emphasizes becoming and changing over static being. Though present in
many historical and cultural periods, the term "process philosophy" is
primarily associated with the work of American philosophers Alfred
North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000).
Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the
diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious,
scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme. Process
philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids
subjectivism. This reconciliation of the intuitions of objectivity and
subjectivity, with a concern for scientific findings, produces the
explicitly metaphysical speculation that the world, at its most
fundamental level, is made up of momentary events of experience rather
than enduring material substances. Process philosophy speculates that
these momentary events, called "actual occasions" or "actual
entities," are essentially self-determining, experiential, and
internally related to each other.
Actual occasions correspond to electrons and sub-atomic particles, but
also to human persons. The human person is a society of billions of
these occasions (that is, the body), which is organized and
coordinated by a single dominant occasion (that is, the mind). Thus,
process philosophy avoids a strict mind-body dualism.
Most process philosophers speculate that God is also an actual entity,
though there is an internal debate among process thinkers whether God
is a series of momentary actual occasions, like other worldly
societies, or a single everlasting and constantly developing actual
entity. Either way, process philosophy conceives of God as dipolar.
God's primordial nature is the permanent ground of value and
determinacy and a storehouse for universals, or "envisaged
potentialities." God's consequent nature, on the other hand, takes in
data from the world at every instant, changing as the world changes. A
considerable number of process philosophers argue that God is not a
necessary element of the metaphysical system and may be excised from
the process model without any loss of consistency.
Process philosophy has also been cited as a unique synthesis of
classical methodology, modern concerns for scientific adequacy, and
post-modern critiques of hegemony, dualism, determinism, materialism,
and egocentrism. In this respect, process philosophy is sometimes
called "constructive postmodernism," alluding to its speculative
method of system building with a hypothetical and fallible stance,
over the alternative of deconstruction.
1. What Counts as Process Philosophy
a. The Perennial Process Tradition
Process philosophy argues that the language of development and change
are more appropriate descriptors of reality than the language of
static being. This tradition has roots in the West in the pre-Socratic
Heraclitus, who likened the structure of reality to the element of
fire, as change is reality and stability is illusion. Heraclitus is
famous for the aphorism that one can never step in the same river
twice.
In Eastern traditions, many Taoist and Buddhist doctrines can be
classified as "process." For example, the Taoist admonition that one
should be spontaneously receptive to the never ending flux of yin and
yang emphasizes a process worldview, as do the Buddhist notions of
pratyitya-samutpada (the inter-dependent origination of events) and
anatma (the denial of a substantial or enduring self).
More recently on the continent, one finds process philosophers in
Hegel, who saw the history of the world as processive and dialectic
unfolding of Absolute Spirit and in Gottfried Leibniz, Henri Bergson,
Nikolai Berdyaev, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Even David Hume (insofar as he rejected the idea of a substantial self
in favor of a series of unconnected perceptual "bundles") can be
considered a process philosopher.
Process Philosophy found its most fertile ground and active
development in 20th century North America. American philosophers
Samuel Alexander, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, C.S. Peirce,
William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and others
continue this tradition.
Peirce's philosophy is process-oriented in several respects. He
defines truth as the unattainable goal of a never-ending process of
inquiry. Likewise, Peirce's semiology indicates that the meaning of
signs is always triangulated between an object, its sign, and the
infinite series of "interpretants" or subjective impressions made by
the sign upon human knowers. Thus, Peirce correlates meaning with an
ongoing and indeterminate historical process interpretation. Finally,
Peirce was a staunch anti-determinist and advocated tychism, the
belief that the operations of the natural world were not fixed and
regular, but exhibit considerable spontaneity.
James is considered a process philosopher for several reasons. He
stresses that true empiricism requires that we acknowledge the
continuous flow of experience (the "blooming buzzing confusion") as
our primary datum rather than individual and discrete physical
objects. Also, James was a strong proponent of libertarianism (the
belief in genuinely free choice, not the political ideology) and
argued that determinism was not a genuine candidate for belief. James
also advocated a metaphysics of "pure experience" late in his career,
which puts forth the hypothesis that both mind and matter are
manifestations of a more primary experiential "stuff."
Dewey exhibited process themes in his philosophy of education and
epistemology. First, Dewey's philosophy of education criticized the
rote memorization of facts, and advocated the development of critical
thinking faculties and problem solving abilities, thus shifting the
emphasis from the accumulation of static propositions to building
capacities for appropriating new insight. Likewise, Dewey's
epistemology of transaction argues that no belief should be considered
final, as human knowledge is in a constant state of revision and
development. Likewise, the naming of objects is always tentative and
human knowing cannot be divorced from its temporal context.
b. The Whitehead-Hartshorne Tradition
Despite these rich and varied contributions, the term "process
philosophy" (as well as "process theology" and "process thought") has
become virtually synonymous with the neo-naturalist philosophical
legacy left by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles
Hartshorne (1897-2000). This association was popularized among those
theologians and philosophers of the mid-century "Chicago School." For
this reason, the remainder of this essay will primarily focus on the
Whiteheadian-Hartshornean school of process philosophy. Contemporary
philosophers in this school include Lewis Ford, David Ray Griffin,
Robert Neville, Victor Lowe, Donald Sherburne, Donald Wayne Viney,
Jude Jones, John Lango, Daniel Dombrowski, Randall Auxier, and C.
Robert Mesle, among others. Notable characteristics of this variant of
process philosophy are its (1) method of metaphysical speculation, (2)
event (rather than substance) ontology, (3) assertion of panpsychism
or panexperientialism, (4) description of "prehension" in place of
perception, and (5) panentheist doctrine of God.
2. Assumptions and Method
a. In Pursuit of a Holistic Worldview
Whitehead begins the preface to his Science and the Modern World
(1925) by noting that the human intuitions of science, aesthetics,
ethics, and religion each make a positive contribution to the
worldview of a community. In each historical period, any one or
combination of these intuitions may receive emphasis and thus
influence the dominant worldview of its people. It is a peculiar
characteristic of the last three (now four) centuries that scientific
pursuits have come to dominate the worldview of Western minds. For
this reason, Whitehead seeks to establish a comprehensive
cosmology—understood here in the sense of a systematic descriptive
theory of the world—that does justice to all of the human intuitions
and not only the scientific ones. Toward this end, Whitehead argues
that philosophy is the "critic of cosmologies," whose job it is to
synthesize, scrutinize and make coherent the divergent intuitions
gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific
experience. Process philosophy is frequently used as a conceptual
bridge to facilitate discussions between religion, philosophy, and
science.
b. Neo-Classical Realism
Process philosophy represents an aberration in the history of
philosophy, as it rejects the peculiarly Modern practice of beginning
with philosophical analysis of the knowing subject and moving outwards
toward descriptions of the world. Since Rene Descartes, epistemology
(the investigation of the origin, structure, methods and validity of
knowledge) has been primary and foundational, while ontology (the
study of fundamental principles of being) has been secondary and only
attempted once its possibility has been established by epistemological
analysis.
Process philosophers, however, tend to embrace the reverse, which was
more common in classical Greek philosophy. Rather than beginning with
subjectivity, process philosophy seeks to describe the world first and
the subject's place in it second. Hartshorne adopted the descriptor
"neoclassical" to describe his philosophy and especially his doctrine
of God. Hartshorne was neoclassical not only because his philosophy
was theocentric rather than egocentric, but also because of his strong
tendencies toward rationalism. (Hartshorne defended a variety of the
ontological argument for the existence of God.) This neoclassical
realist approach circumvents philosophical attacks on metaphysics (for
example, Kant's transcendental critique) that arose in the Modern
period. It is a matter of debate between process philosophers and
their critics, however, whether process philosophy is pre-modern or
post-modern in this respect.
c. Speculative Metaphysics
Process philosophy as a whole employs three methodologies, usually
simultaneously: empiricism (knowledge from experience), rationalism
(knowledge from deduction), and speculation (knowledge from
imagination). Whitehead's famous metaphor for philosophy from the
opening pages of his opus Process and Reality (1929) is that of a
short airplane flight. Philosophy begins on the ground with the
concrete reality of lived experience. Experience provides us with the
raw data for our theories. Then, our thought takes off, losing contact
with the ground and soaring into heights of imaginative speculation.
During speculation, we use rational criteria and imagination to
synthesize facts into a (relatively) systematic worldview. In the end,
however, our theories must eventually land and once again make contact
with the ground—our speculations and hypotheses must ultimately answer
once again to the authority of experience. Though one of Whitehead's
more infamous aphorisms is that "it is more important that an idea be
interesting than true," he insists that speculative theories be both
coherent and adequate to the facts of experience. By taking this
airplane flight as a model for speculative metaphysics, Whitehead
envisions the process of metaphysics to consist in an unending series
of "test flights," as our metaphysical conclusions are never final and
always hypothetical. The process of adjusting our metaphysics to meet
the demands of experience is a task with no end in sight, as
experience continually provides the philosopher with new facts. Thus,
process metaphysics regards the status of its own claims as contingent
and tentative. This differs significantly from classical metaphysical
systems, which are regarded as final, authoritative, and necessary.
3. Basic Metaphysics
a. Creativity as Ultimate
Whitehead argues that the best description of ultimate reality is
through the principle of creativity. Creativity is the universal of
universals—that which is only actual in virtue of its accidents or
instances. Thus, creativity is frequently compared to the notions of
Aristotle's "being qua being," Martin Heidegger's "Being itself" (more
appropriately "Becoming itself"), or even the material cause of all
events. Creativity is the most general notion at the base of all that
actually exists. Thus, all actual entities, even God, are in a sense
"creatures" of creativity.
Whitehead also characterizes creativity as the principle of novelty.
The events of the past are ceaselessly synthesized into a new and
unique event, which becomes data for future events. "The many become
one, and are increased by one," (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 20).
This focus on oscillation between one and many forms the foundation of
the process metaphysic.
b. Events, not Substances
The most counter-intuitive doctrine of process philosophy is its sharp
break from the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, that actuality
is not made up of inert substances that are extended in space and time
and only externally related to each other. Process thought instead
states that actuality is made up of atomic or momentary events. These
events, called actual entities or actual occasions, are "the final
real things of which the world is made up," (Whitehead, Process and
Reality, 18). They occur very briefly and are characterized by the
power of self-determination and subjective immediacy (though not
necessarily conscious experience). In many ways, actual occasions are
similar to Leibniz's monads [link], except that occasions are
internally related to each other.
The enduring objects one perceives with the senses (for example,
rocks, trees, persons, etc.) are made up of serially ordered
"societies," or strings of momentary actual occasions, each flowing
into the next and giving the illusion of an object that is
continuously extended in time, much like the rapid succession of
individual frames in a film that appear as a continuous picture.
Contemporary commentators on process thought suggest that individual
actual occasions vary in spatio-temporal "size" and can correspond to
the phenomena of sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, and
human persons (that is, souls). Likewise, these individuals may
aggregate together to form larger societies (for example, rocks,
trees, animal bodies). According to this model, a single electron
would be a series of momentary electron-occasions. Likewise, the human
subject would be a series of single occasions that coordinates and
organizes many of the billions of other actual occasions that make up
the subject's "physical" body.
Where substance metaphysics and modern science have posited that the
world is made up of material objects, Whitehead argues that "organism"
is a better term for things that exist. Whereas matter is
self-sustaining, externally related, valueless, passive, and without
an intrinsic principle of motion; organisms are interdependent,
internally and externally related, value-laden, active, and
intrinsically active.
c. Internal and External Relations
Process philosophy rejects the doctrine of scientific materialism and
substance-based metaphysics that entities can only influence each
other by means of external relations. In a metaphysic of material
substance, solid bodies are only able to influence other solid bodies
by making physical contact with them or exerting some force on them.
Although these interaction produce change, they do not affect the
intrinsic constitution of the bodies acted upon. As a result, the
actualities of materialist metaphysics are able to endure interaction
without any changes to their constitution.
Process philosophy asserts that actual occasions influence each other
by internal and external relations. When one actual occasion is
internally related to another, the past occasions participate in and
contribute to the intrinsic character of the present. The primary
vehicle for internal relatedness is Whitehead's notion of prehension.
Prehension is the experiential activity of an actual occasion by which
characteristics of one occasion come to be present in another. Thus,
one occasion may prehend certain qualities of an occasion in its past
(for example, a shade of red or a certain proposition). By means of
prehension, a past occasion comes to be constitutively present in the
contemporary occasion and contributes to its intrinsic character. All
actualities prehend. This is not a voluntary or a necessarily
conscious activity.
One important consequence of this doctrine is the principle of
relativity, which states that every actual occasion is internally
related to every other actual occasion in its past (that is, the
entire past history of the universe), though the efficacy each past
occasion exerts upon the present occasion may vary widely. Thus
process philosophers describe the world as a vast and tangled web of
relationalty and interdependence.
d. Rejection of Nominalism
Whitehead, who famously asserts that the history of philosophy is
safely characterized as "a series of footnotes to Plato" (Whitehead,
Process and Reality, 39), resurrects the Platonic notion that the
qualities of objects exist independently of any perceiver. This
position arises from the need for the actual occasions to take on
"forms of definiteness" as they assimilate the data of the past into
the particularity of the present. Because Whitehead argues that
anything that exerts causal efficacy upon the world must be an actual
entity (his "ontological principle"), he denies that universals are
free-floating, independently real entities like the Platonic Forms.
Instead, Whitehead calls the universals "eternal objects" and locates
them in the mind of God, who is an actual entity. The divine
actuality, according to Whitehead, primordially envisages and orders
the eternal objects into an ideal pattern(s). Eternal objects are
tiered in complexity. Several simple eternal objects can be ordered
into a single complex eternal object, which would be an ordered
arrangement of simpler eternal objects. So a particular shade of green
is a relatively simple eternal object, while "green life form" is a
more complex eternal object and "vegetable" would be even more
complex.
Thus, eternal objects are relevant novel possibilities that are
presented to and "ingress" into every actual occasion. The divine
actuality mediates eternal objects—both simple and complex—to other
actual occasions by means of prehension. These eternal objects make
their way into the concrescing (developing) actual occasions when an
occasion "feels" them in a past actual occasion or in the divine
actuality. A person who experiences a musty smell feels that datum as
a complex eternal object that was present in the occasions that make
up the moldy book. The direct transmission of eternal objects from the
divine actuality to worldly actual occasions is the chief source of
novelty in the world.
Though Whitehead and Hartshorne share many metaphysical commitments,
Whitehead's doctrine of eternal objects is one source of significant
disagreement between the two process philosophers. Hartshorne argues
that although there is a meaningful sense in which specific qualities
of phenomena are objectively real, he does not agree that they are
"haunting reality from all eternity, as it were, begging for
instantiation, nor that God primordially envisages a complete set of
such qualities," (Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis, 59). For example,
Hartshorne uses the example that the quality of "being like
Shakespeare" could not have existed, even in God's mind, before
Shakespeare's actual existence.
Hartshorne contends that Whitehead has obscured or overlooked the
distinction between what is determinable and what is determinate. The
former consists in unactualized possibility that is in no way settled
beforehand. Hartshorne asks us to consider the advance possibilities
of a painter creating a painting. Certainly the possible outcomes are
partially definite. There are only so many pigments in existence and
the perceptual range of human vision is fixed, but the precise outcome
of this creative act is not pre-existent as an eternal object. Not
even God, claims Hartshorne, can anticipate the products of human
creativity. Prior to completion, the finished painting is
determinable, but not determinate. The process of becoming for
Hartshorne is more than the temporally ordered actualization of
antecedently (or eternally) present forms—a "vast sum of
determinates"—but rather the essentially creative emergence of
genuinely novel forms and patterns of infinite range.
Hartshorne, however, does not endorse nominalism, which he defines as
the denial of a genuine distinction between the universal and the
particular. (Nominalists either deny ontological status to all
universals or to all particulars.) In this sense, Hartshorne is a
realist, just not as robustly realist as Whitehead. He allows that
some universals are eternal (for example, the necessary aspect of
deity and numbers), but most are emergent and contingent upon the
temporal flow of actual events.
4. The Human Person
a. Panexperientialism with Organizational Duality
Process metaphysics doctrine of panpsychism or panexperientialism
state that all individual actual entities—from electrons to human
persons—are essentially self-determining and possess the ability to
experience the world around them. Although actual entities possess
experience, it is not necessarily conscious experience. Whitehead
argues that consciousness presupposes experience and not vice versa.
Panexperientialism is another significant departure from the dominant
metaphysical theories of idealism (all is mind), dualism (mind and
matter are equally fundamental), or materialism (all is matter).
Whitehead's metaphysic is a monistic one. Everything that is actual is
composed of actual occasions. Actual occasions are themselves diverse;
they vary in size and complexity. Electronic occasions have limited
freedom and opportunities, while human persons are capable of
incredibly rich experiences. Despite the great range of complexity,
these differences are differences of degree, not of kind. Thus, the
traditional problems of mind-body interaction are not present in
process metaphysics because reality, at its base, is not purely mental
or physical. Actual entities, as events, are at their foundation
experiential and one can have physical experiences and mental
experiences.
Although the system is a monistic one, which is characterized by
experience going "all the way down" to the simplest and most basic
actualities, there is a duality between the types of organizational
patterns to which societies of actual occasions might conform. In some
instances, actual occasions will come together and give rise to a
"regnant" or dominant society of occasions. The most obvious example
of this is when the molecule-occasions and cell-occasions in a body
produce, by means of a central nervous system, a mind or soul. This
mind or soul prehends all the feeling and experience of the billions
of other bodily occasions and coordinates and integrates them into
higher and more complex forms of experience. The entire society that
supports and includes a dominant member is, to use Hartshorne's term,
a compound individual.
Other times, however, a bodily society of occasions lacks a dominant
member to organize and integrate the experiences of others. Rocks,
trees, and other non-sentient objects are examples of these aggregate
or corpuscular societies. In this case, the diverse experiences of the
multitude of actual occasions conflict, compete, and are for the most
part lost and cancel each other out. Whereas the society of occasions
that comprises a compound individual is a monarchy, Whitehead
describes corpuscular societies as "democracies." This duality
accounts for how, at the macroscopic phenomenal level, we experience a
duality between the mental and physical despite the fundamentally and
uniformly experiential nature of reality. Those things that seem to be
purely physical are corpuscular societies of occasions, while those
objects that seem to possess consciousness, intelligence, or
subjectivity are compound individuals.
b. Perception and Prehension
Every actual occasion receives data from every other actual occasion
in its past by means of prehension. Whitehead calls the process of
integrating this data by proceeding from indeterminacy to determinacy
"concrescence." Concrescence typically consists of an occasion feeling
the entirety of its past actual world, filtering and selecting some
data for relevance, and integrating, combining, and contrasting that
original data with novel data (provided by the divine occasion) in
increasingly complex stages of "feeling" until the occasion reaches
"satisfaction" and has become fully actual. Because this process of
synthesis involves distilling the entire past universe down into a
single moment of particular experience, Whitehead calls a completed
actual occasion "superject" or "subject-superject." After an occasion
reaches satisfaction, it becomes an objectively immortal datum for all
future occasions.
In human beings (and all other sufficiently complex animals), the
concrescing structure of the dominant occasions entails that
consciousness is a derivative form of experience that only appears in
the latest stage of concrescence. "Consciousness flickers; and even at
its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination,
and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense
experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness
is no measure of the complexity of complete experience," (Whitehead,
Process and Reality, 267). Thus, sense perception, because it is
conscious, is considered by Whitehead to be a relatively superficial
mode of perception. In fact, Whitehead argues that human beings
perceive in three modes, of which sensory perception is only one.
Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is Whitehead's term for the
initial prehension by an actual occasion of its entire past world.
Whitehead describes the data of the past world coming to bear upon the
occasion as "brute fact." Thus, the occasions of the past exert
efficient causation upon the concrescing occasion. Whitehead argues
that all actualities experience perception in the mode of causal
efficacy, and it is by far the most significant and fundamental mode
of causation. Thus, contrary to Hume, we do perceive the causal
influence of other actualities, although not always consciously.
Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is the
manifestation of causal efficacy as it "bubbles up" into
consciousness. Some examples include uninterpreted blotches of color
that one sees or the experience of an audible tone, without comparison
to those tones that have already been heard. Presentational immediacy
provides the subject with information about the durational present,
but not the past or future.
These two "pure" modes of perception—causal efficacy and perceptual
immediacy—are combined in the third "impure" mode of perception:
symbolic reference. Perception in the mode of symbolic reference is
the process by which we identify and correlate those phenomena in
causal efficacy with the causally efficacious occasions in our past.
Symbolic reference is the conscious (or liminally conscious) activity
of assigning referential relations between immediate sensory phenomena
and past actualities "out there" in the world. Process philosophy
diverges from the skepticism about the world-in-itself engendered by
Hume and Imannuel Kant. Human beings are able to perceive causal
relations and can correlate noumena and phenomena by means of symbolic
reference.
5. God and the World
a. Dipolar Panentheism
In his metaphysical works, Whitehead notes that, given the virtually
unlimited number of "forms of definiteness" (that is, eternal objects)
available, the "creative advance" of the occasions in the universe
would not be possible if there were not some "principle of concretion
or limitation" placed upon actuality. This principle must determine
which forms are available for instantiation in each object and
introduce contraries, grades, and oppositions among those values. The
metaphysical system requires a reason that actual occasions take on
only a very specific selection of the eternal objects that are
available. Thus, God is introduced into the system as the principle of
limitation, which actual occasions require. In Whitehead's system,
only actual entities can have causal efficacy. Thus, a divine actual
entity was posited. Though Whitehead's philosophy has inspired an
entire tradition of process theology, the doctrine of God at this
point (especially in Science and the Modern World) is very thin,
theologically speaking. Whitehead was initially a reluctant theist.
God appears as a metaphysical necessity—the evaluator and purveyor of
universals—and little more.
It is important to note that although God's envisagement of the
eternal objects is "eternal" (that is, causally outside of the
temporal flow), God's own being is that of an everlasting actual
entity (Whitehead) or an everlasting society of discrete actual
occasions (Hartshorne). Process philosophy's dedication to naturalism
prohibits the postulation of any entities that are exempt from
metaphysical principles, especially God, who should be the chief
exemplification of the world's metaphysical principles rather than
their sole exception. The tension in the process conception of God
between an eternal and unchanging evaluation of eternal objects and a
temporal entity internally related to every other actuality has led to
Whitehead's "dipolar" doctrine of God. It is useful to think about
God's being by means of two abstractions: God's primordial nature and
God's consequent nature. The primordial nature envisages and orders
the eternal objects into a single unimaginably complex ideal. The
consequent nature of God interacts with the world, prehending fully
every single actual occasion in the world upon its concrescence and,
thus, preserving the past. This consequent nature of God is the aspect
of God that is continuously changing as the world changes and feels
every experience in the world with subjective immediacy.
Process philosophers also characterize God's relation to the world as
one of mutual transcendence, mutual immanence, and mutual creation.
For example, God transcends the world insofar as God is able to fully
synthesize and integrate every occasion in the world and compare that
world with the primordial envisagement of ideals. The world transcends
God insofar as it is not subject to divine fiat and can disregard
God's lures or presentation of novel possibilities. Likewise, God is
the creator of the world in the sense that an orchestra conductor or a
poet is a creator—organizing and directing elements that frequently
surprise or misinterpret. The world creates God in the sense that the
data from the world are internally related and constitutive of God's
being.
The doctrine of God established by process philosophy is a significant
departure from previous models of the God-World relation. Process
philosophy does not endorse classical theism, understood as the
doctrine that God is completely transcendent, supernatural, beyond
time and space, simple, and unchanging. Nor does process philosophy
endorse pure immanence or pantheism, the doctrine that the world and
God are identical and that God is nothing more than the sum of
entities in the world. Instead, process philosophy endorses
panentheism, the belief that all is in God and God is immanent
everywhere in the universe, but is more than the universe. A
frequently used analogy here is that the universe is God's body and
God is the consciousness that directs and interacts with that body.
God is the divine subject of all experience.
b. Freedom and the Problem of Evil
Because every actual entity, including God, is an instance of
creativity and is therefore experiential and self-determining, God is
incapable of overriding the self-determination of the creaturely
occasions. To exist at all is to be composed of creativity and this
necessarily implies both an element of self-determination and a
particular pattern of causal relation with all other entities. God is
not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles,
invoked to save their collapse. God is their chief exemplification.
(Process and Reality, 343). God prehends and is prehended just as
billions of other actualities are prehended. Ultimately, the syntheses
of these data (including divine data) are determined by the
concrescing entity, whether that entity is an atmospheric molecule or
a human being. God's power over the world is described as persuasive
rather than coercive. God cannot override the self-directed
integrations of feeling present in the concrescence of any
occasion—God cannot force human beings to make any particular decision
and cannot supernaturally intervene in natural processes. God's power
is that of presenting novel eternal objects (possibilities) as a
"lure" to the creaturely occasions. For this reason, the God of
process philosophy is not omnipotent, if one's definition of
omnipotence includes the ability to perform any conceivable action.
This denial of omnipotence (see Charles Hartshorne's Omnipotence and
Other Theological Mistakes) is process philosophy's solution to the
problem of evil. Because the power of self-determination is a quality
of Becoming itself, anything that exists must necessarily possess
self-determination. God's benevolence is not at odds with the
existence of moral and natural evils in the world because God's power
cannot prevent creaturely occasions from ignoring the divine lures and
acting in a less-than-ideal fashion.
6. Non-theistic Variations
Some later process philosophers (for example, Donald Sherburne, Robert
C. Mesle) dispute whether God is truly necessary to Whitehead's
system. They argue that a non-theistic or "naturalistic" version of
process philosophy is more useful and coherent. This movement,
classically expressed by Donald Sherburne's 1971 article "Whitehead
without God," observes that Whitehead believes that God is
metaphysically necessary because God (a) preserves the past; (b) is
the ontological ground, or "somewhere" of the eternal objects; and (c)
is the source of order, novelty, and limitation in worldly occasions.
Sherburne argues that these roles for God are inconsistent with the
metaphysical principles of Whitehead's system and are superfluous.
According to Whitehead's own principles, God cannot be the ground for
the givenness of the past. Likewise, the eternal objects need not be
located in an everlasting divine actuality—a rather Platonic
formulation—but could be inchoate in the flux of worldly actualities
themselves—a more Aristotelian view. Finally, Sherburne points out
that a principle of limitation can arise from the naturally ordered
causal relevance of the past rather than God. A concrescing occasion
is most heavily influenced by the preceding occasion in its immediate
past and the determinate character of this occasion limits the
possibilities of the present.
7. Process Philosophy as Constructive Postmodernism
"Modernity" in itself is a rather diffuse term, which means many
things to many people, and especially varies depending on the
disciplinary context. The term "postmodern" is even more ambiguous
(and abused). Process philosophy's place in the history of philosophy
is somewhat of an enigma, due to its ambivalent relationship with
modernity. In some ways, process philosophy seems pre-modern by virtue
of its neo-classicism and unapologetic metaphysical speculation.
Process philosophy also embraces modernity in its dedication to the
importance of natural science and its metaphysical realism. It is also
post-modern in its rejection of both substance metaphysics and the
notion of an enduring self.
Many process philosophers, following the lead of David Ray Griffin,
refer to their own work as "constructive postmodernism" in order to
differentiate it from the deconstruction program of Jacques Derrida,
Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and others. The latter
movements seek to dismantle the notions of system, self, God, purpose,
meaning, reality, and truth in order to prevent, among other things,
oppressive totalities and hegemonic narratives that arose in the
Modern period. Constructive postmodernism, on the other hand, seeks
emancipation from the negative aspects of modernity through revision
rather than elimination. Constructive postmodernism seeks to revise
and re-synthesize the insights and positive features of Modernity into
a post-anthropocentric, post-individualistic, post-materialist,
post-nationalist, post-patriarchal, and post-consumerist worldview.
For example, modernity's worship of scientific achievement, combined
with lingering Aristotelian doctrines of substance and efficient
causation may have led to a mechanistic materialist worldview.
Deconstructive postmodernism would combat this worldview by
undermining the efficacy of science, claiming that all observational
statements are actually about our own culturally-constituted
conceptual scheme, not about an independently real world. Constructive
postmodernism seeks instead to leave natural science intact, because
empirical observation itself produces evidence against mechanism and
materialism when it takes in a sufficiently broad data set (that is,
all of human experience, and not just experience of "physical"
objects).
8. Conclusion
Many thinkers have found process philosophy to be most useful because
of this ambivalent stance. Whitehead's own method for resolving
philosophical difficulties was to see the polar oppositions present in
any philosophical debate (idealism vs. materialism; libertarianism vs.
determinism) as two exaggerated positions that arise from an
inappropriately narrow selection of data and evidence. Solutions to
problems, for process philosophy, are always to be found in novel
syntheses of the past judgments.
9. References and Further Reading
a. Primary Sources
* Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution (Kessinger Publications, 2003).
* Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to
Metaphysics (Citadel Press, 1992).
* Browning, Douglas and William T. Myers, eds. Philosophers of
Process (New York: Fordham, 1998).
o This anthology collects important essays from the broader
tradition of process philosophy—C.S. Peirce, William James, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, A.N.
Whitehead, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Hartshorne.
* Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method
(Chicago: Open Court, 1970).
o Hartshorne tackles classical issues in philosophy: proofs
for theism, metaphysics and language, a priori knowledge, aesthetic
value, and the nature of reality.
* Hartshorne, Charles. Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1983).
o Hartshorne presents his own systematic philosophical views
by commenting on the major figures in the history of philosophy from
the Pre-Socratics to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.
* Hartshorne, Charles. Creativity in American Philosophy (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1984).
o Hartshorne comments on the major figures in American
philosophy, focusing on their metaphysical commitments, and treatment
of "creativity."
* Hartshorne, Charles. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1984).
o This short, simple, and lucid work summarizes Hartshorne's
doctrine of God and related philosophical theology.
* Hartshorne, Charles. The Zero Fallacy (Chicago: Open Court, 1997).
o This anthology presents diverse essays by Hartshorne on
classical theism, democracy, the logic of contrasts, the nature of
metaphysics, the mind-body problem, and even ornithology.
* Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World (New York:
The Free Press, 1925).
o By arguing that the rise of modern science is a contingent
and idiosyncratic cultural fluke, rather than an inevitable
intellectual achievement, Whitehead establishes the framework for his
own holistic metaphysical system.
* Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham, 1926).
o By examining the history, phenomenology, and sociology of
religion, Whitehead discusses the important interrelation of religious
experience, scientific experience, and metaphysical philosophy.
* Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (New York: The Free
Press, 1929).
o In his highly technical and dense opus, Whitehead
systematically describes his unique "philosophy of organism."
* Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free
Press, 1933).
o By examining the history of civilization, Whitehead
explores the notions of widescale moral progress of civilization, the
infusion of values and ideals in the world, the God-world relation,
and the importance of novelty and adventure for human inquiry.
b. Secondary Sources
* Cobb, John B., Jr. and Griffin, David Ray. Process Theology: An
Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).
o This book applies the metaphysics of Whitehead and
Hartshorne to explicitly theological problems.
* Cobb, John B., Jr. and Griffin, David Ray. Postmodernism and
Public Policy: Reframing Religion, Culture, Education, Sexuality,
Class, Race, Politics, and the Economy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).
o John B. Cobb, Jr. uses a Whiteheadian perspective to
address matters of public policy and social justice.
* Cloots, Andre, and Robinson, Keith A.. Deleuze, Whitehead, and
the Transformation of Metaphysics (Brussels: Flämische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, 2005).
o This work places Whitehead in conversation with French
poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze.
* Dombrowski, Daniel. A Platonic Philosophy of Religion (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2006).
o This work's interpretive framework derives from the
application of process philosophy and discusses the continuation of
Plato's thought in the works of Hartshorne and Whitehead.
* Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy
(Philadelphia, Westminster, 1976).
o This work compares traditional theodicies with the
Whiteheadian-Hartshornean solution to the problem of evil.
* Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A
Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2001).
o This book uses process philosophy as an explanatory scheme
for major issues in the philosophy of religion—religious language,
religious experience and perception, freedom, evil, and morality.
* Griffin, David Ray et al. Founders of Constructive Postmodern
Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne.
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
o This volume discusses process philosophy as a
distinctively postmodern trajectory of thought.
* Jones, Judith. Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).
* Keller, Catherine and Anne Daniell, eds. Process and Difference:
Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2002).
o This collection of essays engages the process
philosophical tradition with the poststructuralist movements.
* LeClerc, Ivor. Whitehead's Metaphysics (New Jersey: Humanities
Press, 1958).
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