To Jan Noble Linnaean Holmgren from Zvi Lothane
Dear Jan Holmgren,
I was delighted to read your post for two reasons: I had the same idea of
referring to Whitehead in connection with the current spate of discussions
about MIR etc and I have a fondness for Sweden. I have a few good friends
in Sweden, among them the psychoanalyst Jan Stensson, editor of International
Forum of Psychoanalysis published by Scandinavian University Press, where
a number of my papers have been published, of which the most recent one
is The Perennial Freud: Method vs. Myth and the Mischief of Freud Bashers,
which may be getting off the presses as I write.
Whitehead is indeed a towering 'actual entity', to use his quaint neologism
and synonym, inter alia, for person. As a matter of fact, Process and Reality
is riddled with a plethora of neologisms which make reading it like running
an obstacle course. It is only my fondness for him that made me persevere.
But then, most great minds, e.g. Schreber, of whom you probably never heard
but whose noble forbear, Johann Christian Daniel Edler von Schreber, was
a diligent student and propagator of Linnaeus. Let the greats have their
neologisms, but we smaller minds prefer to use the common words in the dictionary.
So whereas 'actual entity' may refer to planets and pebbles and people,
I prefer to stick to the old fashioned person: Whitehead was an actual person,
and I am surprised, nay, flabbergasted, that he never used the simple term
person, and this in a philosopher whose express aim and 'philosophic scheme'
in writing his complex Process and Reality 'the 'Philosophy of Organism'',
inspired, as he says by George Sanatayana. He also invokes Aristotle (and
Plato) as his inspiration: organism implies person, the concrete person
(capable of concrescence), with body, soul, and spirit (the Aristotelian
Nous, not a theological notion, although that, too) -- so why the hell did
Whitehead not say person? He used the synonym 'subject', as a foil to object,
but never said person. He spoke of unconscious mental processes but never
mentioned Freud. Strange things happen to philosophers ...
Perhaps it could be ascribed to British insularity, here verging on terminological
solipsism, or to the specific spell cast on British philosophy by that bunch
of so-called empiricists, Locke, Hume and Berkeley, who both corrected and
confused philosophy after Aristotle. In Process and Reality Whitehead struggles
with the contradictions in those philosophers but cannot quite shake off
their mistakes and is found foundering here and there.
But I am in favor of uncompromising PERSONALISM. To me the person is the
center of everything human, the rest is, as Whitehead's great rival Bertrand
Russell said, so much obfuscation by philosophers.
One of the big confusions of the British school was to confuse subjectivism
with PERSPECTIVISM. There is a world of objects out there, pace Hume, there
are persons in it, persons have recognizable identities or selves, there
is causality, even though you cannot SEE causality, and there are habits.
And there are also the perspectives of the perceiving person, as Nietzsche
made it so clear.
But therein lies the beauty of being human: when armed with Dilthey's verstehende
Psychologie, we can, in the process of interpersonal communication, enter
the inner world of the other, the other person, the interlocutor, and he
can enter ours, for that's our only way to become aware of those other minds.
That's how I make a living and that's the charm of these internet encounters
in communication.
-----------------------------------
Zvi Lothane
http://www.mssm.edu/faculty/lothane/schreber/
E-MAIL <zl@doc.mssm.edu>
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Dear Zvi,
Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comment, and for the Noble Linnaean.
I cannot live up to such a grand title, though, being just an architect
somewhat astray in natural philosophy.
I too am fond of Whitehead in spite of his neologisms. I wish he was easier
to read, but there is also a certain thrill in the sudden understanding,
i.e. when it appears. I admire his far-reaching attempt at establishing
'a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which
every element of our experience can be interpreted.' Notice the 'every element'.
Too few listened to his early warning against taking the abstract to be
the objective (the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness'), and the twentieth
century was stamped by much misinformed and 'detached' rationality. I hope
the growing demand for taking qualitative experiences seriously is of good
omen for this century. Obviously, I'm very far from understanding all of
Whitehead's thoughts.
Certainly, I can agree that 'the person is the center of everything human'.
Considering Jarvilehto's organism/environment theory, the demarcation of
a person, however, is not evident. To my mind, conscious experiences (Whitehead's
Category of the Ultimate, with the, to our biased modern minds, somewhat
odd capacity of being simultaneously 'one', 'many', and 'creative') ultimately
are the only entities we have access to. I see no contradiction with your
statement 'we can, in the process of interpersonal communication, enter
the inner world of the other, the other person, the interlocutor, and he
can enter ours, for that's our only way to become aware of those other minds',
as far as you don't mean it literally. I see it as shared experiences, thoughts,
emotions, etc.
If subjectivism means Humean solipsism, could it be confused with perspectivism?
I think Whitehead solved the escape from solipsism with his 'physical pole'
of actual entities (parts of conscious experiences, as I read him). It allows
for constructivism at the 'mental pole'. Is there a better solution to be
had?
I read your 'Freud and the interpersonal' with great interest. There is
much beyond metaphysical cosmology to be known. In fact, Whitehead mentioned
Freud once in 'Process and Reality' (p.32): 'The word 'appetition' illustrates
a danger which lurks in technical terms. This same danger is also illustrated
in the psychology derived from Freud.' I wonder what he meant. I thought
Whitehead's system would imply efficiency of psycho-analysis/therapy, since
actual entities (conscious experiences) have creative power.
Best wishes,
Jan Holmgren
e-mail <j.holmgren@telia.com>
http://w1.411.telia.com/~u41104695/index.html
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Dear Jan,
thank you for you response, which I enjoyed greatly. I am delighted to find
that you are an architect, a philosophizing architect at that. This could
mean that you have been open to the creative spirit of architecture, a visual
art that had me spellbound since I was 14. There is one architect, Alexander,
who built bridges between architecture and free association, Freud's premier
methodological concept, the latter insufficiently understood not only by
non-analysts but by the analysts themselves. The other that comes to mind
who understood this is Poincar_. But Whitehead would qualify as well. And
his invoking the appetitive is Aristotelian and Freudian: the appetitive
soul.
To restate my point: to me the person is an ens realissumum, like God to
Thomas Aquinas. I think Whitehead is deliberately nebulous here and unnecessarily
avoids the term person. Some folks have cited him as one of the modern existentialists.
I believe he was, a much better one than Heidegger, the great obfuscator.
As to perspectivism, it surely beats hazy solipsism, and here Whitehead
did provide a solution. In connection with the debates about MIR in this
forum, it is useful to remind people of Whitehead's definitive disposal
of Galileo's erroneous theory about secondary qualities that became the
basis for Hume's skepticism and Berekeley's far-right idealism: colors,
sounds, and smells are real, folks, the rose by any other names still smells
sweet. What a wonderful discovery Whitehead made...
Best regards,
Zvi Lothane