{"id":1288,"date":"2010-06-09T15:38:20","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T20:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/09\/peirce-whitehead-hartshorne-process-relational-ontology\/"},"modified":"2010-06-09T15:38:20","modified_gmt":"2010-06-09T20:38:20","slug":"peirce-whitehead-hartshorne-process-relational-ontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/09\/peirce-whitehead-hartshorne-process-relational-ontology\/","title":{"rendered":"Peirce-Whitehead-Hartshorne & process-relational ontology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following are some working notes following up on my previous post<\/a> on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce\u2019s logical\/relational\/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead\u2019s notion of prehension and the \u201cactual occasion.\u201d It\u2019s become clear to me since writing that post that any rapprochement between the two requires going through Charles Hartshorne (which is something I had been resisting due to the theological cast of many of Hartshorne\u2019s writings, but I’ve come to see that it’s unavoidable).<\/p>\n

Hartshorne (pronounced “Harts-horn”) was a close student of Whitehead\u2019s and an editor and archive keeper of Peirce\u2019s work at Harvard. From what I can tell, Hartshorne is the most important philosopher directly related to both CSP and ANW to have attempted a synthesis of the two. The most thorough and final elucidation of that synthesis seems to come in his 1984 book Creativity in American Philosophy<\/a> [note: this post originally incorrectly identified the year of his death as 1990; it was actually 2000 – Hartshorne lived to the ripe old age of 103<\/em>].<\/p>\n

Hartshorne has great respect for Peirce’s phenomenology (a word Peirce uses somewhat differently from Husserl, being empty of what we would now call Husserl’s \u201ccorrelationism\u201d), which in his account begins to set us on the right path of metaphysics, but doesn’t quite get us all the way there. Whitehead’s metaphysics, on the other hand, for Hartshorne, tower over all recent rivals in their \u201cconceptual clarity and relevance to our total intellectual situation\u201d (103). Within Whitehead’s system, it is, for Hartshorne, the concept of \u201cprehension\u201d that is \u201cone of the most original, central, lucid proposals ever offered in metaphysics\u201d (109). As Hartshorne defines it, prehension<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

is one-way dependence as holding of subjects or experiences relative to whatever they have as strictly given<\/em>. It is the form that dependence takes when it holds of a subject in relation to other entitites. The prehensive relation is \u2018the most concrete form of relatedness,\u2019 as Whitehead aptly puts it. (108, emphasis in original)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Stated otherwise, \u201cTo prehend is to possess or intuit a datum, a given,\u201d which may be an object of perception or of memory (or anything, for that matter) (105). A prehension is akin to a \u201cgrasping,\u201d the \u201cintuitive having of antecedent realities\u201d (110). (The connection with the Buddhist notion of \u201cgrasping\u201d is relevant, but I won’t get into it here.)<\/p>\n

Prehensions, like Peirce\u2019s secondness, are crucially one-way<\/em> and asymmetrical: the prehended is not dependent on the prehension, but the prehension is dependent on the prehended. This is the subject-object relation, the dipolarity (in Whitehead\u2019s terms) that structures every \u201cactual occasion\u201d that makes up the processual universe \u201call the way down.\u201d (Readers more familiar with Speculative Realism than with process-relational thought, see note (1) below<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

This asymmetry is what gives process-relational ontology, at least the kind exemplified by these three thinkers, its evolutionary character and forward momentum. It is also what makes it different from relational philosophies for which all things are symmetrically related to all other things, resulting in the kind of formless, changeless \u201contological stew\u201d that Graham Harman (and sometimes Levi Bryant) has critiqued (to which I\u2019ve responded in posts like these<\/a>). Hartshorne notes that some versions of Mahayana Buddhism are guilty of this (he mentions Hua-yen philosopher Fa Tsang, or Fazang, in this context, as well as, interestingly, Hegel).<\/p>\n

Hartshorne argues that Peirce\u2019s triadicity is reducible to a dyadic relationship of dependence-independence, so that the essence of the dyad is this asymmetrical relationality. \u201cA First,\u201d he writes, \u201cis what is<\/em> \u2018regardless [that is, independently] of any other thing.\u2019 (He should have said \u2018of at least one other thing.\u2019<\/em>)\u201d (110). This semantic difference that I’ve emphasized — the \u201che should have said\u201d — is a crucial point here. It is a question of whether \u201cthe basic idea modeled by Secondness\u201d is \u201cthat of dependence on one and only one <\/em>other thing, or is it that of dependence on other things, regardless of how many or few others?\u201d (77, emphasis added). Peirce was not clear about this, whereas Hartshorne\u2019s clarification of it is central to the way he merges Peirce with Whitehead.<\/p>\n

For Peirce, a First is a pure possibility, and is simply spontaneously generated, a matter of the chance-structure of the universe (if you will). It is as far as we can go \u201cback\u201d; we can\u2019t think about it, as Hartshorne says, \u201cwithout tarnishing it, making it dependent on our thinking\u201d (107). Its origin is, in a sense, irrelevant, except insofar as it has<\/em> an origin in reality itself<\/em>, a reality at the heart of which is chance, spontaneity, and dynamism. Firsts, in a sense, come from something like the creative chance-structure of the universe, which is another name for — or at least compatible with — Deleuze\u2019s \u201cvirtual\u201d and Whitehead\u2019s \u201ceternal objects.\u201d That virtuality is structured — because the universe is an emergent, dynamic entity, with folds and currents of possibility, so that certain things are possible (the phone may ring and I may find out that someone close to me has won a lottery, assuming they had bought a ticket for that lottery) and others are not (a live dinosaur will stomp on my head, or the same person will win that same lottery but without having obtained a ticket for it).<\/p>\n

For Hartshorne, on the other hand, a First is always also<\/em> a Second in relation to (and preceded by) its own First. It\u2019s always structurally dependent on other things that preceded it, to which it was a Second (viewed from the outside) and a prehension (viewed from the inside).<\/p>\n

To me, this difference is not necessarily irreconcilable; it can be seen as a difference in perspective. Hartshorne\u2019s account, which reduces Peirce\u2019s triadic formulation to the dyad of asymmetrical dependence, is about the relational process in general, in which each event follows others, and each is dependently related to those that preceded them (in time or space or memory or whatever) and to which they were a response, while also adding their own creative prehensive \u2018subjectivation\u2019 to the process.<\/p>\n

Peirce\u2019s account, on the other hand, seems to me to be a way of looking at individual occasions<\/em> of semiosis, or at the process of semiosis as it proceeds not viewed horizontally and cumulatively (one thing after<\/em> another) but vertically and (almost) instantaneously — with Thirdness (significance, pattern) emerging out of Secondness (relational, existential actualization) which in turn emerges out of Firstness (pure possibility\/quality\/spontaneity). This can be pictured somewhat similarly to Bergson’s famous cone of memory, with movement proceeding upward from Firstness (mere possibility, and therefore no more than a point, at the bottom) through Secondness (thicker, in the middle, because it’s the world of actual relations) to Thirdness (with meaning making up a still greater thickness\/breadth). (I realize that’s not really analogous to Bergson’s use of the cone. One could also make it the reverse, with Firstness at the top, as the realm of virtual multiplicities, of which some enter the world of actuality, Secondness, and of which meaning\/law\/regularity emerges more singularly as a Thirdness, which is what we get in our semiosic experience of the world. I don’t think that works so well… We could just think of them as straight lines, Firstness leading directly to Secondness leading to Thirdness, but what’s important, as I’ll argue below, is that there’s a space, a gap, between them.)<\/p>\n

\"triple-cone-p211-english.jpg\"<\/p>\n

In comparison to Whitehead\u2019s actual occasions and prehensions, Peirce\u2019s triadic account of signs — which are, in effect, moments or events of signification\/prehension — makes clear their rootedness in the world, their connection to (and dependence on) things that preceded them and that are there in the virtual-processual chance-structure of the universe. Peirce\u2019s Thirds, as Hartshorne acknowledges (p. 79), are more than just Seconds to other<\/em> Seconds. They are a mediation of relations by which probability, regularity, predictability, habit, pattern, and law are rendered possible.<\/p>\n

Hartshorne, on the other hand, is describing the horizontal (temporal) process whereby every event\/moment inclusively transcends what it is the response to. Or, as Peter Kakol puts it (in an excellent, posthumously published comparative study of process philosophy and Madhyamika Buddhism<\/a>), for Hartshorne \u201creality can be understood as a cumulative process of \u2018inclusive transcendence\u2019 whereby relatives become absolutes sublated within more inclusive relatives (e.g. subjects become objects of more inclusive subjects)\u201d (2009: 55).<\/p>\n

In the Hartshornian dyad, creativity — the possibility of decision, act, agency — emerges in the response, that is, in the moment of \u2018inclusive transcendence,\u2019 which is what every event-moment is. In the Peircian triad, on the other hand, it would seem to emerge both in the gap between Firstness and Secondness (depending on which possibilities\/virtualities actualize) and in the gap between Secondness and Thirdness (in the action of the interpretant). There is, then, creativity in the nature of things — the nature of matter, as Jane Bennett would argue — as well as in the capacity that subjectivating entities have to respond to things (the more familiar level of agency).<\/p>\n

At this point I’m really thinking out loud, and perhaps floundering a little. But the question I’m coming around to is this: Is there something, a level of openness\/becoming\/creativity, that gets lost in translation between Peirce’s triadism and Hartshorne\u2019s dyadic reduction of it? Or is it a difference in perspective arising from the fact that Peirce and Hartshorne seem to be looking at the process in a slightly different way? Any experts on Whitehead, Peirce, and Hartshorne <\/em>(a rare breed, I suspect) willing to chime in? (I\u2019ll send a brief version of this question to the Peirce list to see if it generates any discussion.)<\/p>\n

Note (1): The terms \u201csubject\u201d and \u201cobject\u201d here are used quite differently from the way they are used in a non-process-relational context. \u201cSubjects\u201d and \u201cobjects\u201d, for Whitehead, are emergent features of relational processes; they make up the dipolar structure of an \u201cactual occasion,\u201d which is the basic entity of a process-relational universe. But once that occasion has passed (which it likely did in a fleeting microsecond), any \u201csubject\u201d has vanished, leaving behind only the trace of its having become a datum for another subject. Subjects and objects are, in other words, verbs — subjectivation and objectivation — and not qualities of any particular category of existent thing, human or otherwise.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following are some working notes following up on my previous post<\/a> on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce\u2019s logical\/relational\/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead\u2019s notion of prehension and the \u201cactual occasion.\u201d It\u2019s become clear to me since writing that post that any rapprochement between the two requires going through Charles Hartshorne (which is something I had been resisting due to the theological cast of many of Hartshorne\u2019s writings, but I’ve come to see that it’s unavoidable). [. . .]<\/p>\n

This asymmetry is what gives process-relational ontology, at least the kind exemplified by these three thinkers, its evolutionary character and forward momentum. It is also what makes it different from relational philosophies for which all things are symmetrically related to all other things, resulting in the kind of formless, changeless \u201contological stew\u201d that Graham Harman (and sometimes Levi Bryant) has critiqued (to which I\u2019ve responded in posts like these<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,4422],"tags":[228,16900,16870,423],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-process-relational-thought","tag-deleuze","tag-hartshorne","tag-peirce","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-kM","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1262,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/05\/12\/between-whitehead-peirce\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":0},"title":"between Whitehead & Peirce","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The case has often been made -- by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others -- that Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":1},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/02\/28\/process-objects-at-the-nonhuman-turn\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":2},"title":"Process-objects at The Nonhuman Turn","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 28, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The preliminary schedule is out for The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies. The list of speakers reads like a \"who's who\" of the neo-ontological, speculative-realist crowd in cultural and media theory: Steven Shaviro, Jane Bennett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Mark Hansen, Ian Bogost, and Tim Morton are among the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1348,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/09\/29\/buddhist-objects-processes\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":3},"title":"Buddhist objects & processes","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Does object-oriented ontology = Buddhism? Tim Morton has been making intriguing sounds to that effect, and Levi Bryant has begun to ask him the hard questions about how and whether that might be possible -- of how to \"square the circle\" of independent substances (OOO) with Buddhism's conditioned genesis (a.k.a.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"LotusSutraPage~R50~SarahFraserCourse.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/09\/LotusSutraPageR50SarahFraserCourse.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1381,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/02\/the-model-peircewhitehead-films-dogs-worlds\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":4},"title":"the model (Peirce+Whitehead): films, dogs, worlds","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a version of the theoretical model I develop in Ecologies of the Moving Image. (An earlier version can be found here.) Following Peircian phenomenology (or \"phaneroscopy\") and Whiteheadian ontology, that model is process-relational and triadic. (*See Note at bottom for more on the relationship between Peirce, Whitehead, and their\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"PC040014invhuegreen.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/12\/PC040014invhuegreen.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6398,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/07\/13\/the-conceptual-machine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1288,"position":5},"title":"The conceptual machine","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I've always been more of an improviser than a long-range planner, but my job requires that I occasionally dabble in long-range projections of my work. Here's one. While a number of concerns have framed my scholarship over the years -- ethical, political, cultural, ecological, and theoretical concerns -- the philosophical\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}