But any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.
“
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Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas pp. 184-185. This is Whitehead’s justification for a certain type of anthropomorphism, i.e. for attributing desires and satisfactions, and experience in general, to all organisms. Either we are dualist and anthropocentric, saying that human beings alone have subjectivity, desires, etc., or we accept that the distinctions between us and other entities are only relative — in this latter case, anthropomorphism is the only alternative to reductionism and eliminativism. |
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