Or
How a Vine can Kill a Tree
There is a certain group of scholars – I’ll name no names – which has taken on such a dominant position in Whitehead scholarship (at least, within the US), that one could arguably characterize their position as “hegemonic.” I have personally met a number of individuals associated with this group, whom I’ll simply call “The Group,” and freely admit that they are, as individuals, fine, generous, and altogether excellent folks. My complaint here – and I will be complaining rather sharply – is not with any of them as particular persons, but rather with the hegemonic direction in which The Group has taken Whitehead scholarship. That direction is what I am calling “Happy-Fluffy-Touchy-Feely-God-Talk” (HFTFGT from now on.)
Now, there is no question that Whitehead spoke of “God” extensively in his writings. Many people have the devil’s own time with such talk, those whom I’ll often characterize as “Ouchie Atheists,” for whom any such discussion drives them either into a fury or else into something like a cognitive anaphylactic shock. (Sometimes both.) This is one of the lesser pities of our day and age, a consequence of neo-fascist Christian Dominionist fundamentalists having hijacked the word and all discussions thereof. It is additionally unfortunate with regard to Whitehead scholarship because his use of the “G-word” could easily be replaced throughout his text with the Greek word “arché,” which would eliminate at a stroke the difficulties the Ouchie Atheists have and (arguably, at least) make it possible for them to dive more deeply into Whitehead’s texts and arguments. But Whitehead was intransigent in his refusal to employ non-English words. “Atom” was an exception. Though it originated with the Greeks, it had by his time – both by convention and courtesy – been thoroughly adopted as “English.” This is a little ironic, since contrary to most physicists of his day, Whitehead continued to use it in the original Greek sense of “a-tomos,” meaning “uncut.” So an atom for Whitehead was not a microscopic corpuscle, but an undivided whole which could be of any size.
I like the word “arché” because it can be translated as “foundation/font,” and this is what Whitehead meant by “God”: the rational foundation of reality, and the font of creativity. (This latter is one of the things that distinguishes process philosophies from static, substance based ones: the universe is a process of creative advance.) Notice that I do not suggest the Greek word for “god,” “theos” (or possibly “theou,” my Greek is not very good.) This is a deliberate choice, readily justifiable by even a moderately close reading of what Whitehead actually says, particularly within the pages of his masterwork of metaphysics, Process and Reality (PR).
With, however, the exception of one sentence.
This sentence appears in the last few pages of PR, which are separated from the rest of the volume as Part V. The language and argument of this final, very short “part” is fundamentally different from the preceding hundreds-plus pages of text, and this radical difference has led some to wonder just how genuinely integral an element of the rest of the discussion it truly is. In these final, very few pages, Whitehead allows himself to slip into more poetic language, most particularly with the above mentioned one sentence – which I’ll not quote. (If you know, you know, and if you don’t you’ll recognize it instantly should you ever read PR to the end.) But members of The Group, and others sympathetic to their program, latched onto that one sentence and ran with it. They ran fast, long, and hard, and are still running. From this we get the HFTFGT of process theology.
And it has swallowed the scholarship whole. So much so that Whitehead’s triptych of 1919 – 1922 (Enquiry into The Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity with Applications), a revolutionary re-evaluation of the entire philosophy of nature, have largely vanished from the canon of Whitehead’s works that are studied. (Let me reiterate that this is within the US. Chinese scholars, for example, recently celebrated the centennial of those works with no fewer than three separate conferences, one for each book.)
Even those works of Whitehead’s that do receive some attention receive it only selectively. Thus part IV of PR, for example, is often skipped over and ignored with students sometimes being told to ignore it because it is “irrelevant.” One might, alternatively, point out that part IV is the beating heart of Whitehead’s entire relational system, where he presents his mature mereotopology, his non-metrical theory of curvature (“flat loci”), his subtle theory of physical connectedness and causality (“strains”), his completed theory on the internalization of relatedness as the flipside to the theory of the externalization of relatedness found in part III, etc. But part IV also involves a lot of logical and mathematical thinking “stuff,” and so one can just skip over that because it doesn’t feed into HFTFGT. A more cautious reader might suspect that what this rather demonstrates is that it is HFTFGT that is flopping around looking for relevance. But such cautious readers are not being invited into the club, and their professors are not encouraging their students to adopt such cautious approaches.
It is partly as a result of this narrow and eminently disputable presentation of Whitehead’s philosophy that many outside the field who might otherwise profit from engaging with Whitehead’s ideas (especially persons in the sciences), explicitly reject the notion out of hand. Because, after all, Whitehead is “nothing more than” a lot of HFTFGT. And people “just know this to be the case” because they are constantly and loudly reminded of this “fact” by those experts who are only interested in HFTFGT.
(Of course, persons in the physical sciences tend to reject any suggestion of engaging in philosophy because it is, after all, philosophy. They often do this as they explicitly engage in philosophical discourse; and do so badly.)
Such a reductionist caricature of Whitehead’s thought is, of course, the worst sort grotesquely fatuous twaddle imaginable. Let me repeat, Whitehead wholly re-imagines Nature in a relationally robust and holistic framework that is original, insightful, and logically rigorous. But consider in comparison what your grasp of Christianity might be were it the case that all you ever heard about it came from the neo-fascist Christian Dominionist fundamentalists. Your idea of Christ would look more like Adolf Hitler. (By the bye, in contrast to the neo-fascists, the advocates of HFTFGT promote a vastly more Christ-inspired vision of God and the gospels that is genuinely loving and caring for ALL of creation.) And so it becomes increasingly difficult to even suggest to people who are not already heavily, even exclusively, invested in HFTFGT to cast even a casual eye on Whitehead’s work.
Which brings us to the matter of how a vine can kill a tree.
There is a method of killing a tree called “girdling.” A tree grows out as well as up. But if something is tightly bound around the outside of the trunk (it is “girdled”) the tree can no longer grow outwards. And it is these outer portions that carry the nutrients up the trunk to the rest of the tree. So the effect is like a garrote.
A vine is capable of girdling a tree. There is no malevolence involved, no ill or predatory intent; but the effect is the same. This is what ‘The Group’ is doing, I would argue, to the larger tree of Whitehead scholarship. (One of the ironies here is that they themselves are being girdled by the neo-fascist Christian Dominionist fundamentalists, who deny that liberal – never mind process – theology even qualifies as Christianity, or as anything other than the work of the Devil, even though this form of “devilry” is demonstrably truer to the Gospels. But just try to find someone who is not already an expert in the field who is even aware of the existence of process theology.)
I don’t want the HFTHGT people to go away, but I would like to see a serious effort on their part to acknowledge that their project emerges from a vanishingly small corner of Whitehead’s work. I don’t want to chop down the vine, but I would like the vine to stop strangling the tree. This would include exercising some genuine circumspection about what they attribute to Whitehead, as opposed to what they themselves rather freely speculate about, far beyond anything he – in his meticulous, mathematically rigorous and disciplined way – ever pretended to entertain.
THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION 
I share your dismay that the revolutionary metaphysics of Whitehead has ended up languishing in a prison cell marked “theology.” Still, having been driven to review the last few pages of PR by your coy reference to a single sentence (I noted several candidates), I’m under no illusion about the fact that Whitehead is invoking recognizably Christian doctrines. Why he decided to sabotage his opus this way is, I suppose, between him and God. All we can do is try to salvage his other ideas.
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Calling them specifically Christian is possibly a stretch, as nowhere does he mention Jesus. It has been suggested by others, in conversation rather than published text (that I’m aware of — my own brain is suffering from its own degree of mushiness these days) that part V was tacked on as an afterthought. The claim is certainly credible, as the entire stile of writing is fundamentally different from the preceding pages.
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The “Final Interpretation” certainly has a different tone. Whitehead is no longer explaining the metaphysics, but placing it in an uplifting or edifying context. He is sermonizing.
Let me say at the outset that I’m not here to promote Christian doctrine, in Whitehead or anywhere else. I’m merely pointing out some clues that Whitehead has Christian doctrine in the back of his mind.
His theme is not merely “redemption through suffering” (near the end of Section VI) but also the incarnation of God in the World, the manifestation of the eternal in the temporal in order to “save” the World (a word used repeatedly in Section IV) . In Section VII he speaks of four phases: conceptual origination; physical origination “with its multiplicity of actualities” (think before-Christ); perfected actuality, in which “the many are one everlastingly” (unity in Christ); and finally, “love of God for the world” in which “perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world.”
In Section II he rejects certain common conceptions of God, found even among Christians: that of “imperial ruler,” “personification of moral energy,” or “ultimate philosophical principle.” But he says, “There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion. . . It dwells on the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love.” This is where he sets up the story of salvation through the Incarnation that informs the rest of the Final Interpretation.
I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough to illustrate the point. For those with ears to hear, there’s some dog-whistling going on.
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I’ve seen this move in a number of fields of philosophy.
A group gains a vested interest in continuing their narrative of scholarship regardless of its accuracy.
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The words are certainly there in part V. The thing that merits challenge is the valorization beyond all justifiable extent of those words — arguably a mere afterthought — over and beyond the vast majority of his published thought.
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Fair enough. But perhaps Whitehead’s philosophical tree is (to use a favored metaphor of The Group) more like a clonal colony of quaking aspens, with many others shooting up independent of (though friendly with) the touchy-feely God tree.
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Well, one chooses the metaphor because of its aptness, not because it gives us a happy fluffy feeling. Look at the scholarship, rather than your feelings: where are the people teaching and writing about Whitehead’s *philosophy*? Why did I have to learn about the centennial observances of the publication of the triptych by accident? (Why wasn’t that being widely advertised and promoted?) Tim Eastman’s book is one of the rare exceptions in the publication arena, and he had to distance himself from the “God-Talk.”
And let’s look a little more closely at Pando. Why is it you only see one kind of tree in any of those pictures? Why do all the trees basically look like one kind of tree. The answer, of course, is because it *IS* only one kind of tree. It is a monocultural clone organism that aggressively excludes any other tree from its territory by blocking its access to light and choking it to death at its roots should it invade Pando’s ground.
Huh. Come to think of it, that really *IS* a good metaphor for what’s happening in Whitehead scholarship in the US.
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I’m teaching two sections of a graduate course on Whitehead’s philosophical cosmology this semester. We spend one week on process theology.
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Also known as “an outlier.”
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There will be many more outliers coming out of my program. And while I agree completely that Whitehead should not be pigeonholed I’m also less concerned about the theological aura preventing wider interest in his work. I continue to be surprised by how many wild Whiteheadians reach out to me who discovered his work on their own. These include folks in philosophy but also increasingly the natural sciences.
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Well congratulations on having found a niche at the top of a mountain no one knows how to climb. To the extent that this is happening for you, it is in spite of what the dominant schools have produced in the US. (I continue to emphasize the US, because one sees a very different picture in Europe in Asia.)
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But I also caution against the automatic confirmation bias. Where are the publications? How is it that you ALONE are having these experiences?
(At the other end of the spectrum, issues at SIUC seem to be sorting themselves out, so it, too, might begin to see more activity that is strongly oriented toward the philosophical end of the spectrum. This is all in the future, if it happens at all, but there are some promising signs.)
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I am curious why you would say that “Whitehead was intransigent in his refusal to employ non-English words”—especially since you do recognize “atom” as an exception (considering he did not use it in the vernacular English sense but rather in a technical sense appealing to the meaning of the Greek word): certainly atom is not the only exception in this vein (and not the worst, either). To the contrary, Whitehead is well known (notorious?) for his willingness to go beyond the English language, considering his philosophical writings are full of neologisms or unfamiliar terms that appeal to Latin. Hence, “prehension,” “concrescence,” also “nexus” especially when one considers his use of the plural “nexūs” which is a rather obscure Latin inflection and certainly foreign to English grammar (which at best can recognize the plural -i). The word “creativity” itself would have been obscure English when he first used it (and, again, appealed to the Latin root). Whitehead makes frequent use of non-English terminology from the relevant history of philosophy in Process and Reality. Thus, the Latin “causa sui” is used in some rather important passages; or take when he states that the “esse” of an actual entity’s satisfaction is “sentiri” (PR 220). If anything Whitehead operates with the basic assumption that the reader will know Latin, not to an extent that it’s a serious obstacle to a first reader but it does require some Latin knowledge or dictionary work for a close reading of a few passages.
Whitehead did indeed use a Greek word to refer to God, but not arché. In Adventures of Ideas he uses some Greek terminology (including the use of the Greek alphabet, even, to really hit home this is bona fide not-English), specifically because he is attempting to appropriate some of Plato’s key terminology. The word he picks is Eros—so that he talks of the “supreme Eros,” “Divine Eros,” and the “Eros of the Universe” to refer to the Primordial Nature of God.
I certainly don’t think we should ignore Part IV and Whitehead’s theory of coordinate division. To quote category of explanation viii: “That two descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one which is analytical of its potentiality for ‘objectification’ in the becoming of other actual entities, and (b) another which is analytical of the process which constitutes its own becoming” (PR 23). It would be great to see more discourse capable of comprehensively discussing Whitehead’s full system. Still, I’m not sure why we should call it the beating heart (rather than saying, perhaps, that Part III and Part IV together are the beating heart, if we have to pick out one part of the book). After all, Whitehead does caution the reader that coordinate division is descriptive of “quasi-feelings” rather than feelings per se, since only genetic division maintains the subjective unity of the actual entity (i.e., its description includes the shared teleology operative in each prehension). I think we’d all agree one major contribution Whitehead provided was a novel theory of final causation, and this is not provided by coordinate division, which instead provides the basis by which the natural sciences may abstract their subject-matter—Nature—from concrete intuition (though in P&R he doesn’t talk about “natural science” so much as “physical science”). Nature is an abstraction from concrete experience for Whitehead, since it only takes into account the object of sense-awareness and not the perceiving and thinking mind. To fully appreciate this, however, one must then also refer to Part II and his theory of statistical inductive arguments (i.e., arguments appealing exclusively to efficient causation), while keeping in mind the account of judgment provided in Part III (and the theory of propositions provided in parts II and III).
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WordPress is being unreliable about notifying me of new posts.
You might consider breaking your comments into smaller units, to make it easier to respond to the salient points.
“I am curious why you would say that “Whitehead was intransigent in his refusal to employ non-English words”” — Well, primarily because it is true. The examples you give — “prehension,” “concrescence,” also “nexus” — are all well established ENGLISH words by the time he was writing; they were archaic, and had fallen out of common usage, but not the less English for all of that.
Part for is not just and only about the theory of nature. It where makes explicit what he has been hinting at throughout that the entire system is *logically* prior to both space and time, thus absolutely undercutting any attempt to reduce his metaphysics to an ontology. Reducing CA to just and only about nature is to miss the point entirely.
“(though in P&R he doesn’t talk about “natural science” so much as “physical science”)” — and Nature is not the same as science. I’ve argued elsewhere why I believe Whitehead’s triptych (which, with the noted exceptions, he continues to embrace in PR) should be viewed as ‘Natural Philosophy,” rather than philosophy of science. Which brings me to this:
I’m not going to address in 1,500 words questions that required over 170,000 words to properly engage, and that was only the last book. (I’ve more to say about Nature in “The Measurement Problem of Cosmology.” I’m sorry, but most of your objections, while considered and well-enough based on ONE text, also reminded me of those who objected to “Black Lives Matter,” with “All Lives Matter.” You fret over my use of the phrase “beating heart” as though that amounts to the same type of systematic dismissal the major scholars in the contemporary US have shown for part IV. You then *seem* (I emphasize, only seem) to silo the entire coordinate analysis back in its place in the closet where no one has to deal with it. After all, it is only relevant to “physical science”; this latter point being, of course, patently false.
Insisting that black lives actually matter in no way denies or denigrates the lives of the butt-hurt white people who refuse to confront the overt racism so endemic to policing in the US. Similarly, demanding that *real* attention be paid to the role of coordinate analysis *THROUGHOUT* the entire metaphysics is not an attack on the other parts.
You’ve obviously got a very solid grounding in the text. All I can suggest at this point is that you check out the book Randy and I cowrote which — coincidentally — has the same title as this blog. I apologize for the expense, that’s on the publisher. You ought be able to get a copy through your library. That’s the 170,000+ words I mentioned above, and it does the deep dive on CA that I can scarcely do more than gloss here.
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Even accepting prehension, concrescence, and nexūs as pre-existing English of an extremely Latinate sort, there’s still the cases in which Whitehead was directly using Latin, Greek, and I believe some French, so I still am very unsure of this claim that he was so strongly against using non-English words in his philosophy.
I did not mean to suggest that coordinate division is _only_ relevant insofar as it provides a basis for the physical sciences, though certainly it is only about the physical in general. That is, Part IV is about a mode of description that abstracts from the mental pole. Extensive relationships characterize physical prehensions, not conceptual prehensions. (They don’t characterize all physical prehensions either, considering hybrid prehensions.) Coordinate division thus abstracts from mental activity–and thus also any actual feelings–to instead analyze the potential of the actual world for objectification as characterized by extensive regions and their relations (defined in terms of the primitive relation of extensive connection). “Nature” was Whitehead’s earlier term for the objects of sense-awareness considered apart from their being perceived and thought about, and this was then analyzed into extensively related events. Thus the two fit quite closely, I’d think.
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“I did not mean to suggest that coordinate division is _only_ relevant insofar as it provides a basis for the physical sciences, though certainly it is only about the physical in general.” — Again, if you don’t want to read the detailed answer, I certainly can’t give you a satisfactory, superficial gloss. You are pushing Whitehead’s use of the term “physical” to mean just and only what it means in physical science, and then saying that is not what you are reducing it to.
You cannot have *any* kind of explanation in the absence of coordinate division. Period.
Also, since you give no examples, you give me no reason to suppose that you aren’t conflating use and mention. Give an example of the *use* of a term that was demonstrably *NOT* either in common usage, or an established English term that was archaic but had fallen out of common usage.
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As you suggested, I have been consulting your book Quantum of Explanation. I found this one claim in it, “For several of his books, Whitehead adapted a form of mathematical inquiry to the task at hand, which he called genetic and coordinate analysis” (112).
So far, I have only been able to find one instance of “genetic analysis” and two instances of “coordinate analysis” in Whitehead’s books, and both those are in Process and Reality: “The process of concrescence is divisible into an initial stage of many feelings, and a succession of subsequent phases of more complex feelings integrating the earlier simpler feelings, up to the satisfaction which is one complex unity of feeling. This is the ‘genetic’ analysis of the satisfaction. Its ‘coordinate’ analysis will be given later, in Part IV” (PR 220). “Physical time makes its appearance in the ‘coordinate’ analysis of the ‘satisfaction.’” (PR 283) I can’t find any other instances, so I would greatly appreciate having some page citations for examples of these terms being used, if you’re able to provide any. I haven’t come across any such citations in your book.
He uses the terms “coordinate division” and “genetic division” also (again in Process and Reality), and in the above quotations he specifies each time he is referring to the coordinate and genetic analysis _of the satisfaction_, which would be synonymous with coordinate and genetic division, given that in that book “division” has the technical meaning of a mode of analysis of an actual entity into its constituent prehensions (PR 19). I ask this especially because your book includes the claim, “Genetic and coordinate analyses” are “distinct from methods of division” (113), but I have only been able to find the above uses of the terms genetic and coordinate analysis, where it is referring to genetic and coordinate division (which, thus, are modes of metaphysical description of actual entities in terms of prehension, not methods of mathematical inquiry in general). Because of this, I would be especially curious to compare any of Whitehead’s other uses of the terms.
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This interaction seems to be at the end of its effective lifespan, but I’ll take one more stab at this.
You *say* that, in effect, of course the coordinate division is important, yet I find nothing in the rest of your comments to suggest you give even a passing nod at that claim. Yet consider: in the absence of coordinate division/analysis, there is no actual occasion.
The actual occasion is not some bit of ontological stuff we just magically find floating around out there in the world. This is because the whole thing is “prior” to both space and time. Whitehead is very clear on this point, as are Randy and myself in our book. But in what sense can it be “prior”? Well it cannot be earlier in time or at a more initial point in space, as these characteristics are not yet available to us. The only priority that remains, then, is logically. It is not for nothing that we called the book the quantum of *explanation*, rather than the quantum of stuff.
But that logical priority is not given, it is achieved. It is the *product* of meticulous part/whole and relational-connectedness analyses. This is the intention of the entire Fenway park discussion. We did not simply get some inexplicable weed up our ass and decide to talk about baseball. We were engaged in a concrete form of coordinate analysis – how to build a model of Fenway park. Well, a miniature paper weight or other objet d’art is pretty easy; pretty much anything that looks roughly like a baseball park will do as long as it has the “green monster” prominently displayed. But a functional model, built for little league players, is a vastly more complex entity. As a result, the necessary part/whole and relational-connectedness analyses necessary to *produce* an effective “quantum of explanation” are also much more subtle. It is a matter of pursuing the internalization of relatedness (coordinate analysis) so as to express the externalization of relatedness (genetic division.) Note that we do NOT talk of “internal” or “external” relations in their usual, substantive form. And, yes, subject/superject is about the externalization of relatedness, while the mutually conditioning and relationally inseparable forms of part/whole are about the internalization of relatedness. The world becomes one and is increased by one.
In any, and every case, the analysis will be fine tuned to the inquiry. It won’t be a rubber stamp, one-size-fits-all, rigidly identical structure. This is, by the bye, standard operating procedure for any mathematician.
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Apologies for all the writing, but I also noticed what I believe to be a distinctive error in your reading of a key passage in Whitehead. You quote at length from the start of Part IV and give interpolations in brackets: “At length a complex unity of objective datum is obtained [that is, the satisfaction], in the guise of a [generic] contrast of actual entities, eternal objects and propositions, felt with corresponding complex unity of subjective form [that is, the actual entity is a unified togetherness of all these other entities]” (quoted in 137). The “complex unity of objective datum” certainly is not the satisfaction. The satisfaction is a feeling; the objective datum and subjective form are factors then analyzable as parts of said feeling. The unity of objective datum felt is, rather, “the actual world”—and that is what Whitehead is referring to there.
Thus, your later interpretation here seems misleading or a non sequitur: “Note that the satisfied actual entity, genetically described, comes as an appearance of contrasts between what it actually did in unifying and contributing itself to the world, and the world to which it has contributed itself (137). In the text above from Whitehead, when he brings up a “contrast of actual entities, eternal objects, and propositions” he is discussing the objective datum felt, which by definition will not include the feeling actual entity being genetically divided. So I believe to then discuss the satisfaction itself as appearing as contrasts is, as I said, a bit of a non sequitur given the text you intend to comment on.
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If I understand you correctly, you have a very expansive idea of what Whitehead meant by “coordinate division” and “coordinate analysis” in a way that I just can’t find in Whitehead, so I’d again reiterate that I’m very curious if you can cite the texts from Whitehead where you got this. My only concern right now is just claims about what Whitehead did and didn’t say, grounded as explicitly as possible in the textual evidence.
This is Whitehead’s precise definition of what “coordinate division” is, and the only sense of both that term and “coordinate analysis” I have (taking both as synonymous): “A coordinate division is thus to be classed as a generic contrast. The two components of the contrast are, (i) the parent actual entity, and (ii) the proposition which is the potentiality of that superject having arisen from the physical standpoint of the restricted sub-region. The proposition is thus the potentiality of eliminating from the physical pole of the parent entity all the objectified actual world, except those elements derivable from that standpoint; and yet retaining the relevant elements of the subjective form” (PR 285).
In this sense, it presupposes the category of actual entity already. It’s defined, like all “division” is in Whitehead’s technical sense in PR, around being descriptive of actual entities–and, specifically, it is descriptive of extensive relations among subregions analyzable in actual entity’s standpoint.
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I would also be curious if you could further speak on another aspect of your book. “The central aim of this book is to make an argument, as persuasively as possible, for the concept of explanation—in all domains that human beings study—defended by Alfred North Whitehead” (1). This concept of explanation “is that concrete existence explains the abstract aspects of experience and not vice-versa” (2) or as is reiterated soon after, “the true explanation of any physical reality is the concrete event that it surrounds” (4). This is a striking use of the term “explanation,” but I cannot find any similar uses of the term in Whitehead that justifies identifying this as his concept of explanation, or something he defended or affirmed at all.
Whitehead, rather, talks of writing, thoughts, doctrines or theories (i.e., basically, propositions or that which communicates them, and propositions are by definition abstract entities) as explaining things. I have never found him state that the concrete explains. For instance, take this famous passage from the start of Process and Reality: “The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things” (PR 20). Here it is “philosophy” that (at least ideally) explains, and what it explains is “the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things.” He noticeably does not say that the concrete things themselves explain; philosophy—presumably as a set of doctrines or theories, or a discourse communicating such—does the explaining. Take also a passage from Adventures of Ideas, where he writes that “the status of objects cannot be understood in the absence of some such ontology explaining their function in experience” (179-180). Note that here “ontology” is doing the explaining, not the experience that is being discussed through such an ontology.
I would be very curious to see any possible counter-examples where Whitehead uses “explain” or “explanation” or variations thereof and that supports your position, as right now I am having trouble understanding where you got this claim from.
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