1261. Creativity

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Creativity, for Whitehead, is not, as Cobb says, "the ultimate material cause of all things," because it is, in Whitehead's own words, "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact." Accordingly, if we are to categorize at all in terms of Aristotle's four causes, we would be less likely to mislead if we said instead that it is the ultimate (or primal) formal cause of all things.

If we ask, then, What, if anything, could be said to be "the ultimate material cause" for Whitehead? his own answer, presumably, as well as that of Hartshorne and others holding a Whiteheadian metaphysics of a categorial type, would be "experience," or "sentience," in the supposedly completely generalized, "analogical" sense of "experience (or sentience) as such." By contrast, others, such as myself, holding a Whiteheadian metaphysics of a noncategorial, strictly transcendental type would say simply "concreteness," in the purely analytical, and so literal sense of whatever content, quality, or value distinct from its purely formal structure as such makes anything concrete a concrete and not an abstract, and so an instance of "concreteness," and not of "abstractness."

But, be this as it may, Whitehead's term for the purely formal structure of the concrete as such, and thus of "concreteness," is "creativity," or "concrescence," using this second term quite literally to mean the process by which, again and again, and at the two radically different levels of God and the temporal world, the many so "grow together" as to become one, and to be increased by one. The proper task of a transcendental metaphysics that abjures "generalization" and "speculation" and gives itself instead to "analysis" is quite simply to analyze and explicate the purely formal structure of "concreteness" to which Whitehead's own uses of “creativity” as well as "concrescence" clearly refer.

21 October 1998