Self-Control
A recent research paper on self-control by Dr. Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology, illustrates the importance of second-order thinking in our ability to make good decisions. Although she doesn’t use the term, her work addresses the ancient philosophical problem of akrasia, a Greek word that literally means “lacking command.”[1] It is sometimes rendered as “weakness of will” and refers to acting against your better judgment or knowingly choosing what you judge to be an inferior option.[2] It is often couched in terms of succumbing to temptation.
If you know, for instance, that drinking alcohol is bad for you and leads to embarrassment and painful hangovers, why do you do it? Why do you eat way too many donuts or chocolates when you know they make you fat and prone to heart disease? Why, if you know better, do you keep getting into toxic romantic relationships or succumbing to the blandishments of false gurus or buying needless junk?
Historically there have been many answers. Socrates thought it was due to ignorance of what is truly good for you. Saint Augustine thought it was due to lack of will-power. The latter view is more prevalent today. Duckworth says,
Ordinarily, when we think of exercising self-control, we think about how hard it is. Perhaps we smoke and wish we didn’t. Perhaps we spend hours watching TV and wish we went to the gym more often. Perhaps we stay up late and wish we got more sleep. Whatever it is that makes us feel better now but worse in the long-run, struggling—and often failing—to exercise self-control is familiar territory for all of us.[3]
When you succumb to temptation you are in a state of akrasia; you lack command of yourself, you lack self-control. Duckworth defines self-control as
… the self-initiated regulation of conflicting impulses in the service of enduringly valued goals. … self-control is called for when we are torn between two mutually exclusive options, one expected to bring immediate gratification and the other expected to further more enduring and important goals.[4]
Implicit in this view of conflicting impulses is the idea that each of us contains more than one level or aspect of selfhood. Duckworth says “An individual can be of two minds about what to do, think, or feel.”[5] She doesn’t mean that we are schizophrenic, only that in addition to being able to act, often successfully, in the world, we also have the ability to observe and think about ourselves acting. In so doing we can improve how we act in the world. We humans have gained quite a lot of mastery over the physical world by observation, experimentation, thinking and planning. When we turn that same capacity for cognition toward ourselves, we are in a position to exercise self-control.
The two levels of selfhood have been called various things: First-order vs. second-order desires; hot vs. cold cognition; impulsive vs. reflective action; automatic vs. controlled mental functioning.[6] I call them first-order and second-order thinking. Our second-order thinking gives us the ability to control our first-order desires and impulses. How this plays out can be seen in the phases of the process that typically leads to an occasion of akrasia.
Duckworth identifies four phases, which she calls Situation, Attention, Appraisal and Response. She pictures them like this:[7]
The cycle starts at the bottom. You find yourself in a situation, for instance entering a room with a plate of donuts in it. Despite knowing that donuts are bad for you, your attention is drawn to the donuts; you implicitly appraise them as tasty and desirable; and finally, you respond by eating them. Your knowledge of their ill effects fades into the background as your attention fixes on the salient characteristic of the situation, the donuts. And the next time a similar situation arises, the cycle starts again.[8]
This model not only describes the cycle cogently; it also suggests ways to break it. You can intervene at any point. When you see the donuts (Attention), you can look at something else instead. Having looked at the donuts, you can remember that they are bad for you despite their delicious flavor (Appraisal) and turn away. When you are about to put one in your mouth (Response), you can stop yourself by sheer force of will. Each of these is progressively harder to achieve. It’s easier just to look away than to gaze on the donuts and appraise them as no good. It’s easier to appraise them as no good and turn away than to stop yourself in the act of eating, when you are in the throes of restimulation and rational thought is out the window. But easiest of all is addressing the situation in the first place.
Duckworth says,
… enacting self-control isn’t always difficult, particularly when it takes the form of proactively choosing or changing situations in ways that weaken undesirable impulses or potentiate desirable ones. Examples of situational self-control include the partygoer who chooses a seat far from where drinks are being poured, the dieter who asks the waiter not to bring around the dessert cart, and the student who goes to the library without a cell phone.[9] … As a rule, earlier intervention is best.[10]
To intervene in the later stages requires enough presence of mind to notice that something needs to change and enough gumption—aka will power—to change it. But to intervene on the situation before it arises requires something else. It requires having enough self-awareness to notice under what circumstances such situations arise and to think about them when you are not in the midst of desire. Then you can devise strategies to deal with them. You don’t do it in the heat of restimulation; you make plans to deal with the situation exactly when you are not in it. That’s when you are more likely to come up with successful strategies to reduce your exposure to the triggering situation, strategies that allow you to avoid exerting a lot of painful effort in the Attention, Appraisal and Response phases. Self-awareness is the key to success.
Philosophical Implications
Beyond providing good advice for dealing with akrasia, the research done by Duckworth and her colleagues sheds light on two important philosophical issues: whether we have free will and how to live well. Her research supports the assertion that we do have free will. It also supports the idea that there is something unique about human beings that, if cultivated, can lead to a more fulfilling life than if not.
Free Will
In his influential essay “Freedom of the will and the concept of a person,” philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguishes between two levels or orders of desire and will. Along with every other living being, humans have desires for various things: food, shelter, entertainment, companions, sex and many others. Even the smallest single-cell organism has desires for nutritious things, which presumably taste good, and aversions to harmful things, which presumably taste bad. These Frankfurt calls “first-order” desires; the organism just wants something and goes after it.
Humans also have second-order desires, which he describes as follows:
Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, [humans] may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are.[11]
A drug addict, for instance, wants a drug. But some addicts might also want to avoid that drug because they know its ill effects. Here we have conflicts among first-order desires. If the addict further wants to avoid the drug to the point of wanting to not even have the desire for it in the first place, they have a second-order desire, one that refers to their first-order desire. Then the conflict is between first and second-order desires.
Frankfurt distinguishes between second-order desires and second-order volitions, the latter being desires that the person wants to move him (or her or them) to do something to get what they want. By “will” or “volition” he means a desire that “moves … the person all the way to action.”[12] Presumably a person might want to experience a desire but not want to actually do the desired action or get the desired object. That’s an unusual edge case, but Frankfurt, being carefully analytic, considers it. His focus, however is on second-order volition.
Now consider two cases, both of which involve an addict that wants to quit being addicted. Addict A wants to quit, but can’t. When the opportunity arises, addict A, in a full-blown episode of akrasia, goes ahead and takes the drug. Addict B wants to quit and does in fact refuse the drug. The refusal could happen at any of the inflection points that Duckworth identifies; what’s salient is that the addict is successful in avoiding the drug. Addict B’s will is free; addict A’s is not. Frankfurt says,
It is in securing the conformity of his will to his second-order volitions … that a person exercises freedom of the will. … The unwilling addict’s will is not free.[13]
I expect that we are all addicted to something to a greater or lesser degree, be it heroin or sugar or something in between. We’ve probably all had occasions of not wanting the addiction. We know the experience of wanting to not want something, but going after it anyway. In such a case, the second-order will is thwarted. We are constrained, just as surely as if we were imprisoned and forced to ingest the drug. But if we succeed in actuating our second-order will and curbing the first-order one, we feel a sense of freedom, of power and accomplishment. Second-order thinking, aka self-awareness, is what makes freedom of the will possible.
Human Excellence
Inscribed on a wall at the Oracle of Delphi were the words “Know thyself.” According to the ancient Greeks the nature of a thing—what a thing is, essentially—determines or at least gives us very good clues to what it is good for or good at, and what is good for it. When a thing is doing what it is good at and getting what is good for it, then it is functioning well. The internal experience of functioning well is—in human terms—fulfillment, a fulfilling life. And the thing humans are best at is second-order thinking.
Our capacity for second-order thinking—also called self-awareness, self-knowledge and metacognition—is what makes us distinctively human. Most other animals don’t have it. Think of a dog who suddenly notices a squirrel and takes off after it. There’s not much cool self-reflection going on in that case, nor when the squirrel is gone and the dog gets distracted by something else. Perhaps some animals, the so-called higher ones like octopuses, whales, chimpanzees and elephants, have that capacity in rudimentary form, but absent intelligent beings from another planet it’s clear that humans can do it more and better than any other species.
That fact suggests that if we cultivate our capacity for second-order thinking, our ability to consider ourselves as well as all the things we busy ourselves with, we’ll better be able to figure out how to live in a fulfilling way.
We can do this in two ways. The first is that we can think about ourselves and how we typically behave, react and function. Such thinking is retrospective and prospective. We remember how we comported ourselves in the past and think about how we might do better in the future. The original meaning of “know thyself” was “know your limits” in the sense of knowing the extent of your abilities.[14] That’s the kind of self-knowledge that pervades much of human social and intellectual life. It involves taking an objective stance and considering yourself as if from a public point of view. From there you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Friends, coaches and mentors help us do this.
The other way is to observe ourselves in action, in the present moment as we experience and do things. To do this you take a personal, private stance and view yourself from your own subjective point of view. How do you feel? What thoughts go through your mind? What does the world look like? These are sorts of questions asked by therapists and spiritual teachers.
Both these forms of self-reflection enable self-transcendence. By this I mean that in “seeing” ourselves as an object, we take a position, as it were, outside of ourselves, and doing so enables us to alter the self that is “seen.” (“See” and its variants are in quotes because the experience is not just visual. We experience ourselves in many modalities.) Of course the self that is “seen” is not different from the self that “sees,” in that both are the interior of the same physical body. But in another sense, the self that “sees” is different. It has a larger vantage point and is not entirely caught up in the life of the self that is “seen.” By taking a position outside yourself, you can change yourself for the better.
Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living.[15] That’s a bit harsh, but the point is clear. The more we examine and understand ourselves, the more we can figure out how live in a good way for us and for others. We can learn how to achieve our goals and even which goals are worth pursuing. Second-order thinking gives us mastery because it enables us to tune the instrument, so to speak, by means of which we exert first-order influence on the world. That’s worth cultivating whether you are an addict or not.
NOTE —
- For a more extensive discussion of free will, see my How To Exert Free Will at https://www.bmeacham.com/FreeWill.htm.
- For more on human excellence see my How To Be An Excellent Human at https://www.bmeacham.com/ExcellentHumanDownload.htm.
- For more detail on function, see my “More About Function” at https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1835 and an earlier piece, “Soul Function,” at https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1544.
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References
Duckworth, Angela, et. al. “Situational Strategies for Self-Control.” Online publication https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4736542/pdf/nihms741973.pdf as of 2 January 2026.
Frankfurt, Harry. “Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.” In The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 11-25.
Plato. Apology. Online publication https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-the-apology-of-socrates-sb/ as of 7 January 2026.
Wikipedia (2019). “Akrasia.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia as of 30 March 2019.
Wikipedia (2026). “Akrasia.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia as of 4 January 2026.
Wikipedia. “Know thyself.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself as of 7 January 2026.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia (2019), “Akrasia.”
[2] Wikipedia (2026), “Akrasia.”
[3] Duckworth et. al., p. 1.
[4] Duckworth et. al., p. 3.
[5] Duckworth et. al., p. 5.
[6] Duckworth et. al., p. 33, Table 1.
[7] Duckworth et. al., p. 30, Figure 1.
[8] Duckworth et. al., p. 30.
[9] Duckworth et. al., p. 1.
[10] Duckworth et. al., p. 7.
[11] Frankfurt, p. 12.
[12] Frankfurt, p. 14.
[13] Frankfurt, pp. 20–21.
[14] Wikipedia, “Know thyself.”
[15] Plato, Apology, 38a5–6.
Is Truth Mutable?
The American Pragmatist William James says a curious thing about truth: that it can change.
Truth is a property of statements about reality. If I say “The cat is on the mat” and the cat is indeed on the mat, then my statement is true. If the cat moves off the mat, as cats do, then the statement becomes false. So of course the truth of a statement changes if the reality that it’s about changes. But James means something more. He says that even if the reality doesn’t change, the truth of statements about it can and do change. His view implies that it was once true that the earth is flat and now it has become true that it’s not. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. The key to understanding his assertion is to recognize the point of view from which he makes it.
From an objective, third-person point of view remarks such as these make no sense.
… ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience ….[1]
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.[2]
How can an idea become true? Surely it is either true or not. People used to think that the earth was flat. Now we know that it’s round (technically, it’s an oblate spheroid). James seems to be saying that the proposition “The earth is flat” used to be true but now it’s false. Does that mean that the earth itself has changed shape? Surely not.[3] Was the idea that the earth is flat true many years ago but now false? Or has the idea always been false, and now we have finally recognized its falsehood? Most people would affirm the latter. In fact, the founder of Pragmatism, C.S. Peirce, so disliked the idea of truth as mutable that he called it one of the “seeds of death” by which James allowed his pragmatism to become “infected.”[4]
James says
[An idea] makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works.[5]
Here he seems to attribute agency to ideas. But ideas are not agents; they are mental objects. They are thoughts, which can be entirely private or shared among others, but don’t act on their own. Presumably James speaks figuratively, not literally, but the point remains: how can an idea become true?
The answer is two-fold. The first is that James is less precise than we might like. By “truth” James means truth as we experience it. He says,
[By] the word ‘true’ … the pragmatist always means ‘true for him who experiences the workings [of a chain of reasoning].’[6]
He means by “truth” what we take to be true. If he had said that ideas become more or less believable as we accumulate evidence instead of more or less true, we would have no trouble with his words.
The second part of the answer has to do with why James uses such language. He speaks of truth from a first-person phenomenological point of view, an approach he used throughout his life. From his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890) through his famous Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to his Pragmatism (1906), in which he speaks favorably of “inner personal experiences,”[7] he always had an appreciation for how things appear to us subjectively.
Think of walking toward a tree or a building or any other physical object. As you approach it, it seems to get bigger, and as you walk away, it seems to get smaller. In reality it stays the same size, of course, and it’s only your perspective on it that changes. (By “reality” I mean the taken-for-granted world that we all inhabit together.) Even though the object’s physical size doesn’t change, its perceived size certainly does. From a first-person point of view, it’s quite reasonable to say that it gets bigger as we get nearer to it.
Just so, an idea—say, that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around—first appears ridiculous and fallacious, then appears more plausible and finally appears to be true. From a third-person, objective standpoint we say that the idea finally appears to us as true or that we finally believe it. From a first-person perspective, we can say that the idea has become true. The statements mean the same thing; they are just expressed differently.
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References
Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers, Electronic Edition. Online publication https://colorysemiotica.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/peirce-collectedpapers.pdf as of 30 November 2025.
Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907. Available online at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Pragmatism_a_new_name_for_some_old_ways/UGBRAAAAYAAJ as of 9 July 2020.
James, William. The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’. London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1909. Available online at https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.264519/2015.264519.The-Meaning.pdf as of 26 July 2024.
Notes
[1] James, Pragmatism, p. 58.
[2] James, Pragmatism, p. 201.
[3] Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, p. 55.
[4] Peirce, Collected Papers, section 6.485.
[5] James, Pragmatism, pp. 64.
[6] James, The Meaning of Truth, p. 177
[7] James, Pragmatism, p. 109.
Knowing
In ancient Greek mythology Daedalus was quite an accomplished craftsman, inventor, artist, and architect.[1] He is said to have designed and built the labyrinth on Crete and is best known for constructing wings made of beeswax and feathers that allowed him and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment from that very labyrinth by flying away. Unfortunately, Icarus ignored his father’s advice, flew too close to the sun thereby melting the wax that held his wings together, and fell to his death. The story cautions us to take the advice of people who know more than we do.
Daedalus was also famous for creating statues that were so lifelike that they could move. Plato uses the idea of these statues to make a point about what knowledge is. His Meno contains a brief discussion of how knowledge differs from beliefs that happen to be true. Both knowledge and true beliefs can be equally useful. If you live in Austin and have been to San Antonio you can tell someone how to get there, and so can someone who has never been there. Both will tell you to head south on I-35, and both pieces of advice will work. But there is a crucial difference between them, and it has to do with knowledge. Only the first person really knows; the other one merely has true belief. Meno asks Socrates why knowledge is valued more than true belief and what makes them different. Socrates replies by referring to the statues of Daedalus:
They too run away and escape if one does not tie them down but remain in place if tied down. … To acquire an untied work of Daedalus is not worth much, like acquiring a runaway slave, for it does not remain, but it is worth much if tied down, for his works are very beautiful. What am I thinking of when I say this? True opinions. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. … After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down.[2]
The tying down of the errant statue is equivalent to having good reasons for your beliefs, reasons you can return to if in doubt. (Plato says that one good reason is remembering certain truths that you learned before birth, but that’s beside the point for present purposes.)
Here’s an example. Suppose you read on a website somewhere that intermittent fasting is good for you because it helps you lose weight. Even though you don’t practice it yourself you recommend it to your obese friends. But suppose you find another website that says it could be very dangerous for you and lead to eating disorders.[3] Then you’ll change your mind and quit recommending it. In neither case do you have any real knowledge, only beliefs that might or might not be true. And your beliefs waver; they are not settled.
But then suppose you actually try it for yourself for a while and observe the effects. You’ll find out for sure whether it is beneficial or harmful (or has no effect), at least for you yourself. No random website will make you change your mind, because when tempted to do so you can remember what happened when you tried it. You have a good reason for your belief.
Ever since then, at least until recently, philosophers have defined knowledge as justified true belief. To count as knowledge, your belief has to be true, obviously. You can’t know that the earth is flat no matter how fervently you believe that it is because it’s not. But you also need to have some justification for what you believe. Most likely you believe that the earth is not flat but round. If you believe that because everybody says so, it’s not really knowledge, according to this definition. But if you watch a ship sailing away from you on the ocean and you notice that in addition to getting smaller it seems to sink down gradually into the water until it finally disappears, then you have good reason to believe that the earth is round. You have even better reason if you are an astronaut orbiting it and you see its roundness with your own eyes.
In 1963 Edmund Gettier poked a big hole in this definition. There are cases in which a person’s belief happens to be true and the person has good reasons for their belief, but the belief is true only by chance. His examples are a bit far-fetched, as can be expected of edge cases, but sound. Here’s one:
Two people, Smith and Jones, are up for promotion. Smith has heard the boss say that Jones will get the job, and Smith knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket because he saw Jones put them there. So, Smith has good reason to believe that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. But the boss is actually going to choose Smith. And, although he doesn’t know it, Smith also has ten coins in his pocket. In this case it’s true that the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, but we would not say that Smith knows it, even though his belief is true and he has good reasons for believing it.[4]
Here’s another, from well before Gettier and halfway around the world. In 632 CE the Buddhist monk Xuanzang in China sees what looks like a body of water as he hikes through the desert, so he believes that there is water ahead. In this desert there are numerous mirages that look like water. By chance Xuanzang sees an actual body of water, not a mirage. Does he really know that there is water ahead? His belief is true, and his belief is justified because he sees the water. But it’s just a matter of luck that he sees the real body of water and not a mirage.[5]
In both these cases your belief is true only because you got lucky. But it’s no good having epistemic luck be part of how you justify your belief because if it is, your belief doesn’t count as knowledge. Each of these cases—and there are many more in the literature—shows that being true and having good reasons are not enough to ensure that a belief is knowledge. These factors are necessary but not sufficient. Something else is needed to banish epistemic luck.
There many suggestions about what that something else is.[6] The true belief must not be deduced from a false belief. Your chain of reasoning must contain no “defeaters,” propositions that, were they known, would lead you to disbelieve what you are otherwise convinced of. There must be a connection, for instance a reliable process for forming true beliefs, between some state of affairs in the world and your belief. Or there must be a causal connection between some state of affairs in the world and the belief. Such a connection might be direct perception, memory, your own agency, or inference, each step of which is warranted. There are other suggestions, and each has its proponents and opponents. As is usual in philosophical debates, there is no clear answer and certainly none that convinces everyone.
The author’s own preference is for the reliable process option, just because it seems to make the most sense. How do you ensure that your justification is sound? By adopting it according to a process that reliably produces true beliefs. C.S. Peirce, to whom we will turn shortly, has things to say about the reliability of various processes for acquiring beliefs.
And at least one of the objections to reliabilism is ridiculously implausible: that an evil demon might cause a person to think something is true. Even if that belief turns out to be in fact true and even though a reliable process would yield the same result, it would not count as justified because it’s caused by an evil demon rather than the process.[7] But in the real world we have no truck with evil demons. As Daniel Dennett says, the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its departure from reality.[8] Such arguments lead us into the weeds of philosophical debates that can be great fun but have little practical effect.
Considerations such as these and the fact that the correct answer, if there is one, is so hard to find are clues that something may be amiss in the original question.
What’s amiss is that we think that knowledge must have some sort of essence that we can discover by careful inquiry, something unchanging that is found in all instances of knowledge. We reify it (from the Latin res), meaning we treat it as a real thing. But most likely there is no such essence, and we can get a better handle on the issue by following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice to look at it in terms of usage.
Wittgenstein says “For a large class of cases … the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”[9] Let’s look at how we use the word “knowledge” and related words such as “know” and “knowing.” Let’s look at what the concept of knowledge is used for and what role it plays in the structured social interactions that Wittgenstein calls “language games.”[10]
There are lots and lots of language games and thus lots of roles. To begin with, there are two types of knowledge, which Bertrand Russell calls “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge about.”[11] (There is a third type, knowing how to do something, colloquially known as “know-how.” Since it combines aspects of them both, I discuss only the two.) The former is how we know a person or a place (or many other things). If I say “I know Alice” or “I know Pease Park,” I merely assert familiarity with the person or place. The latter is how we know a proposition or theory. If I say “I know that modus ponens is a valid form of inference,” I assert that I can explain the concept and use it correctly. If I say “I know epistemology,” I assert that I can speak with confidence about the various ideas and arguments in that field. This essay concerns only the latter, knowledge-about.
There are numerous contexts in which the words “knowledge” or “know” are used to indicate some kind of knowledge-about. If you say that you know something, you signal to others that you think they should believe you. If others think that you know something, they are likely to take your word for what you say rather than investigating further. If you think you know something, you are unlikely to seek further evidence for it. In many social arenas, if people think you have knowledge about something, you have high status, especially if what you know about is a specialized field of inquiry. In other social arenas claiming to know something might cause you to be mocked as a know-it-all. (This list is not intended to be exhaustive, just illustrative.)
Claiming knowledge about a class of people can be a way to exert social control over them, especially if your way of speaking about and defining them dominates the discussion. The field of study called Sociology of Knowledge deals with knowledge as a social production, asserting that knowledge and knowing are contextual, shaped by interaction among people. In this view, what a person believes to be true is fundamentally shaped by their social position in society—their race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, culture, religion, etc.—and by the dominant ideologies that frame their understanding of that position.[12]
Given such disparate uses of the term “knowledge,” it seems unwise to try to find a singular essence of its referent. Instead, the various uses form what Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances.”[13] They are all similar in some ways, but different in others. You don’t know the Pythagorean theorem in the same way that you know that the sun will come up tomorrow, nor in the same way that you “know” (i.e., that you believe firmly) that certain people who are different from you are inferior and not to be trusted. But despite differences, they are all similar enough that we all know what the term means—meaning we all know how to employ it—in diverse situations. Accordingly, despite quibbles about edge cases, the definition of knowledge as justified true belief is good enough in most contexts.
In practical terms, however, the problem remains of how to justify our beliefs. If reliability of process is the add-on needed to counteract Gettier-type objections, we need to determine what counts as a reliable process.
A process is a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a goal. A reliable process is one that it is repeatable and gives consistent results. A simple cookie recipe is an example, as is the complex industrial process that converts crude oil into gasoline. In our case the goal is true belief. We want a way to make our beliefs stand firm against doubt, just as we would want a way to tie down a statue of Daedalus.
The American Pragmatist C. S. Peirce (pronounced “purse”) addresses the issue. His influential paper “The Fixation of Belief” describes four different methods to fix (i.e. to establish, not to repair) a belief. Only one of them is reliable enough to turn a belief into knowledge.
First, he defines belief. Knowledge is a form of belief, obviously, one that is true and reliably justified, so this is a good place to start. Belief, he says, is that upon which a person will act. This is Peirce’s original and influential contribution to philosophy and the foundation of Pragmatism as a philosophical movement. He says,
Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions. … The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. … Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way, when the occasion arises.[14]
Peirce comes to this view by observing how belief and its opposite, doubt, actually function in ourselves and in the world. He says that doubt and belief differ in three ways:[15]
- They feel different. The sensation of doubting is a kind of irritation. The sensation of belief is calm and satisfactory.
- They have different effects on our actions in the world. In a state of doubt we do not act with confidence. Doubt gives us no guidance; we do not know what to do, so we act hesitantly if at all. In a state of belief we do act with confidence. We are sure of what we believe and act on it quite readily.
- They have different effects on our actions toward themselves. “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.”[16]
Peirce’s method is scientific; he observes reality and learns from it. He advocates this method over three others that people use to quell doubt and settle on something to believe. The four ways to fix belief are as follows:[17]
- Tenacity. The tenacious person simply holds on to their belief, constantly reiterates it and refuses to entertain doubts. This method works until you encounter people who don’t believe as you do. Then you have doubt, which is exactly what you don’t want. You might just double down on your belief and refuse to listen, but eventually, because humans are social animals and can’t help but influence each other, you suspect that other ideas may have some merit. Your belief wavers.
- Authority. A person with excessive respect for authorities such as the state or the church or even their peer group simply believes what they are told to believe. A bumper sticker sums it up: “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” (There is a certain amount of tenacity in this one as well.) This method works until you start to notice the atrocities committed by people with great power and consideration only for their own welfare, especially if the atrocities affect you or your loved ones. Then you start questioning authority and again need to find another way to determine what to believe.
- A priori method. This method consists in basing your beliefs on something that seems indubitably true. A great many philosophical systems employ this method, reasoning from a first premise to a whole system. Descartes’ famous Cogito is an example. Peirce says “Systems of this sort have not usually rested upon any observed facts…. They have been chiefly adopted because their fundamental propositions seemed ‘agreeable to reason.’ This is an apt expression; it does not mean that which agrees with experience, but that which we find ourselves inclined to believe.”[18] The issue here is that different people start with different premises without a way to choose between them, and there is no agreement on which one is proper or best.
- Scientific method. This method is the only one that works reliably. It assumes that a real world exists independently of what we may think about it and that by carefully examining it we can find out things about it. We come up with beliefs that are not subject to the deficiencies of the other three methods. And it is the only one that is self-correcting.
The scientific method is the only one that ensures that your beliefs will be true, that they will “coincide with the fact,” as Peirce says.[19] The others have their uses. Tenacity buys you peace of mind. Respect for authority stabilizes a community against willful disobedience. The a priori method can be quite pleasing to the intellect. But they are unreliable. Only a method that starts with and returns to careful observation of reality will do.
You don’t have to be a scientist in a laboratory to practice this method. The scientific method is just a formalized approach to everyday problem solving. Suppose your car won’t start. You hypothesize that it’s out of gas. You test your hypothesis by putting gas in it. If it starts, you know you were right (your belief is true); and if it doesn’t, you hypothesize something else. Carefully elaborate that procedure, put in stringent safeguards to isolate the variables so you are sure that you are measuring just what you want, and you have the scientific method.
Someone might object that knowledge is supposed to be something unassailable, something final, but scientists keep changing their minds. People used to “know” that the earth is flat, but now we know that it is (approximately) round. Science used to tell us that when things burned, they released a substance called phlogiston, but now we know that burning is a process of chemical combination with oxygen. Scientists used to believe that Newtonian physics governed the whole of physical reality, but now they know (or at least believe with good evidence) that on very tiny scales quantum mechanics gives a better explanation and at very large scales the theory of relativity does. But quantum mechanics doesn’t quite jibe with relativity, so maybe we don’t really know anything.
The way out of this skepticism is to note that from an individual point of view what we call knowledge is basically the same as firm belief. One effect of knowing is that you act with confidence; you don’t hesitate. But the same is true of firmly believing. Another effect is that you think others should agree with you and perhaps you try to persuade them, but again the same is true of firmly believing. For clarity, we need to distinguish between an objective view of knowing, that we believe on good evidence something that’s true, and a subjective view, that we are firmly convinced. On the latter view it is no contradiction at all to say that people used to know that the world is flat, but now we know that it’s round.
Instead of saying we know something, we could merely say that we are convinced of it because we have good evidence. Pragmatist Richard Rorty agrees, saying that the term “knowledge” is only “a compliment paid to the beliefs we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed.”[20] “Knowledge” and “reliably justified true belief” work equally well to denote the same thing. But of course “knowledge” is shorter and easier to say.
Regardless of what you call them, what we are really after is beliefs we can count on to help us navigate around our world and act in it successfully. The important thing is not what we call our beliefs but to know how to justify them. For that, close observation of reality is key.
###
References
AFPA (American Fitness Professionals & Associates). “Food and Nutrition Debates That You Need to Pay Attention to as a Health Professional.” Online publication https://www.afpafitness.com/blog/8-controversial-nutrition-topics#h-intermittent-fasting as of 18 September 2025.
Cole, Nicki Lisa. “Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge.” ThoughtCo, May 7, 2025. Online publication https://www.thoughtco.com/sociology-of-knowledge-3026294 as of 22 September 2025.
Dennett, Daniel. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013.
Engel, Mylan, Jr. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). “Epistemic Luck.” Online publication https://iep.utm.edu/epi-luck as of 19 September 2025.
Gettier, Edmund. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Jun., 1963), pp. 121-123. Online publication http://www.jstor.org/stable/3326922 as of 25 August 2009.
Koka, Maya. “Xuanzang & the Gettier Problem.” Philosophy Now, Issue 169, August/September 2025. Online publication https://philosophynow.org/issues/169/Xuanzang_and_the_Gettier_Problem as of 16 September 2025.
Littlejohn, Clayton (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). “The New Evil Demon Problem.” Online publication https://iep.utm.edu/evil-new as of 23 September 2025.
Peirce, Charles Saunders. “The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12, pp. 1-15 (November 1877). In Charles S. Peirce: Collected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance), pp. 91-112. Ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. Online publication http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/OP/Peirce_FixationOfBelief.htm.
Plato. Meno. Tr. G.M.A. Grube. Online publication https://commons.princeton.edu/eng574-s23/wp-content/uploads/sites/348/2023/02/Plato-Meno.pdf as of 17 September 2025.
Rorty, Richard. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” In Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation ed. Michael Krausz, pp. 167-183. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Available online at https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationalism%20(2020)/Texts/Rorty%20solidarity-or-objectivity.pdf as of 22 September 2025.
Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind, new series, 14 (October 1905), pp. 479-493. Online publication http://www.jstor.org/stable/2248381 as of 3 July 2014.
Wikipedia. “Daedalus.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus as of 17 September 2025.
Wikipedia. “Language game (philosophy).” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy) as of 22 September 2025.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, fourth edition tr. Hacker and Schulte. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia, “Daedalus.”
[2] Meno, 97d-98a
[3] AFPA, “Food and Nutrition Debates.”
[4] Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, p. 122.
[5] Koka, “Xuanzang & the Gettier Problem.”
[6] Engel, “Epistemic Luck.”
[7] Littlejohn, “The New Evil Demon Problem.”
[8] Dennett, Intuition Pumps, p. 183.
[9] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, remark 43.
[10] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, remark 7. See also Wikipedia, “Language game.”
[11] Russell, “On Denoting.”
[12] Cole, “Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge.”
[13] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, remark 67.
[14] Peirce, ed. Weiner, “The Fixation of Belief,” pp. 98-99.
[15] Ibid., pp. 98-99.
[16] Ibid., p. 99.
[17] Ibid., pp. 101-108.
[18] Ibid., pp. 105-106
[19] Ibid., p. 111.
[20] Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?”, p.171.
The Least Units of Reality
(This essay originally appeared in the online journal Drops & Buds, Vernal Equinox 2025 edition.)
Last time, we saw that actual entities, also termed, with one important exception, “actual occasions,” are the fundamental building blocks of reality according to 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. We saw that they constitute themselves by incorporating aspects of the world around them, a process Whitehead calls “prehension.” This time we’ll take a look at them in more detail.
Whitehead’s view is atomistic; he takes the world to be composed of tiny entities that are not further decomposable. It is also dynamic; in contrast to classical physics, he asserts that these entities are not bits of inert stuff but rather events, and these events are inherently intertwined and related to each other.
He wrote at a time when quantum mechanics was being developed, and the mysterious behavior of reality at the subatomic level informed his thinking.[1] Entities submicroscopically small are not material as we generally think of materiality. Quantum-level entities do not bounce around at the mercy of external forces like billiard balls; instead, they seem to have a quasi-existence in a field of mere potentiality until they are detected; then they become actual. The interaction between them and someone or something else that detects them is essential to their existence. Reality at that level is relational and dynamic.
Whitehead’s revolutionary insight was to add panpsychism to quantum mechanics. He asserts that these tiny entities are in a rudimentary way aware of their surroundings. Panpsychism is the idea that everything material has also an aspect of psyche, or mind. It asserts that both matter and experience are equally fundamental. Everything, in addition to its material aspect, has an aspect of psyche or mind to it. This theory is rather obviously anthropomorphic, but that’s a feature, not a bug.
Whitehead seeks categories of explanation that can apply to both the quantum level of reality and the world revealed by our unaided senses. In our everyday world it is undeniable that, unless we are asleep or sedated, we are aware of our surroundings and remember our past. And, of course, others can be aware of us. So, Whitehead posits that subatomic actual occasions also are, in a way, aware of their surroundings and of their own past. Whitehead calls them “drops of experience, complex and interdependent”[2] and “occasions of experience.”[3] The tiniest actual occasion is structurally similar to a moment of rich human experience, albeit in a rudimentary, attenuated form. Whitehead speaks of actual occasion as being “dipolar,” having both a physical and a mental pole. He says that “No actual entity is devoid of either pole.”[4]
The process whereby an actual occasion comes into being is called “concrescence.” Concrescence is a term from biology that means the growing together of parts that were originally separate. Whitehead uses it to refer to the process of an actual occasion’s coming into being. That process consists of several phases, the details of which we will get to shortly, and the end result is a fully actual submicroscopic quantum entity.
Occasions and objects
These actual occasions, the least units of reality, are a bit like subatomic particles, with some important differences:
- Each is momentary, coming into being, going through various phases and then passing away.
- The final phase of an actual occasion is not fully determined by the beginning. There is room for novelty, for the possibility of something new coming into being.
- Each actual occasion experiences, in a primitive way, its past and its present surroundings.[5] Metaphorically, it has an inside, an aspect experienceable only by itself.
- Each actual occasion is experienced by other actual occasions. Metaphorically, it has an outside, an aspect experienceable by others.
- What we think of as a particle is actually a series of these actual occasions. A single electron is a series of momentary electron-occasions that form an enduring object much like the momentary frames of a movie form a continuous picture.
- What Whitehead calls “God” has a crucial role to play in the process that an actual occasion goes through as it comes into being.
Whitehead’s metaphysics is comprehensive and immense, and each element depends for its meaning on all the others, much like reality itself. To fully explicate the idea of actual occasions, I need to introduce two additional concepts, that of eternal objects and that of God.
Eternal Objects
Whitehead’s term “eternal object” includes both what philosophers call “abstract objects” and “universals”. An abstract object is something that, unlike the many physical objects in our world, is neither spatial nor temporal and hence has no causal power.[6] Some examples are numbers, sets, geometrical figures, forms of logical inference, mathematical and logical proofs and the like. A universal is something posited to explain how individual things can have qualities, features or attributes in common. It is something that can be instantiated by different entities.[7] There are three major kinds of such attributes: types or kinds (e.g. mammal), properties (e.g. short, strong, red) and relations (e.g. father of, next to).[8] Such attributes are called “universal” because each extends over, or is located in, many distinct things.[9]
Abstract objects and universals share one common characteristic: we never find them existing on their own. We never find a perfect circle; we find only particular images of circles. We never find just redness; we find only red things. This commonality leads Whitehead to lump abstract objects and universals together, calling them both “eternal objects”:
Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an “eternal object.”[10]
They are called “eternal” because they do not change. Every time we encounter one, it is the same as it was before. Whitehead’s concern is how to account for such objects in his metaphysics. His solution is to invoke what he calls “God.”
God
God is a unique part of Whitehead’s scheme. God is an actual entity of a most peculiar sort. God is the one actual entity that is not an actual occasion.[11] Unlike all other actual entities, God is not submicroscopic. All actual entities except God are temporal, meaning that first they don’t exist, then they do, and then they fade and become part of the past. But God is non-temporal (but not eternal).[12] That means that God always exists. God is present in the world of every actual occasion, and is thus available to be prehended, that is, to be incorporated into, every occasion.
Like other actual entities, God is dipolar, having two aspects.[13] The first Whitehead calls the “primordial nature” of God, and the second, the “consequent nature.” The primordial aspect acts as a repository for eternal objects. The consequent aspect is how God interacts with the world.[14] In combination, the effect is that God prehends, or feels, every actual entity and enduring object in the world and offers eternal objects to new concrescing occasions. God’s goal in this offering is “harmony of … universal feeling,” resulting in “truth, beauty and goodness.”[15]
Much more can be said about God, and perhaps that will be a topic for another time. For now, we focus on the role of God in the process of concrescence.
The process of concrescence
As an occasion concresces into something definite and actual, it goes through several phases. Whitehead’s account of this process is extremely complicated. He describes phases and subphases of the process and several varieties of prehensions, the number of which can vary from occasion to occasion.
Even though he speaks of them as occurring in sequence, these phases are not in objective time. They are entirely internal to the actual occasion. Time in Whitehead’s view is not a universal and infinitely divisible Newtonian container. Instead, time is a function of interrelationships of actual occasions. It comes in chunks, a view he calls the “epochal theory of time.”[16] Citing William James, he says,
Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all.[17]
Each actual occasion is one of these buds or drops. The time-like sequence of phases internal to each actual occasion is completely private and is incommensurable with the time that arises from the interaction among actual occasions. Viewed from the outside, a quantum object is either detected or it’s not. In Whitehead’s terms, it is either actual or it’s not. Considered from its own point of view, however, it goes through phases.
In this paper I can provide only a simplified description of the internal process of an occasion of experience becoming actual.[18]
- The occasion comes into being desiring to be something definite. Whitehead calls that desire its “initial aim.” Initially it might aim at being just a copy of the actual occasion immediately preceding it, or it might aim at being a variation of the preceding occasion. According to his ontological principle—that the only reason for something existing is the existence of something else—, that aim has to come from some actual entity.[19] Whitehead says that entity is God:
God is the principle of concretion; namely, he is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its self-causation starts.[20]
- Having begun to be, it prehends the physical feeling of its immediate predecessor. Whitehead often uses the term “feeling” as a synonym for prehension.[21] The concrescing actual occasion feels how it was to be the one just prior to it, including how its surrounding actual occasions and enduring objects appeared to it.
- It then adds conceptual prehensions, sometimes termed “conceptual feelings,” which are ideas of or about the physical feelings. These become the mental pole of the occasion. These nascent concepts enable the emerging actual occasion to recognize what is around it. The concepts thus prehended are eternal objects, which Whitehead says “ingress” into the occasion.
The conceptual prehensions of the physical feelings are valuational. On the basis of the initial aim, some of the actual entities and enduring objects are selected to be incorporated into the occasion and many more are rejected. Those rejected are called “negative prehensions.” Whitehead says that an actual entity’s entire world is prehended into it, but most of that world is via negative prehensions.
The mental pole of the emerging actual occasion comprises numerous eternal objects. The conceptual prehensions of eternal objects are also valuational. God envisions or contains within Itself all possible eternal objects. Only some become relevant to the concrescing occasion. God provides not only a plethora of eternal objects but a preference for some of them over others. Whitehead calls God in this aspect a “lure for feeling.”
He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act, as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him [as] the initial ‘object of desire’ establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.[22]
- The occasion in process of becoming integrates these many prehensions, these many physical feelings, conceptual feelings and hybrids of them, into one final feeling that incorporates them all. Whitehead calls this final feeling the occasion’s “satisfaction.” He says,
The problem which the concrescence solves is, how the many components of the objective content are to be unified in one felt content with its complex subjective form. This one felt content is the ‘satisfaction,’ whereby the actual entity is its particular individual self ….[23]
The notion of ‘satisfaction’ is the notion of the ‘entity as concrete’ abstracted from the ‘process of concrescence’; it is the outcome separated from the process ….[24]
… the ‘satisfaction’ of an entity can only be discussed in terms of the usefulness of that entity. … The tone of feeling embodied in this satisfaction passes into the world beyond ….[25]
In other words, an actual entity’s final feeling of satisfaction is what becomes the initial feeling of its successor. Whitehead says,
In its self-creation the actual entity is guided by its ideal of itself as individual satisfaction and as transcendent creator. The enjoyment of this ideal is the ‘subjective aim,’ by reason of which the actual entity is a determinate process.[26]
Notably, this integration may or may not agree with God’s preference. For Whitehead God does not determine what the occasion is when it finally becomes fully actual. God suggests but does not command.
A view from the inside
To understand this a different way, let’s imagine being an actual occasion. Imagine how things would appear from that point of view.
Occasion 1
A world appears. You take it in. You scan it, assess it, evaluate it. Vague feelings of colors and shapes are there. They seem familiar. You recognize them. Now many things are there. There are directions, feelings of upness and downness. Upness feels more attractive. You decide to proceed up, and you do so.
You take all these things in until you have certain degree of satisfaction with what you are taking in, a certain feeling of having made sense of it. Then the world is gone, and you don’t know it because you are gone. There’s no you who can know.
Occasion 2
A world appears. You take it in. You scan it, assess it, evaluate it. Vague feelings of colors and shapes are there. They seem familiar. You recognize them. Now many things are there. You remember having proceeded up. That’s familiar. You feel a certain momentum of going up, and it feels good to do that. You decide to continue to proceed up, and you do so.
You take all this in until you have certain degree of satisfaction with what you are taking in, a certain feeling of having made sense of it. Then the world is gone, and you don’t know it because you are gone. There’s no you who can know.
Occasion 3
A world appears. You take it in. You scan it, assess it, evaluate it. Vague feelings of colors and shapes are there. They seem familiar. You recognize them. Now many things are there. You feel a certain momentum of going up and find that you are proceeding up. You feel like going down; the idea of going down is attractive. But you decide to keep going up, and you do so.
You take all this in until you have certain degree of satisfaction with what you are taking in, a certain feeling of having made sense of it. Then the world is gone, and you don’t know it because you are gone. There’s no you who can know.
Occasion 4
A world appears. You take it in. You scan it, assess it, evaluate it. Vague feelings of colors and shapes are there. They don’t seem familiar. You don’t recognize them. Now many things are there. You remember a certain momentum of going up, but now you find that you are stationary. You feel like continuing, but you can’t. You have a sense that others around you can sense you, that you’ve been detected.
You feel a certain contentment at having been detected at just that spot, a spot that is perfect for you. It’s as if you have fulfilled a mission that you hadn’t quite known was yours. You decide to stay where you are, and you do so.
You take all this in until you have certain degree of satisfaction with what you are taking in, a certain feeling of having made sense of it. Then the world is gone, and you don’t know it because you are gone. There’s no you who can know.
These scenarios represent a single electron’s path through a magnetic field in a Stern-Gerlach experiment.[27] (Remember, the electron is composed of numerous actual occasions in sequence.) Named after the scientists who first performed it, the experiment consists of sending a series of electrons through a magnetic field, which deflects them. The magnetic field is stronger at one end than at the other, a condition that causes the electron to swerve a bit, toward one pole of the field or the other, as it passes through. On the other side of the field from the emitter is a recording medium, which registers where the electron hits the medium. Each electron is detected at one of two places on the medium, depending on a property of the electron called “spin.” The experiment corroborates the quantized nature of reality at this very tiny level; the electron is detected in one of only two places rather than in a range between them. It also corroborates quantum indeterminacy: you cannot predict in advance where the electron will be detected.
These scenarios may seem quite fanciful. They are guesswork, of course, but they are informed guesswork. The experience of an actual occasion, although quite primitive compared to our everyday wakeful experience, is nevertheless structurally similar. (This comparison is imaginative, of course, as we can’t really experience the world from another point of view, but the alternative is to avoid talking about subjectivity altogether. That won’t do, as subjectivity is an essential element of Whitehead’s philosophy.)
The world’s appearing, the subject’s initial taking it in and the sense of familiarity are intended to portray the early phases of concrescence in which physical prehensions are paramount. The vague feelings represent purely physical prehensions. Familiarity is the prehended feeling of the satisfaction of the prior occasion.
The recognition and the appearance of discrete things are intended to portray the ingression of eternal objects, which give form to the physical prehensions. The feelings of attraction are their valuational aspects.
The decision is intended to portray what Whitehead refers to by the same term. “The word is used in its root sense of a ‘cutting off’,” he says.[28] The entity makes actual only one possibility, for instance going up rather than down, and thereby discards all the others.
The satisfaction is intended to represent the final phase of concrescence. Satisfaction is a state of completeness. When a meal leaves you satisfied, you quit eating; you are done with it. Just so, when an occasion’s concrescence reaches satisfaction, the process ceases and the occasion becomes actual.
Final Thoughts
Whitehead was a mathematician and philosopher, not a healing professional. Nevertheless, the process of concrescence that an occasion of experience goes through in becoming actual may be likened to the process of personal and transpersonal growth that a person goes through in healing from trauma and becoming, as Stanislav Grof might say, more whole.[29] An occasion of experience integrates into one unified whole many physical and mental prehensions of actuality and many ingressions of eternal objects. Similarly, a process of personal growth involves integrating and understanding many different components of personhood, including past experiences; present bodily feelings; present, past and hoped-for future relationships with others; emotional feelings and their somatic release; and one’s own ideal of what sort of person one would like to be. To this list Whitehead would add the ideal of unique personhood that one receives as if by grace from a reality much greater and wiser than oneself, a topic to which I hope to return. The goal of the actual occasion is to become fully itself in harmony with its world. The goal of the growth facilitated by numerous therapeutic techniques and spiritual traditions of the world is the same.
###
References
Grof, Stanislav. “The Theory and Practice of Holotropic Breathwork.” Online publication https://holotropic-association-na.org/breathwork/how-to-ensure-safety-quality-criteria-for-gtt-facilitators as of 28 February 2025.
Harrison, David M. “The Stern-Gerlach Experiment, Electron Spin, and Correlation Experiments.” On-line publication http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SternGerlach/SternGerlach.html as of 29 August 2007.
James, William. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Longman, Greens and Co., 1911. Online publication https://dn720400.ca.archive.org/0/items/someproblemsofph01jame/someproblemsofph01jame.pdf as of 10 February 2025.
Lawrence, Nathaniel. Alfred North Whitehead: A Primer of his Philosophy. New York: Twain Publishers, 1974.
Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo. “Nominalism in Metaphysics”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.) Online publication https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/ as of 5 January 2025
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process And Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. Abbreviated in the notes as “PR”.
Wikipedia. “Stern-Gerlach experiment.” On-line publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern–Gerlach_experiment as of 29 August 2007.
Zimmerman, Dean W. “Universal.” Britannica Encyclopedia Online publication https://www.britannica.com/topic/universal as of 3 November 2024.
Notes
[1] Whitehead, PR, p. 116. See also pp. 78 and 91.
[2] Whitehead, PR, p. 18.
[3] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 221.
[4] Whitehead, PR, p. 239.
[5] Technically, it experiences the surroundings of its immediate past, but for our purposes the less precise formulation is sufficient. Whitehead was conversant with Einstein’s theories of relativity as well as with quantum mechanics. He says “… the general philosophical doctrine of relativity … is presupposed in the philosophy of organism…” (PR, p. 66).
[6] Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Nominalism in Metaphysics”, single column PDF p. 4
[7] Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Nominalism in Metaphysics”, single column PDF p. 2
[8] Rodriguez-Pereyra, “Nominalism in Metaphysics”, single column PDF p. 7.
[9] Zimmerman, “Universal.”
[10] Whitehead, PR, p. 44.
[11] Whitehead, PR, p. 88.
[12] Whitehead, PR, p.7.
[13] Whitehead, PR, p. 345.
[14] Whitehead, PR, pp. 87-88.
[15] Whitehead, PR, p. 346.
[16] Whitehead, PR, p. 283.
[17] Whitehead, PR. p. 63. James, Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 155.
[18] In this section I draw from numerous places in PR and from Lawrence, Alfred North Whitehead, chapter 3, pp. 68-78.
[19] Whitehead, PR. p. 24.
[20] Whitehead, PR, p. 244.
[21] Whitehead, PR, p. 220.
[22] Whitehead, PR, p. 344.
[23] Whitehead, PR, p. 154.
[24] Whitehead, PR, p. 84.
[25] Whitehead, PR, p. 85.
[26] Whitehead, PR, p. 85.
[27] Wikipedia, “Stern-Gerlach experiment”; Harrison, “The Stern-Gerlach Experiment.”
[28] Whitehead, PR, p. 43.
[29] Grof, “The Theory and Practice of Holotropic Breathwork.”
Letter to Jada and Vicky
We found your announcement of your love in the park the other day. Cool! We love you (in a sort of abstract way, because we don’t even know you) and wish you the very best. We’re happy for your love.
Here’s a way for you to make your love even stronger. Instead of advertising it publicly, let it seep out of you throughout the day. You know that warm, scrumptious feeling you have when you are with the one you love? Remember it and hold on to it. Feel it as you meet people. View everyone as worthy of love and looking really good and evoking love in you. See everyone with the eyes of love.
We hope this doesn’t sound too preachy. We just mean it as good advice.
Thanks for sharing your love with us. Now try showing it more subtly, almost secretly. It will have more power.
Note: I came upon a picnic table in the park with some graffiti on it, which inspired me to post this to our neighborhood email group. It’s an application of pantheistic panpsychism. As I write this, two years later, the graffiti is still there.
The Existentialist and the Mystic
Jean-Paul Sartre, wrong and incoherent as he often is about human reality,(1) occasionally provides incisive insights about it. One of them shows certain parallels with the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan.
Sartre’s basic notion is that each human being is always able to make free choices. We are not determined by our past. We can always choose what to do, both in individual situations and in comporting ourselves in general. Our free choices determine what we make of ourselves. Sartre famously asserts that “existence precedes essence.”(2) Medieval scholastic philosophers defined “essence” as what something is and “existence” as whether something is.(3) The essence of a unicorn is a horse-like animal with a pointy horn coming out of its forehead. Whether any such animal actually exists is another question. For Sartre, the essence of an individual human being is not preordained or defined in advance. Instead, what each of us is becomes known only after we exist for a while and make choices that define us. We each make something of ourself through our choices of what to do and how to relate to others and the world. Free choice is central to Sartre’s understanding of human reality.
The principle way our choices define us is through our projects. A project for Sartre is uncontroversial; it is simply taking action to achieve an end or to accomplish something. We envision a state of affairs that does not currently exist (Sartre calls this a type of nothingness) and do something to bring it about. A project can be as simple as getting a drink of water or as complex as writing a several-hundred-page tome on phenomenological ontology. It can be accomplished very quickly or take years and years. Through our projects we define ourselves, and the way to understand others is by discerning what their projects are.
But we are more than just a collection of projects. We are each in some way a unified being, not just a bundle of impulses or predilections or undertakings. Sartre gives the example of his friend Pierre, who enjoys boating.(4) What explains why Pierre likes boating? Not just that he likes sports in general and not just because he likes being outdoors and so on. You can think of these as types of projects, but they have “a secondary and derivative quality.”(5) What Sartre is after is a something more foundational.
Unwilling to explain human reality as a causal result of external forces such as, for instance, childhood trauma or social influences or economic status and the like, Sartre wants to explain a person in terms of their freely chosen projects. What gives unity to us over time is our fundamental choice of how to approach the world in which we find ourself. He calls this choice our “fundamental project” or “original project” or sometimes “essential” or “initial” project.
He speaks of
… the fundamental project that I am ….(6)
and says that
In rejecting with equal force both the theory of compliant clay and the theory of the bundle of tendencies, we will encounter the person in his constitutive initial project.(7)
So this project constitutes who we are. Referring to things that have already happened, he says that
… the set of these layers of being-past is organized by the unity of [one’s] project.(8)
The original or essential project is the basis for our unity over time. And it seems to have some defining power over us:
Changes [in my surroundings] cannot bring me to abandon my original project.(9)
… to the extent that our past appears within the framework of our essential project, we are constrained to act in these ways.”(10)
But what is this essential project? To ascertain it, he says, we need a special method:
By means of a comparison of a subject’s various empirical tendencies … we may attempt to discover and isolate the fundamental project that they have in common …. In these investigations we will … stop only when we encounter something whose irreducibility is evident ….(11)
“… it is a matter of finding, beneath some partial and incomplete aspects of the subject, … the totality of his impulse toward being, his original relation to himself, to the world and to the other, within the unity of … a fundamental project.”(12)
This sounds like an observational method; each person might have a different fundamental project, and to find out what it is we must examine their individual projects to find out what is common to all of them. But in fact, we don’t have to do that, because Sartre claims to know what everyone’s original project is. It is our impulse to survive, to continue to exist:
a [person]’s original project can aim only at its being … the project of being, or desire to be, or tendency toward being …. Man is fundamentally the desire to be ….(13)
The original project that is expressed in each of our empirically observable tendencies is therefore the project of being, or alternatively, each empirical tendency relates to the original project of being as its expression and symbolic fulfillment….(14)
On the face of it, this sounds plausible but vacuous. After all, the goal of every living organism is first to survive, then to thrive and reproduce.(15) Many people have noted the same thing. One of Sigmund Freud’s two basic drives is Eros, which is not just a sexual drive but “interest in one’s own survival.”(16) The master of speculative metaphysics Alfred North Whitehead says “the art of life is first to be alive ….”(17) The desire to be is obviously not unique to human beings. The ancient oracle exhorted “know thyself,”(18) but just knowing that you, like every other living being, want to stay alive is not particularly helpful. We need something more.
Sartre gives us a clue to what that could be, our initial project (or projects). Although at one point he seems to equate a fundamental project with an initial project, at another point he speaks as if an initial project is something different:
… for example, if my initial project aims to choose myself as inferior in the midst of others (the so-called inferiority complex) ….(19)
This example is clearly different from the fundamental project of being. (It’s also a bit strange. Why would anyone choose to feel inferior? But that’s Sartre for you.) Now that you are here, being in your world and in your situation or perhaps several situations, the question is how best to keep on being. What is critical to understanding any particular person, including yourself, is not just that they strive to stay alive, but how they do so. Everybody does it differently.
There is not first one desire to be, and then a thousand particular feelings; rather the desire to be only exists, and is only manifested, in and through … the thousand empirical and contingent expressions … manifested by … a particular person.(20)
At issue is what we might call your strategies for being in the world or for exercising your freedom. Do you have a sort of general or global approach to life? Is it working for you? Even though you might have chosen it some time ago, do you still want to keep on choosing it? These are crucial issues, which Sartre alludes to but does not treat in any detail.
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The Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, in some ways diametrically opposed to Sartre, has an analogous view of human nature. Where Sartre is an atheist, Inayat Khan (“Hazrat” is an honorific meaning, roughly, “honorable”) is fully convinced of the reality of God. Where Sartre thinks that human beings have no defining essence before existing and creating one, Inayat Khan thinks that we are each born with a purpose to be accomplished. But Inayat Khan’s purpose and Sartre’s fundamental project are quite similar. In both cases there is something common to all people and something unique to each individual, and each has a great deal to do with how we comport ourselves in life.
Inayat Khan’s view of reality can be called pantheistic panpsychism, although he himself never used those terms. In this view, everything we can see, touch or feel or be conscious of in any way is an expression or manifestation of one being, which is variously known as God, Allah, Buddha Nature, Brahman, the Dao and many other names. This includes both objective things, those that many people can be conscious of such as trees and rocks and stars and other people, and subjective things, those that only one person can be directly conscious of such as private thoughts, feelings, impulsions to action and the like. That’s the pantheism part; all (pan) is theos, God. Panpsychism is the doctrine that everything has a mental as well as a physical aspect; all contains psyche, mind. Panpsychism holds that everything has an aspect that can be directly discerned only by the individual entity that it is—that’s its inside, the subjective aspect—and an aspect that can be discerned by more than one person—that’s its outside, the objective aspect.
Although we are all manifestations of the One Being, most of us don’t know it. The point of Sufism, along with many other mystical traditions, is to train us to realize, to actually experience, immediately and directly, our unity with the Divine and with all beings. Such experience is said to have a great many benefits: it gives us insight into how the world works; it leads us to feel compassion for all beings; it gives us wisdom to lead our lives well; and it feels really, really good, blissful even.
Inayat Khan says the purpose of our life is to attain just such a realization. Here are some representative passages from his works. (Note that he wrote and spoke before there was any effort to remove gender discrimination from common usage. By “man” he means both men and women as well as those who identify as neither or both.)
Man is here on earth for this one purpose, that he may bring forth that spirit of God in him and thus discover his own perfection.(21)
If man does not realize the kingdom of God within himself …, he does not accomplish the purpose of life.(22)
All these different scriptures and ways of worship and of contemplating God are given for one purpose: the realization of unity.(23)
The more you reach such a realization, the more you enable Divine Wisdom to work through you:
That which is most precious, that which is the purpose of man’s life is to arrive at that state of perfection when he can be the perfect instrument of God.(24)
Man’s greatest privilege is to become a suitable instrument of God, and until he knows this he has not realized his true purpose in life.(25)
These passages parallel Sartre’s insight that the fundamental project is to be, except that Inayat Khan goes farther and gives us a reason to be. And just as Sartre speaks of what we might call subsidiary projects, Inayat Khan recognizes that we have many individual purposes which are underpinned by our ultimate purpose:
In all different purposes which we see working through each individual, there seems to be one purpose which is behind them all, and that is the unfoldment of the soul.(26)
Unlike Sartre, who says little about how to accomplish our project of being, Inayat Khan gives us some practical advice about how to achieve our ultimate purpose.
The ultimate freedom of the soul is gained by concentration, by meditation, by contemplation, and realization.(27)
What you are seeking for is within yourself. Instead of looking outside, you must look within. The way to proceed to accomplish this is for some moments to suspend all your senses such as sight, hearing, smell, touch, in order to put a screen before the outside life. And by concentration and by developing that meditative quality you will sooner or later get in touch with the inner Self. … And this gives joy, creates peace, and produces in you a self-sufficient spirit, a spirit of independence, of true liberty. The moment you get in touch with your Self you are in communion with God.(28)
This passage identifies the inner Self with the Self of God, but explaining that level of theological detail would take us too far afield. See my book How To Be An Excellent Human for specifics.(29) The point is that there are methods of attaining the desired goal. In his public talks and writings Inayat Khan gave only a broad overview of them. The esoteric school that he founded offers a plethora of practices that are tailored for each seeker by an experienced guide.
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Both Sartre, the Western atheist existentialist, and Inayat Khan, the Eastern spiritual mystic, recognize that there is something deeper to human existence than the many details of our busy lives. In both cases it behooves us to find out what it is and deliberately choose to embrace it. That’s not something you do from the comfort of a philosophical arm chair. It’s something to be pursued with passion. Achieving it can result in a great sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. So if you haven’t done so already, get started.
Notes
(1) See my essays “The Anguish of Freedom“, “Sartre, Positionally” and “Sartre’s Bad Logic“.
(2) Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”
(3) Catalano, A Commentary, p. 9.
(4) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, pp. 729-731.
(5) Idem, p. 729.
(6) Idem, p. 649.
(7) Idem, p. 731.
(8) Idem, p. 651.
(9) Idem, p. 658.
(10) Idem, p. 655.
(11) Idem, p. 732.
(12) Idem, p. 731.
(13) Idem, p. 733.
(14) Idem, pp. 733-734.
(15) Goodenough, “Life and Purpose.”
(16) Gerber, “Eros and Thanatos.”
(17) Whitehead, The Function of Reason, p.8.
(18) Wikipedia, “Know Thyself.”
(19) Sartre, Being and Nothingness tr. Richmond, p. 616.
(20) Idem, p. 734.
(21) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 214, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm.
(22) Idem, p. 200, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm.
(23) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals, p. 12, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm.
(24) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm.
(25) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings, p. 116, https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm.
(26) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm.
(27) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden, p. 197, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm.
(28) Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness, pp. 42-43, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm.
(29) Meacham, How To Be An Excellent Human, pp. 63-66.
References
Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Gerber, Timofei. “Eros and Thanatos: Freud’s two fundamental drives.” Epoché Philosophy Monthly, No. 20, February 2019. Online publication https://epochemagazine.org/20/eros-and-thanatos-freuds-two-fundamental-drives/ as of 17 March 2024.
Goodenough, Ursula (Khan Academy). “Life and Purpose: A Biologist Reflects on the Qualities that Define Life.” Online publication https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/big-history-project/life/life-and-big-history/a/life-and-purpose as of 17 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VI, The Alchemy of Happiness. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_30.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_28.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VI/VI_4.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VII, In an Eastern Rose Garden. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_28.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. VIII, Sufi Teachings. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VIIIa/VIIIa_2_5.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. IX, The Unity of Religious Ideals. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1963. Online publication http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_1.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Khan, Inayat. The Sufi Message Vol. XIV, The Smiling Forehead. Online publication https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_21.htm, http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/XIV/XIV_2_20.htm as of 18 March 2024.
Meacham, Bill. How To Be An Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life. Austin, Texas: Earth Harmony, 2013. Available at https://www.bmeacham.com/ExcellentHumanDownload.htm.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Tr. Sarah Richmond. New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2018.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman. London: Meridian Publishing Company, 1989.
Online publication https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 20 October 2018.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Function of Reason. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 (Princeton University Press, 1929).
Wikipedia. “Know Thyself.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself as of 17 March 2024.
