WHITEHEAD'S PLATO / אפלטון בעיני וייטהד

At the beginning of his paper, the writer quotes the well-known passage from Process and Reality in which Whitehead maintains that "... if we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience... we should have to see about the construction of a philosophy of organism." The author tries to answer the following two questions: (1) How Whitehead interpretes Plato's general point of view and particularly the main Platonic conceptions; (2) Does Whitehead give to these conceptions, or to the equivalent ones found in his philosophy of organism, a meaning identical with the Plato's meaning; and if not, what are the differences between them. The writer shows how Whitehead interpretes the general character of Plato's philosophy, Plato's conception of the soul, of mathematical relations, of the Forms and of the structure of the Cosmos. At the end of the discussion he compares the Platonic Form with Whitehead's eternal object. The conclusion arrived at is, that the main difference between Plato's conception and that of Whitehead roots in the problem of reality. According to Plato, the perfect and eternal Forms are the true reality; if not the only one, then at least the "most real" one, the measure for all reality. He did not change this concept in later life in spite of the difficulties which occurred by way of his unceasing investigation in the various implications of the Theory of Forms. Whitehead, on the contrary, takes as true reality the actual entity, the synthesis of apprehensions which is an act of experience. The eternal object is by itself only a possibility, and a possibility in this context is different from reality. The Ontological Principle brings out this assumption most clearly: One cannot ascribe reality to anything which rests outside any actual entity. Those eternal possibilities which were not yet actualised in the creative process of the world are also present in a unity of prehensions, namely, in the unity of the prehensions of God, and God, too, is an actual entity. Whitehead identifies the real with the individual, and the individual with the realisation striving for perfection; Plato identifies the real with the general, and the general with the permanent and perfect which is the aim of all realisation.