Science and the modern worldWhitehead, Alfred North
Religion
Science and the modern world
Whitehead, Alfred North
Science
The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term for the fundamental
situation disclosed in experience. It is really reminiscent of the
Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate.’ It already presupposes the
metaphysical doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private
predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private worlds of
experience. If this be granted, there is no escape from solipsism. The
point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity
underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects,’ as thus conceived, are
merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates. The primary situation
disclosed in cognitive experience is ‘ego-object amid objects.’ By this
I mean that the primary fact is an impartial world transcending the
‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object, and transcending the ‘now’ which
is the spatial world of simultaneous realisation. It is a world also
including the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality of the
future, together with the complete world of abstract potentiality, the
realm of eternal objects, which transcends, and finds exemplification in
and comparison with, the actual course of realisation. The ego-object,
as consciousness here-now, is conscious of its experient essence as
constituted by its internal relatedness to the world of realities, and
to the world of ideas. But the ego-object, in being thus constituted, is
within the world of realities, and exhibits itself as an organism
requiring the ingression of ideas for the purpose of this status among
realities. This question of consciousness must be reserved for treatment
on another occasion.
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