Whitehead's Theory of Value

Abstract

T nHE status of values suffered aprogressive degradation parallel to that of knowledge in modern philosophy. Descartes's "bifurcation. of nature" banned tertiary as well as secondary qualities from the physical world. With values confined to the realm of minds conceived to be independent substances, the complete subjectivity of values was inevitable, no matter how much philosophers might dignify their retreat with moral "postulates." Finally, values took flight altogether, and the nineteenth century witnessed nihilistic doctrines which completely severed the realm of values from the realm of facts-the one unreal, the other worthless. Whitehead's philosophy strikes at the presuppositions of this whole development, which lie in the category of substance and the derivative fallacies of "simple location," "misplaced concreteness," and "vacuous actuality." If the ultimate actualities are not isolated substances but acts of experience related by mutual immanence, so that each is part of the "real internal constitution" of the other, and if none is purely mental or purely physical but each is both, then no "mind" is cut off from community with others, nor are "minds" excommunicated from nature. And, if the actualities themselves are infected with flux and relativity, there is no reason to banish values for a kindred crime. Thus it is a feature of Whitehead's theory of value that it is part of a general reconstruction of categories, not an isolated argument thriving on suppressed metaphysical premises. He opposes the compartmentalization of philosophy as a major source of sterility and guides his own thinking by the ideal of a coherent system in which all parts presuppose one another. Hence his philosophy includes values from the start and does not have to bring them in later as an apologetic afterthought.