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THE TWO CULTURES
from that of stones to that of man. It is precisely this universality
that, in Whitehead's opinion, defines his enterprise as
"philosophy." While each scientific theory selects and abstracts
from the world's complexity a peculiar set of relations,
philosophy cannot favor any particular region of human experience.
Through conceptual experimentation it must construct
a consistency that can accommodate all dimensions of experience,
whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology,
biology, ethics, etc.
Whitehead understood perhaps more sharply than anyone
else that the creative evolution of nature could never be conceived
if the elements composing it were defined as permanent,
individual entities that maintained their identity throughout all
changes and interactions. But he also understood that to make
all permanence illusory, to deny being in the name of becoming,
to reject entities in favor of a continuous and ever-changing
flux meant falling once again into the trap always lying in wait
for philosophy-to "indulge in brilliant feats of explaining
away." 21
Thus for Whitehead the task of philosophy was to reconcile
permanence and change, to conceive of things as processes, to
demonstrate that becoming forms entities, individual identities
that are born and die. It is beyond the scope of this book to
give a detailed presentation of Whitehead's system. Let us
only emphasize that he demonstrated the connection between
a philosophy of relation-no element of nature is a permanent
support for changing relations; each receives its identity from
its relations with others-and a philosophy of innovating becoming.
In the process of its genesis, each existent unifies the
multiplicity of the world, since it adds to this multiplicity an
extra set of relations. At the creation of each new entity "the
many become one and are increased by one. "22
In the conclusion of this book, we shall again encounter
Whitehead's question of permanence and change, this time as
it is raised in physics; we shall speak of entities formed by
their irreversible interaction with the world. Today physics has
discovered the need to assert both the distinction and interdependence
between units and relations. It now recognizes that,
for an interaction to be real, the "nature" of the related things
must derive from these relations, while at the same time the relations
must derive from the "nature" of the things (see Chap-