Friday, May 19, 2023

Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World


To explain by what I mean by "value" or "beauty" or "generative creation" from my past article, I here use Matthew Segall's explanation of Whitehead's meaning of processual "value". And to help make Matthew's article a bit more readable I have overlaid an outline upon it in hopes of making Whiteheadian thought a bit more digestible.
One final thought. Rather than taking Whitehead's process philosophy and giving to it theological words from the bible and from a loving God, I would prefer to let the reader hear in Whitehead's words the parallel words which Process Theology will conjoin, favor, and elucidate within the greater context of a Christian Process Theology.
R.E. Slater, May 19, 2023


A Short Process Series on the God of Generative Value & Love

 


Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality:
God and the World

by Matthew David Segall
April 26, 2019

Ia.

Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise to, and continues to, inform them. Intellectual chauvinism has led many modern scientific materialists to claim that, given the available scientific evidence, atheism is the only rational position.

From Whitehead’s point of view, the history of religious experience is part of the data that any adequate cosmological scheme must incorporate. There is something of great philosophical significance in the religious and spiritual intuitions of human beings, even if these intuitions represent “exceptional elements in our conscious experience,” as Whitehead admits (PR 343).

Ib.

He also reminds us that “the present level of average waking human experience was at one time exceptional” among our ancestors (AoI 294). It is the job of philosophy to elucidate the significance of these rare mystical experiences, to find a systematic place for them in the wider scheme such that the average level of our species’ waking consciousness may continue to deepen.

1.  Philosophy has tended to collapse reality into one or the other of the “ideal opposites” explicated by Whitehead: Permanence and Flux. Plato, for example, over-emphasized the “eminent reality” of permanence by raising his Eternal Forms above the physical world of ever-shifting sensory experience. The world of Ideas was considered ultimate, while the world of physical sensations was demoted to “mere appearance,” or worse, “illusion.”

2. On the other end of the philosophical spectrum, David Hume completely disregarded what Whitehead refers to as “the everlasting elements in the passage of fact” (PR 338). For Hume, only sensory impressions are real, while ideas are merely agglomerations of impressions. All is flux; permanence is an illusion.

II.

Whitehead’s more integral goal is to find a way to think these ideal opposites in a complementary way, such that each is understood to require the other for its meaning. For Whitehead, “perfect realization” is not a timeless perfection (as it was for Plato); rather, perfection “implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing” (PR 338). This is another way of expressing the meaning of the ingression of eternal objects into actual occasions.

Think of a sunset: its beauty is haunted by eternal values even as the sun continues to sink below the horizon into darkness. Its passing, its perpetual perishing, somehow enhances its eternal beauty, rather than subtracting from it. There is perhaps something tragic in this interplay between eternal value and temporal activity, but from Whitehead’s point of view, tragedy may indeed be the highest form of beauty that our universe is capable of realizing.

III.

Whitehead defines the “religious problem” (i.e., the general existential issue that all religions attempt to address each in their own way) as follows: “whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss” (PR 340). One of the profound dilemmas of human experience is that, while we crave novelty, we are also haunted by the loss of the past.

In Whitehead’s process theology, one source of evil arises from the fact that the past fades, that time has the nature of “perpetual perishing.” Thus, one of God’s functions in the world is to preserve the past (this is God’s consequent nature). God is not an “unmoved mover” or an “imperial ruler,” but a “fellow-sufferer who understands” (PR 351).

Whitehead says that God does not create the world, he saves it: God’s infinite patience allows for the preservation of all our sufferings, sorrows, failures, and triumphs. Nothing that occurs in the universe is lost; all is taken up into God’s experience to become unified with his consequent nature.
This grants all actual occasions a kind of immortality, though it is not the personal sort promised us by traditional interpretations of Christian heaven. Each actual occasion of experience, though it may be trivial in the value it achieves in itself (if it is a puff of smoke in far off empty space, for example), in perishing becomes an immortal contribution to the greater end realized in God’s ever-enriched, ever-deepening consequent nature.
God prehends each finite actual occasion not only for what it is (thus, God shares in each occasion’s world view), but for what it can be within God’s perfected nature. The only immortality we enjoy comes from the sense of transcendent value we experience as we perish beyond ourselves and pass into the eternal life of God.
IV.

God’s other function in the world (God’s primordial nature) is to provide the “initial Eros” or “eternal urge of desire” that lures each finite actual occasion toward the most beautiful possibilities available to it given its local circumstances.

God’s primordial nature conditions the otherwise unlimited potentialities of Creativity, ordering the realm of eternal objects so as to make this otherwise infinite sphere of potential relevant to each actual occasion’s needs. Actual occasions are NOT determined by the initial aim provided by God: they still have creative independence from God (God, too, is a creature of Creativity). But God assists finite occasions in their decision as to how to concresce by preventing them from being overwhelmed by the entire infinite array of possibilities all at once.

The “initial aim” provided by God grades these possibilities so those that are not immediately relevant are largely negatively prehended by the occasion in question. All particular occasions of experience presuppose the conceptual order provided by God’s primordial evaluation of the realm of eternal objects. God presupposes only the general metaphysical character of the creative advance. [sic, God gives to creation generative value. - re slater]

In the final chapters of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead articulates the same ultimate interpretation, but now in terms like Beauty, Adventure, and Peace instead of using theological language.

  • He tells us that the purpose of the universe is the production of beauty.
  • He tells us that beauty is more fundamental than truth, and that truth’s importance arises because of its beauty.
  • This is not to say that truth (or the conformation of appearance with reality) is unimportant; it is rather that truth without beauty is, in a general metaphysical sense, boring. That is, it lacks importance; [that] it fails to increase the intensity of value realized in the universe, and instead just reiterates the obvious.
  • Similarly, beauty without truth is shallow, since it fails to penetrate to the deeper feelings inherent in the cosmic process: “The truth of supreme beauty lies beyond the dictionary meaning of words” (AoI 267). Beauty without truth is merely pleasing appearance. True beauty is what occurs when appearance elucidates and amplifies the finer textures of reality for experience.

V.

Whitehead defines art as the “purposeful adaptation of appearance to reality” (AoI 267). Consciousness, which results from a heightened contrast between actuality and ideality in an occasion of experience, is that factor in the universe that renders art possible. In some sense, consciousness itself is an evolutionary expression of nature’s artistry. In other words, it is via artistic expression that nature has educated itself by growing more conscious.

Said otherwise, art is the appropriation by consciousness of the infinite fecundity of nature. Art, Whitehead tells us, is a little oblivious as to morals. It focuses, instead, on adventure [sic, "creativity, novelty, originality" - re slater].

From the perspective of artistic creation, the Day of Judgment is always with us: art is in the business of “[rendering] the Day of Judgment a success, now” (AoI 269).


VI.

Whitehead defines Peace as a trust in the efficacy of beauty. We achieve consciousness of Peace when we rest in that “deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such triumph as is possible for it” (AoI 286).

Peace requires of us that we find some balance between our stoic acceptance of the impersonal order of the cosmos and our devotion to loving relationships of a more personal sort.


The Relentless Process Of A Processually Loving Cosmology



The Relentless Process of
A Processually Loving Cosmology

by R.E. Slater


I often use sources outside of Whiteheadian sources to provide perspective to a new or unfamiliar complex of ideas. Below is such a source. As I, myself, prefer reading Whitehead's process mindset across a range of topics - from theology to science, human industry to human cultures, etc - I was glad to see Bob Mesle's name come up but generally when listening to Arthur Holmes I felt his Westernized Christian background got in the way of hearing Whitehead's metaphysical cosmology as I might now hear it. Further, the commentor posting this article was circumspect in providing as honest an oversight as could be done... to which I thought it may be help then to post as an introduction amongst the many, many introductions I have posted over the years on Whitehead.

One last, Whitehead's process and reality speculation occurred a hundred+ years ago. Since then much has happened in human history. Over those years Whiteheadian theologians, philosophers, and scientists have "updated" and "integrated" process thought in an ever wider spectra of observation, testing, and correlation between the academic disciplines of all types. I say this to note the what Bob Mesle would differ from shows a growth in the overall subject of processual metaphysics and ontology. I am doing the same in my own way. A good view of the world is one which can absorb, morph and grow constructively over time and experience. I find Whitehead's cosmology of the world and universe, life and death, of extreme help in sorting through all the particulars arising in our contemporary times.

Thus my mission to bring to Christian and Non-Christian readership a valuable help in producing generative ethics and value into the many world of human pursuit. I might call this seeing God's love spread across, and embedded within, all things operating in a relational soup of experience and interaction with one another including that of the inanimate and immaterial. But as a Christian confronted with Christianity's pros and cons to the world I especially desire to recenter not only my own faith, but that of all faiths and religions, outlooks and socio-political economies back towards the center of Love.

Whiteheadian thought carries this value within it to which I, as a Christian may say, that God is Love and shared this Love with us by acts of continuing creation and by-and-through himself in the person and work of Jesus. Other religions can do the same via their origins when having been confronted by evil. As can non-religious civil outcries for liberties and justice. It is here where a value-based, generative system such as Process thought may provide a common ground of solidarity between disparate entities in regenerating our many social organs forward in the loving qualities of goodwill, truth (as we know it), peace, mercy, and forgiveness. Which is Process Theology has arisen in response to Whitehead's evolving insights to help reposition a God or religion back to it's origins... that of Love.

Imagine what a loving religion, a loving Christianity, a loving world, might accomplish with itself if it syncs up with the observed processes found throughout a universe leaning into the formation of valuative generations from every prehended event across all succeeding concrescing events? The possibility for the enrichment of life would be astounding. A Process theologian would then demand a pan-en-theistic cosmology as versus the church's mere "theistic" cosmology. One which integrates God's Imago Dei thoroughly into the metaphysics of life while maintaining the Otherness of God's own ontological being. It would more simulate birthing than adoption of God's Self into the There that was there down to its lowest DNA level.

It is also why Process theologians will contend for love in all things, all activities, all views of the world as against the "survival of the fittest" which the Church has claimed to be non-generative, non-loving, and non-God in act. The Church had gotten part of it right and most of it wrong. It's theistic cosmology did not allow it's God to extend to the lowest reaches of the earth, in a manner of speaking. As God is himself a God of process, so too is creation processual. We see this in the processual evolution of the spacetime, quantum particles, the universe itself, and planetary development urging towards "life" in its broadest meanings and senses. And within all these processes is rebirthed again and again a processual longing for more value, more structural interaction between the parts with the whole, a deep psychic push forwards towards greater and greater response against the necessary entrophy filling cosmology (see my previous post with ChatGPT on this topic).


Traditional theistic theologians may dislike Process theology's God and cosmology but when adopted in replacement to traditional Christianity's structural creeds and dogmas will immediately see the value of Love - of a loving God - insisting on reworking their thoughts of God as a God of Holiness and Penal Justice first in favor of a God who is first-and-foremost-and-at-all-times Loving through, and through, and through. And when done, God's presumed Holiness and Penal Justice must now fall inline to God's Love. A Love where a real divine holiness and divine judgment falls first upon the God of Creation (we know as Jesus) as it ever had done even in God's earliest lessons to Abram when passing God's Self through the slaughtered covenanted sacrificial carcasses.

God has ever-and-always led by Love. His holiness is ever mitigated by Love. His judgment, by Love. So that holiness is now found in presence and judgment in the indwelling Spirit of God upon the hearts of creation. As the universe is ever driven by entropy and negentrophy it's negator, so too creation's freedom to love or not love is ever driven by desire to distance, isolate, and remove the binding forces of loving fellowship between all things. Process theology leans the way of fellowship against the Church's earlier speculations of God's more austere presence. No less helped by a collection of religious narratives it inherited by Israel's confused understanding of God's Love in it's own narratives and national life.

And though Jesus and the disciples came to the Jewish priests and rabbis to correct such unloving narratives of God still they persist today in the Church's literal readings of the bible without seeing how the vary nature of the evolution of God in religion was percolating towards love. A process theologian then will read the bible processually as informing themselves that the person and work of a loving God is not immediately understood or grasped from his first followers but as the story of God and God's atoning, redeeming values of love are presently present and enlarging where it can - even in the more unloving, legalizing portions of the Church - then fellowship of all things to all things wins when Love wins across all the boundary lands of faith, organization, mechanism, and binary concept of a valuative panentheistic creation bounded and positioned, poised and oriented towards, a relentless, undying ethic of generative value against an entropy of isolation, breakage, harm, and evil.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
May 19, 2023


A synopsis of process philosophy

A great lecture by Arthur F. Holmes

At the end of my last post (no, not that last post!) I admitted to my predilection for Whitehead, the father of process philosophy and theology. Unfortunately, his magnus opus, Process and reality, is notoriously difficult. Accidentally, I came across a playlist with a lecture series on the history of philosophy by Arthur F. Holmes (The playlist also includes lectures on Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel and American pragmatism, which I will probably use as a background when I will deal with Churchman’s “The design of inquiring systems”). I found the first lecture on Whitehead (there are three in total) greatly elucidating, especially after I made a concept map (see below) of the lecture. I also made a transcription of the lecture, which you can download here. What follows in this post is a short description of the concept map, so a very, very brief introduction to Whitehead’s process philosophy. Best listen to the lecture, while keeping the concept map, the transcription, and possibly this post handy. You may learn something in a jiffy that others (really, really clever guys and gals) have taken months to master.

whiteheads-process-philosophy
click to enlarge here

Process philosophy     … is nothing new. Process notions can be found in many traditions, including Buddhism (India), and Taoism (China), but also in the ideas of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (Greece, 535-475 BC). Process philosophy in its modern guise was formally launched in 1929 when Whitehead (1861-1947) published his Process and reality.

Alfred North Whitehead    … was a ground-breaking philosopher (of science), physicist and mathematician from Thanet in Kent, UK. His main influences as a philosopher were modern science, Hegel, 19th century Romanticism and the Alexandrian fathers. His prime concern is the distinction between science and ethics, the separation of value and fact, a problem that also troubled Churchman (hence perhaps my liking of the two).

Mathematician and physicist   While in Cambridge he wrote Principia mathematica with Bertrand Russell. While teaching at London University he wrote about quantum physics and relativity theory. He reformulated the relational implications of both in a number of fallacies of science, including the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (esp. in relation to mechanistic abstractions) and the fallacy of simple location (which is based on non-relational ideas).

Hegel’s influence     … came to Whitehead mostly through the work of F.H. Bradley, a British idealist philosopher, who rejected empiricism – as did Whitehead. Hegel´s philosophy is best characterized as evolutionary idealism, in which the ‘free, creative spirit’ unfolds into self-consciousness using the well-known triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This spirit is not a substance or thing, but a process, which Hegel studies by means of a phenomenology of human existence and history. Whitehead borrows most of these ideas from Hegel, with the exception of the ‘spirit’ idea (idealism). He is staunchly monistic (as am I) and prefers his evolutionary process to be naturalistic.

The evolutionary naturalism     … of Whitehead emphasizes process (instead of substance), relations (instead of non-relational, atomistic things), and an organic world view (instead of a mechanistic universe). Whitehead also adopts a phenomenological approach to the study of process as the basic notion of reality. His main subject of phenomenological study is human consciousness, as it is most directly accessible to us.

Sense perception      Of all the processes that make up human consciousness, Whitehead uses sense perception as the paradigm event to exemplify all the processes that constitute the universe. Whitehead’s theory of where our ideas come from differs from that of many of his predecessors. Sense perception follows from the intrusion of real, objective 
paradigm-event
data (first step), which prompt us to consider a range of possibilities (second step) as to what this intrusion amounts to. In a third step, we select one of these possibilities or ideas as our ‘working hypothesis’. This hypothetical idea symbolically refers to the objective data that intruded upon our consciousness in the first place, be it by way of sound, touch, vision or otherwise. Whitehead is without doubt a realist (or naturalist) and not an idealist.

Eternal possibilities    The question now is as to where the possibilities of the second step come from? One could say it comes from our “stock of experiences”, as Dewey suggests. Whitehead prefers them to come from the so-called “logos structure” of God as developed by the Alexandrian church fathers such as Clemens and Origenes in the 2nd and 3rd century CE. These possibilities are possibilities of novelty that must have been created in some way. Without novelty no creative process is possible. To Whitehead God is the highest manifestation of creativity, whose stock of possibilities drives the cosmic process of creation. Whitehead does not claim any knowledge of the starting or end point of creation. On the basis of the evidence available to us there is only on-going creation.

Value     … can be observed at two points. In the first place in the range of possibilities, each of them being value-laden, whether it is for good or for bad. The second point is where we opt (or decide) for one possibility or the other. Whitehead wanted a cosmology that has a place for value. Modern science claims itself to be value-free by restricting itself to the facts and nothing but the facts, whereas Whitehead experiences aesthetic and moral value in the world and in nature. This experience of value is also expressed in Romanticism as exemplified by e.g. Wordsworth, whose poetry was a source of inspiration for Whitehead.

Process theology       Whitehead’s metaphysics has greatly inspired Christian theology and perhaps the theologies of other faiths. Important process theologians include Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and John B. Cobb (1925), who co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin (1939) in 1973. Dr. Cobb maintains a blog, answering questions regarding process thought and faith. A very pleasant introduction to process theology is the one by C. Robert Mesle. The Divinity School of the University of Chicago was the place where process theology developed for at least 60 years.

Criticism    … of Whitehead and process philosophy comes from a variety of sources. Whitehead’s early friend and collaborator, Bertrand Russell, obviously criticized the theological aspects of process philosophy, since he believed religion to be little more than often harmful superstition. Arthur Holmes (who delivered the Youtube lecture on which most of the concept map of this post based) thinks Whitehead may have stretched his event-based monism too far by applying it to persons.

God     Whitehead leaves many questions on the nature of God unanswered. Perhaps he did so on purpose, to leave open the possibility of process naturalism as suggested by Mesle, who holds that “the world of finite, natural creatures is unified”, but not “in such a way as to give rise to a single divine Subject,” even of a non-supernatural kind as in process theism. A naturalistic God then may be conceived as the subjective projection of a unified world of finite, natural creatures, i.e. an ideal without the unified existence ascribed to it by theists, but well worth approximating as a conception in one way or another. Such a conception leaves ample room to position oneself as an atheist, agnostic or theist, all the while producing a lot of common ground between the three.

Appreciation     There can be no doubt that Whitehead’s philosophy is a valiant effort to bring value or the human quest for meaning and fact or the scientific quest for truth together in a single scheme. The scheme as a whole cannot be understood and appreciated by looking at it from a single angle. Taking human consciousness as a starting point for obtaining a phenomenological description of a paradigm event of cosmic process, both at macro-scale and micro-scale, as well of human as of divine reality,  was brilliant. Once theism is accepted, then the logos structure gives it a new twist (panentheism) that inspired many theologians, including Wieman and untold (not just Unitarian) others. There is also the romantic view of aesthetic and moral value in nature, which aligns well with this type of panentheism. Bertrand Russell, despite his criticism, could not possibly disprove of that.

Systems approach      What I like about the phenomenological description of the “paradigm event” of process is the way it fits with the systems approach. It is important to note that an event can be anything, from somebody’s biography (or life) to the history of the universe. A systems version of Holmes´ account of an event could be: a process (or project or policy) that experiences an intrusion of sorts (a “wicked problem”), which then may become the subject of an inquiry in a systemic way to suggest an infinite range of possibilities, which enables a decision in favour of one option or another. Another aspect of process philosophy is its process-relational vision, its view that reality is relational, through and through. Reality as a social process. Freedom is inherent in the world. To be an individual is to be self-creative, i.e. to take decision after decision. Furthermore, in Mesle’s words, “Experience is rich and complex. The clarity of sense experience is grounded in deeper but vaguer experiences of our relatedness to the world process. Adequacy to this wealth of experience [SH: which can be tapped by taking into account the perspectives of others] is the ultimate test of our ideas.” The value of the systems approach lies in its potential for finding better approximations to such adequacy.