1228. In Adventures of Ideas . . .

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In Adventures of Ideas: 13 f., Whitehead is quite clear that among "general ideas" that function as "intellectual agencies involved in modifying epochs" are "ideas of high generality." These ideas, he says, express not only "conceptions of the nature of things," but also "conceptions of the possibilities of human society" and "conceptions of the final aim which should guide the conduct of individual men." This means, presumably, that "the ideas of high generality" include properly moral or ethical (and specifically political) as well as properly metaphysical or "cosmological" ideas. 

Incidentally, I take it that what Whitehead means by a "profound cosmological outlook," or an "ultimate cosmology," which is "a general form of the forms of thought," and constitutes "a general agreement upon first principles almost too obvious to need expression, and almost too general to be capable of expression," is roughly the same as what Bultmann and others usually mean by a "world view" (Weltanschauung), or even an "understanding of existence," as distinct from a "self-understanding." (When Bultmann says that the Christian proclamation "can be understood as a phenomenon of intellectual history and, with respect to its content of ideas, it is a possible world view," what he evidently has in mind is clarified when he speaks elsewhere of a world view as "an understanding that is capable of being unfolded theoretically and is in need of being thus unfolded," by which some "practical human attitude [sc. such as faith] toward one's fellow human beings and the world, toward one's own life and destiny, is sustained" [New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings: 41, 57].)

But if this is what Whitehead usually means by "cosmology," shouldn't one suppose that this is also what he means by it when he speaks of Process and Reality in its subtitle as "an essay in cosmology"? Process and Reality is not simply an essay in "metaphysics" in anything like my sense of the term, nor is it simply as essay in "cosmology" in anything like Hartshorne's sense of the term. Rather it is an essay in "philosophy," or "speculative philosophy," in Whitehead's sense of the term, i.e., understood as an existential explication, development, and criticism of cosmologies, or world views, implicit as well as explicit, with a view to coordinating the "general truths about the universe" that they express or imply and assigning them their "various spheres of validity." The immediate aim of such an essay is to contribute, as philosophy is in a position to contribute, to intellectual progress, by explicating world views and thereby making them capable of criticism and improvement, withal treating its own formulations of world views precisely as "working hypotheses." Its ulterior aim, however, is "guiding the purposes of mankind," "piercing the blindness of activity in respect to its transcendent function," "creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can effect the issue" – in short, clarifying "those fundamental beliefs which finally determine the emphasis of attention that lies at the base of character" (AI: 125 f.; MTr: 169, 171).

A possible objection to this interpretation and reasoning is that Whitehead's typical use of "cosmology" definitely tips in the direction of metaphysics, not morality or ethics. Thus he can implicitly define philosophy as "[t]he effort after the general characterization of the world around us"(MTr: 127), apparently abstracting entirely from its task to develop general ideas expressing "conceptions of the final aim which should guide the conduct of individual men." But, true as this is, its force is considerably weakened by considering that, in Whitehead's view, as in that of classical philosophers generally, "the specialized principle of immediate conduct exemplifies the grandeur of the wider truth arising from the very nature of the order of things" (AI: 19). In other words, Whitehead only stresses metaphysics because, in his view of morality or ethics, its principles are more or less direct applications or specifications of metaphysical doctrine for the determination of practice (cf. 21).

26 October 2000