SUO: Re: Peirce and Whitehead
Title: Re: Peirce and Whitehead
Nicola,
I have been busy trying to finish a couple of papers and haven't
had
a chance to write a formal answer to all the points in your review
of my book.
But I did want to clear up that point about the interpretation
of Whitehead's categories and their correspondence with Peirce's.
In particular, the main disagreement was whether Prehension
belonged under Secondness and Nexus under Thirdness, as I said,
or the opposite, as you said.
The point I made was that my interpretation was consistent with
Whitehead's Process and Reality and with Sherburne's summary of
P & N. But for a more definitive answer, I scanned in
some
excerpts from Whitehead's _Adventures of Ideas_, which is the
book he wrote immediately after P & N. The dates are 1929
for
Process and Reality, and 1933 for Adventures of Ideas.
For the basic ideas, Whitehead gave a more detailed explanation
in the later book, which I believe make it clear that my
interpretation is consistent with both of Whitehead's books
and with Sherburne's summary.
The pages that discuss "prehension" and "nexus"
are included
at the end of this message.
Note that a prehension is a dyadic relation between what Whitehead
calls the subject and the object. What seemed confusing in
Sherburne's summary is Whitehead's sentence "Thus a
prehension
involves three factors." When you read that sentence in
context
(see the excerpt labeled p. 178), it is clear that there are
two distinct "occasions", the subject and the object, and
that
the third factor, the "subjective form" is "the
affective tone
determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion
of experience." It is more like a commentary on the
relevance
or importance of that prehension, and certainly not a distinct
"occasion" in the experience.
Following that is a more extended discussion of nexus, in
which Whitehead makes it clear that it is a grouping of
multiple "occasions", which may include multiple
prehensions
of one another. There are clearly many more
"occasions"
involved in a nexus than in a prehension.
Have you sent your review to the editor? If not, I wish you
would correct it. If you have, I'll ask the editor to
include
my response.
Dear John,
thanks
for your note. The final version of my review has been sent to the
editor. I include below the part about Whitehead. After reading your
note, my doubts are still there: a nexus does not seem to me as a
"mediating entity", but rather the result of such mediation.
On the other hand, it is clear it is the prehension that mediates...
Of course the whole matter is complicated, but the problem is that
neither your book nor your further comments help to get a coherent
picture of it.
All the best,
-- Nicola
Sowa's deepest
attempt to use Peirce's distinctions as a unifying ontological
paradigm is his personal revisitation of Whitehead's categories:
actual entity, prehension, and nexus. Although Sowa admits that
"Whitehead never mentioned Peirce" (p.63), he considers
these categories as strictly reflecting Peirce's. If successful, this
unifying attempt could have been the most intriguing contribution of
the whole book; unfortunately, however, the matter addressed is
difficult, and the results are terribly confusing (and sometimes just
inconsistent). Again, the problem is that Whitehead's categories are
presented in an informal and obscure way, by including a few
quotations with no attempt to explain or formalize them:
For Secondness, he
[Whitehead] used the term prehension for "concrete fact of
relatedness." He explained "that every prehension consists
of three factors: (a) the subject which is prehending, namely, the
actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the
datum which is prehended; (c) the subjective form which is how that
subject prehends that datum."
For Thirdness, Whitehead adopted the Latin word nexus [I will use the
plural nexuses] which represents an instance of connecting or binding
together two or more actual entities: "Actual entities involve
each other by reason of their prehensions of each other. There are
thus real individual facts of the togetherness of actual entities,
which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which
actual entities and the prehensions, are real, individual, and
particular. Any such particular fact of togetherness among actual
entities is called a nexus" (pp. 6364).
It took me months to grasp and digest these notions. I
admit I haven't read Whitehead, but this reading shouldn't be a
prerequisite for an introductory bookŠ. Eventually, I got to this
simplified picture of Whitehead's terms: Suppose I sell my car to John
Sowa; my own participation to this event is my prehension of it,
which, of course, is different from John's. The selling event is the
nexus that includes me and John as participants. However, why should a
prehension be considered a secondness if it involves three factors? In
addition, why is a "fact of togetherness" "an instance
of connecting"? Isn't the prehension between entities the
mediating factor within a nexus?
Unfortunately, things become more confusing when Sowa applies Peirce's
distinction to the abstract counterpart of Whitehead's basic
categories. According to Sowa, Whitehead "classified the
abstractions in the categories of Eternal objects, Propositions, and
Subjective forms, which constitute a triad of abstract Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness" (p. 64). Propositions are therefore
the counterpart of prehensions, and subjective forms such as emotions
and purposes are the counterpart of nexuses. This mapping between
Whitehaed's and Pierce's categories sounded very strange to me because
subjective forms and propositions appeared to be switched in their
correspondence to prehensions and nexuses: propositions seem to me as
a nexus composed of a predicate and a logical subject, which prehend
each other. After some serious puzzlement, I finally decided to resort
to A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality by Donald W. Sherburne
[1], which apparently confirms my view. Indeed, on reading Sherburne's
explanations, I realized that Whitehead's notion of nexus may be
different from Sowa's because Whitehead sees it more as composed of
actual entities that are interrelated through their prehensions of one
another rather than as a mediating entity that links the actual
entities together. A person, for example, is seen by Whitehead as an
example of nexus (a "structured society"), but Sowa
considers it an actual entity. Under this view, a nexus should be
classified under firstness. Moreover, a prehension should better be
seen as a thirdness because it "mediates" between the
prehending and the prehended entities. Indeed, intentionality, which
Sowa considers thirdness, has been seen in philosophy as an example of
prehension [2].
In sum, this "synthesis" of Peirce and Whitehead is
very problematic. Unfortunately, the consequences of this
reconstruction are not limited to the philosophical background chapter
because the whole book hinges on six top-level categories, obtained by
adding to the physical trichotomy actuality-prehension-nexus its
abstract counterpart form-proposition-intention (Whitehead's names
have been changed slightly). As discussed above, the most serious
problem here is that the intuitions behind prehension and nexus seem
to be switched with respect to Sowa's
interpretation.
[1] D. W. Sherburne,
A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality. Reprinted in 1981 from
University of Chicago Press; an excerpt of the most important terms is
available on line at http://hyattcarter.com/glossary.htm
[2] Gier, N. 1976. Intentionality and Prehension. Process Studies 6(3)
197-213.