Whitehead and Personal Identity

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WHITEHEAD AND PERSONAL IDENTITY T!E QUESTION whether Whitehead's speculative phiosophy can be adequately applied to the fact of personal identity has long been a thorn in the sides of Whiteheadians. Personal identity seems to be a fundamental aspect of experience to which any comprehensive and systematic philosophy simply must do justice. Yet the distinctive features of Whitehead's thought, particularly its atomism, appear to militate against, if not indeed preclude, any such adequacy. In his A Christian Natural Theology, John Cobb considered this problem and attempted to provide a solution.1 The purpose of this article is to examine that solution, to raise some questions about it, and to present some alternative suggestions. Although it has been several years since Cobb's book was published, it seems appropriate to review his contribution because of the fundamental importance of the issue. For the success of Whitehead's speculative philosophy can be viewed as resting upon the cogency of its claim to be a " one-substance cosmology." 2 The one categoreal scheme is to provide one conceptuality applicable to God, man, and the natural world alike. The cogency of this claim is reduced, however, if the scheme is really inapplicable to man's experience of personal identity. In this context Cobb's proposal becomes fairly important . If it cannot bear the weight he places upon it-and 1 John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1965), pp. 47-91. Subsequent references to this work are abbreviated as CNT and incorporated within the text. 2 Process and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 1'!9, see p. 168. Sub~equent references to this work are abbreviated as PR and incorporated within text. 510 WHITEHEAD AND PERSONAL IDENTITY 511 he admits to some dissatisfaction with his own solution-an alternative must be sought.3 I Cobb locates the problem of personal identity as resting with Whitehead's account of the soul, that center of consciousness and experience which we otherwise, and more usually, identify as the self. In more technical terms, the soul is that living person which is the series of dominant occasions within a body. Cobb does not think that questions about the role of the body in personal identity are really to the point, for in the last analysis "it is the soul that is truly personal, the true subject." (CNT 66) 4 The body is rather the environment for personal existence and is itself " ontologically distinct " from the soul. (CNT 66) Thus it is apparent that by personal identity Cobb has in mind the identity of the person construed as a centered self or soul rather than a mind-body unity of which the soul is only a part. Now it is quite clear that Whitehead's categories repudiate any notion of a numerical or absolute self-identity through time. Such self-identity belongs only to individual actual entities. The fact of personal identity through time cannot then be construed in Whitehead's system in any absolute sense. The question is whether it can be clearly construed in terms of the soul. Cobb argues that Whitehead presents two categoreal or systematic resources for this task. Both pertain to the relationship between successive actual entities in a personally ordered society. The first resource which might explicate 3 Cobb himself points out the seriousness of the issue (CNT 74, 76). • I think Cobb is incorrect in this position, but I am unable to argue the point here. Whitehead does observe that if " human occasions of experience e«sentially inherit in one-dimensional personal order, there is a gap between human occasions and the physical occasions of nature," Adventures of Ideas (New Yol'k: The Macmillan Company, 1933), p. 243. (Subsequently references to this work are abbreviated as AI and incorporated within the text.) The whole thrust of Whitehead's endeavor is directed against such a gap. Cobb's position only widens it. 512 JOHN B. BENNETT personal identity is the inheritance of a common pattern or character. The second is some special mode in which the past is inherited. Cobb's solution involves the complete rejection of the first resource and a development of the...