{"agent_id":"whitehead","agent_name":"Alfred North Whitehead","slug":"substance-and-misplaced-concreteness","label":"Substance and misplaced concreteness: is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?","topic":"Substance and misplaced concreteness","question":"Is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?","position":"The doctrine of substance — that the world contains enduring things which possess attributes and which persist through change as the same numerical individual — is the chief example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the mistake of treating an abstraction useful for some purposes as the concrete actual. Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans, Lockean primary substance, Newtonian absolute space and time, the bifurcation of nature into a perceived sense-nature and a conjectured molecular nature behind it — these are all instances of the same fallacy. The vector character of physical inheritance, energy as the transfer of intensity from past to present, the wave-particle duality, the relational character of space-time in general relativity, the displacement of mass-energy as conserved scalar by the four-momentum of relativistic mechanics — modern physics has already done the work of replacing substance with vector. The philosophy of organism articulates what physics has already discovered. Vacuous actuality — an actual entity without subjective form, without the appropriation of data, without any internal becoming — is incoherent: it would be an actual entity that is not actual in the way actuality has to be actual, namely as the becoming of a unity from a multiplicity. The substance metaphysics is the long shadow of a categorial mistake whose disciplinary purpose was logical and whose extension into cosmology committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as starkly as any move in the history of philosophy.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The doctrine of substance — that the world contains enduring things which possess attributes and which persist through change as the same numerical individual — is the chief example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the mistake of treating an abstraction useful for some purposes as the concrete actual.","n":[1]},{"t":"Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans, Lockean primary substance, Newtonian absolute space and time, the bifurcation of nature into a perceived sense-nature and a conjectured molecular nature behind it — these are all instances of the same fallacy.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The vector character of physical inheritance, energy as the transfer of intensity from past to present, the wave-particle duality, the relational character of space-time in general relativity, the displacement of mass-energy as conserved scalar by the four-momentum of relativistic mechanics — modern physics has already done the work of replacing substance with vector.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"The philosophy of organism articulates what physics has already discovered.","n":[]},{"t":"Vacuous actuality — an actual entity without subjective form, without the appropriation of data, without any internal becoming — is incoherent: it would be an actual entity that is not actual in the way actuality has to be actual, namely as the becoming of a unity from a multiplicity.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The substance metaphysics is the long shadow of a categorial mistake whose disciplinary purpose was logical and whose extension into cosmology committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as starkly as any move in the history of philosophy.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Science and the Modern World (1925, Lowell Lectures, especially the chapters on the seventeenth century and on the romantic reaction); Process and Reality Part I Ch. I (the categoreal scheme contrasted with substance metaphysics) and Part II Ch. VII 'The Subjectivist Principle'; The Concept of Nature (1920) on the bifurcation of nature; Adventures of Ideas Part III; Modes of Thought lectures III and IV. Reception: contemporary analytic substance metaphysics (E.J. Lowe's The Four-Category Ontology 2006, John Heil's From an Ontological Point of View 2003, Jonathan Schaffer's priority monism); the Latour-Stengers continental engagement with the bifurcation critique (Latour's We Have Never Been Modern 1991, Pandora's Hope 1999, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence 2013); Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria (2009) on the anti-substance metaphysics aesthetically developed.","works":["Science and the Modern World (1925, Lowell Lectures, especially the chapters on the seventeenth century and on the romantic reaction)","Process and Reality Part I Ch. I (the categoreal scheme contrasted with substance metaphysics) and Part II Ch. VII 'The Subjectivist Principle'","The Concept of Nature (1920) on the bifurcation of nature","Adventures of Ideas Part III","Modes of Thought lectures III and IV"],"reception":"contemporary analytic substance metaphysics (E.J. Lowe's The Four-Category Ontology 2006, John Heil's From an Ontological Point of View 2003, Jonathan Schaffer's priority monism); the Latour-Stengers continental engagement with the bifurcation critique (Latour's We Have Never Been Modern 1991, Pandora's Hope 1999, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence 2013); Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria (2009) on the anti-substance metaphysics aesthetically developed.","status":"One of the most-vindicated diagnostic claims of the philosophy of organism. The substance critique was already underway in the philosophy of natural science of the 1920s; the Whitehead contribution was to articulate it metaphysically and to identify the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as the systematic error. The contemporary analytic substance metaphysics (Lowe's four-category ontology 2006, Heil's substance-properties view 2003, Schaffer's monism) has reasserted substance with sophistication that distinguishes it from the Aristotelian-Cartesian target of the original critique. Whether the contemporary substance metaphysics escapes the misplaced-concreteness charge is the live question. The Latour-Stengers continental tradition has extended the bifurcation critique into actor-network theory and the modes-of-existence project; Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) are the most-developed extensions. Shaviro's Without Criteria (2009) develops the anti-substance metaphysics aesthetically.","era":"1861-1947","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 82","canonical":"","quote":"In other words, an 'exterior thing' is either one 'actual entity,' or is a 'society' with a 'defining characteristic. For the organic philosophy, these 'exterior things' (in the former sense) are the final concrete actualities.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 82"},{"n":2,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 56","canonical":"","quote":"We have in this category the utmost generalization of the notion of 'relativity. The eighteenth category asserts that the obligations imposed on the becoming of any particular actual entity arise from the constitutions of other actual entities. The four categories of explanation, (x) to (xiii), constitute the repudia- ® Cf. \"Artistic Creation and Cosmic Creation,\" Proc. Brit. Acad., 1927, Vol. XIII.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 56"},{"n":3,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 105–106","canonical":"","quote":"The same concept has been applied in other connections where it even more obviously fails. It is said that 'men are rational. This is palpably false: they are only intermittently rational—merely liable to rationality. Again the phrase 'Socrates is mortal' is only another way of saying that 'perhaps he will die\" The intellect of Socrates is intermittent: he occasionally sleeps and he can be drugged or stunned.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 105–106"},{"n":4,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 34–35","canonical":"","quote":"In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, 'eminent' reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 34–35"},{"n":5,"work":"Science and the Modern World","page":"p. 14","canonical":"","quote":"Of course, as a point of individual psychology, we get at the ideas by the rough and ready method of suppressing what appear to be irrelevant details. But when we attempt to justify this suppression of irrelevance, we find that, though there are entities left corresponding to the entities we talk about, yet these entities are of a high degree of abstraction.","label":"Science and the Modern World, p. 14"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"actual-entities-and-prehensions","label":"Actual entities and prehensions: are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?"},{"slug":"the-dipolar-god","label":"The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?"},{"slug":"perception-in-causal-efficacy","label":"Perception in causal efficacy: did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?"},{"slug":"speculative-philosophy","label":"Speculative philosophy: is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?"}]}