Re: Whitehead on Deduction

[Ted Winslow <winslow@xxxxxxxx>]

Mine:

Whitehead's claims are the same as those of Hegel and Marx.

He is pointing to what Hegel called the mistaken identification of the
method of the "understanding" - formal reasoning which abstracts from
internal relations - with the method of "reason" - formal reasoning which
takes account of such relations.  This is what is meant by the "fallacy of
misplaced concreteness".  In Hegel's language this is the mistaken
identification of the "abstract universal" with the "concrete universal".
In the sphere of "reason",  formal logic is subsumed under "human logic or
the logic of truth".

"It is usually added that understanding must not go too far. Which is so far
correct, that understanding is not an ultimate, but on the contrary finite,
and so constituted that when carried to extremes it veers round to its
opposite. It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions ? but the
man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract 'either ? or',
and keeps to the concrete.
    "On the above mentioned theory of syllogism, as the rational form par
excellence, reason has been defined as the faculty of syllogising, while
understanding is defined as the faculty of forming notions. We might object
to the conception on which this depends, and according to which the mind is
merely a sum of forces or faculties existing side by side. But apart from
that objection, we may observe in regard to the parallelism of understanding
with the notion, as well as of reason with syllogism, that the notion is as
little a mere category of the understanding as the syllogism is without
qualification definable as rational. For, in the first place, what the
formal logic usually examines in its theory of syllogism, is really nothing
but the mere syllogism of understanding, which has no claim to the honour of
being made a form of rationality, still less to be held as the embodiment of
all reason. The notion, in the second place, so far from being a form of
understanding, owed its degradation to such a place entirely to the
influence of that abstract mode of thought. And it is not unusual to draw
such a distinction between a notion of understanding and a notion of reason.
The distinction however does not mean that notions are of two kinds. It
means that our own action often stops short at the mere negative and
abstract form of the notion, when we might also have proceeded to apprehend
the notion in its true nature, as at once positive and concrete. It is for
example the mere understanding which thinks freedom to be the abstract
contrary of necessity, whereas the adequate rational notion of freedom
requires the element of necessity to be merged in it. " (Hegel, Shorter
Logic, don't have the precise page but the book is on the web in the
Marx/Engels Archive)

The method of "human logic" is not induction in the conventional sense.  The
conventional sense (e.g. the sense it has in Hume's treatment of it)
implicitly adopts a particular atomist view of both reality and experience.
In Whitehead, "experience" enters as the ultimate ground for rational belief
in the same way it does in Husserl's phenomenology, i.e. as what Husserl
called the "lifeworld", experience as it actually is as opposed to
experience interpreted (as in Hume) within some particular ontological
framework.  For a reading of Marx which attributes to him this same set of
ideas, take a look at  Enzo Paci's The Foundation of the Sciences and the
Meaning of Man which explicitly compares Marx, Husserl and Whitehead.

It also follows from all this that an answer to the question "what do we
know?" must and can precede an answer to the question "how do we know?".
It must precede because to answer the second question we need a method.   To
start with this question is hence to assume that we already have the answer
to it - it is, as Hegel says somewhere, equivalent to the wise decision to
Scholasticus? not to go into the water until he had learned to swim.  It can
precede because human consciousness is such that the object of
consciousness, its content, can be directly grasped and transformed into
knowledge.

The epistemology which Whitehead elaborates on this basis is very like
Marx's doctrine of "praxis" (misinterpreted, in my judgment, if identified
with "pragmatism" or "instrumentalism" in their conventional senses).

As to Whitehead's criticism "our traditional doctrines of political economy"
in terms of these ideas, the same criticism is found in Marx.  He, like
Whitehead, claims that social relations are internal and that classical
political economy overlooks this.

Sixth thesis on Feuerbach:

"Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence.  But the
human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.  In its
reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

"Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is
consequently compelled:

     1.     To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious
sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract - isolated -
human individual.

     2.     Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as "genus", as an
internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals."

The ontological error - the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" - here
attributed to Feuerbach, is elsewhere attributed to Smith and Ricardo:

"Individuals producing in society - hence socially determined individual
production - is, of course, the point of departure.  The individual and
isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs
among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades,
which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a
return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine.  As
little as Rousseau's contrat social, which brings naturally independent,
autonomous subjects into relation and connection by contract, rests on such
naturalism.  This is the semblance, the merely aesthetic semblance, of the
Robinsonades, great and small.  It is, rather, the anticipation of 'civil
society', in preparation since the sixteenth century and making giant
strides towards maturity in the eighteenth.  In this society of free
competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc.
which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and
limited human conglomerate.  Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on
the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this
eighteenth-century individual - the product on one side of the dissolution
of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of
production developed since the sixteenth century - appears as an ideal,
whose existence they project into the past.  Not as a historic result but as
history's point of departure.  As the Natural Individual appropriate to
their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by
nature.  This illusion has been common to each new epoch to this day.
Steuart avoided this simple-mindedness because as an aristocrat, and in
antithesis to the eighteenth century, he had in some respects a more
historical footing."  (Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin ed., p. 83)

Best,

Ted
--
Ted Winslow                            E-MAIL: WINSLOW@xxxxxxxx
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