 The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, Vol. 2, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, ed. by Brian G. Henning, Joseph Petek, and George R. Lucas (University of Edinburgh Press, 2021), 375. 12 Process and Reality, 15. 13 Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 108. 5 rebellion centered upon “the doctrine that fact is in general independent of experience.”14 That is, the truth (or falsehood) of a proposition remains an objective fact regardless of whether a mind apprehends it. In Moore’s terms, they were rejecting as self-contradictory the idealist thesis that “whatever is, is experienced,” 15 whether by a conscious human being or by Absolute Spirit. Russell’s doctrine of external relations and the logical atomism which followed from it were an attempt to secure the knowledge of physics, but also to eliminate vagueness and confusion resulting from our commonsense ways of speaking about the world disclosed to sense awareness: “Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract.” 16 In this sense, Barfield is correct that the so-called Cambridge Realists sought, by means of the methods of logical analysis and a strict adherence to isolated sense data, to supplant any need at least for speculative metaphysics. His criticism stands, that by seeking a more perfect vantage upon the merely external structure of the universe, they abstracted consciousness from its worldly niche, forgetting “that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.”17 It is because of this inseparability between observation and interpretation that Whitehead’s process-relational reinauguration of metaphysics could only begin by challenging not only established theories but also received notions as to fact.18 Whitehead must also be counted among the Cambridge Realists, but his “organic realism”19 diverges in crucial respects from the analytic school, if not always in method than at least in attitude and results. While Whitehead shared enough with his student-turned-collaborator to spend nearly a decade working to establish the logicist thesis motivating Principia Mathematica (published in three colossal volumes between 1910-1913), it is clear that he and Russell differed significantly regarding the project’s proper philosophical interpretation and implications. In short, while Russell pursued certainty and deductive proof, Whitehead sought coherence, 14 My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 54. 15 Moore, G. E. “The Refutation of Idealism,” in Mind, New Series, Vol. 12, No. 48 (Oct., 1903), 437. 16 Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton, 1931), 82. 17 Barfield, A Barfield Reader, 131. See also Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (1894/1918), a key influence on Barfield’s conception of the evolution of consciousness and whose early exegeses of Goethe’s scientific method is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s philosophy of science (see “Goethe and Whitehead: Steps to a Science of Organism” in Holistic Science Journal, Vol. 2, October 2022). 18 Process and Reality, 9. 19 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 309. 6 analogical connection, and the unification of diverse branches of mathematics. 20 Russell’s own account is again instructive: The conceptions of the universe of Pythagoras and Plato were informed by mathematics, and I followed them eagerly. Whitehead was the serpent in this paradise of Mediterranean clarity. He once said to me, “You think the world is what it appears to be at noon when it’s sunny; I think it’s what it appears to be at dawn when one awakens from deep sleep.” I found his remark horrifying but couldn’t see how to prove that my way of seeing was better than his. Finally, he showed me how to apply the technique of mathematical logic to his world in a way that wouldn't shock the mathematician, by dressing it up in Sunday best.21 Contrary to Russell and Moore, Whitehead could not accept the independence of fact from experience. “If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience,” says Whitehead, “we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation.” 22 Nor was he willing to deny the relevance of the everyday use of words to philosophical investigation (thus bringing him somewhat closer at least to Moore than to Russell): …the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation as an item in a world with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Its search for a rationalist scheme is the search for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate justification, of the interpretations which we perforce employ. 23 20 See Desmet, Ronny (2010). “Principia Mathematica Centenary.” Process Studies 39 (2): 237-238. See also Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, The Man and His Work: Volume 1, 1861-1910 (Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 265. 21 Portraits from Memory (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1956), 39. 22 Process and Reality, 15. 23 Process and Reality, 14-15. 7 Like Barfield, Whitehead conceives of languages as “storehouses of human experience.”24 Also like Barfield, he understood his own philosophical language to be composed of “metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”25 For Barfield, the act of logical predication itself, considered analytically apart from imaginative participation in perceptual experience, becomes nonsensical, either false or tautologous.26 “Hence the attempts we are now witnessing,” Barfield wrote in the mid-1950s, to replace the traditional logic based on predication by a new logic, in which symbols of algebraic precision refer to ‘atomic’ facts and events have no vestige of connection with the symbols and no hierarchical relation to each other.27''

M Segall

Matter of fact is an abstraction arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality, this is why science, in its perfection, relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slipped through the meshes of the scientific net, consider for example the scientific notion of measurement, can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators its prime ministers and its editors of newspapers?

ANW

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

Orwell