I’m still working my way through Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy (1986), ed. by George R. Lucas, Jr. Today I read Klaus Hartmann’s (University of Tubingen) essay, “Types of Explanation in Hegel and Whitehead”. Hartmann finds both similarities and differences in their respective approaches to philosophy. Among the similarities, he notes their mutual concern for organic wholes, for process, and for teleology (p. 61). Hartmann avoids rushing to any premature merger of their systems, however, arguing that Whitehead’s metaphysical cosmology and Hegel’s categorial theory of ontology rest upon incompatible methods of philosophical explanation.
In short, while Whitehead is committed to a flat ontology, wherein there is only a single category of beings (namely, actual entities), Hegel devises a “systematic hermeneutic of possible categories” to serve as “a matrix to diagnose the categorial commitments of the various philosophies that have been [historically] proposed”. Hegel leaves open the possibility of multiple “addresses of Being,” each one comparatively valid in the historical moment of its articulation. In other words, Hegel’s ontology is based in a dialectical account of the evolution of consciousness, wherein the varied philosophical positions of history are integrated into Absolute Spirit, the final truth of Thought’s conscious identity with Being. In this context, Hartmann asks of Whitehead whether the actual entities of his metaphysical atomism remain open to the possibility of “higher” categories serving as “genuine pledges for novel ontological realms,” or, in contrast, if such pledges are to be interpreted as “predicates qualifying monadic individuals” . Hartmann suggests that Hegel’s Logic is ontologically self-grounding, and opposes it to Whitehead’s “merely hypothetical scheme” (p. 73), which limits the reality of reasons to what takes place within the concrescence of actual entities.
- Matthew Segall, Types of Explanation in Whitehead and Hege,