Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Commentary - RE Slater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary - RE Slater. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2024

Is God Talk Necessary? with John D. Caputo (Part 1)


Usually I try to give a short intro to a subject matter but time is pressing at the moment. In short, Dr. Caputo and I have travelled different roads but have gotten to the same point spiritually. For myself, I came by the highways of Process Theology (Whitehead) via Continental Thought. For John, he came by way of progressive Catholicism which finds him in the Radical (religious) and Continental theology side of things. It would not be coincidental that we have each needed to deconstruct our past in order to get where we are today.

I have many of Dr. Caputo's books and am recommending the current new series of five volumes below which summarize his thinking over these many years. My first meeting with John was when hosting him and Peter Rollins for a week via my computer per GCAS' request (sic, Creston Davis) many years ago. I've stayed aware of John's work ever since then; and regarding Pete, I met him personally and have listened to him many times via Rob Bell and Mars Hill, and Pete's own network. If memory serves correctly, I believe Pete is a protege of John's.

All for now. Enjoy!

R.E. Slater
November 14, 2024

John Caputo Bio (Wikipedia) - Syracuse University site link
Caputo received his BA in 1962 from La Salle University, his MA in 1964 from Villanova University, and his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from Bryn Mawr College.[4]
Caputo is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy, with a particular expertise in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Over the years, he has developed a deconstructive hermeneutics that he calls radical hermeneutics, which is highly influenced by the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Additionally, Caputo has developed a distinctive approach to religion that he calls weak theology. Recently, his most important work has been to rebut the charges of relativism made against deconstruction by showing that deconstruction is organized around the affirmation of certain unconditional ethical and political claims.
Caputo has a special interest in continental approaches to the philosophy of religion. Some of the ideas Caputo investigates in his work include the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and others; the critique of ontotheology; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with Augustine of Hippo and Paul of Tarsus; and medieval metaphysics and mysticism. In the past, Caputo has taught courses on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.




Is God Talk Necessary?
with John D. Caputo (Part 1)


Ilia Delio sits down with philosopher-theologian John D. Caputo (Jack). Ilia asks Jack about how he got from Continental Philosophy to what he calls weak theology, and theo-poetics. Then they tackle the big, enduring question Jack and Ilia like to often ask—what is going on “in the name of God?” and why it might benefit us to stop talking about “God.”

ABOUT JOHN D. CAPUTO

“The name of God is the name of the impossible, and the love of God transports us beyond ourselves and the constraints imposed upon the world.”

John D. Caputo, the Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Villanova University) and the Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus (Syracuse University), is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who works in the area of “weak” or “radical” theology, drawing upon hermeneutic and deconstructive theory. His most recent books are What to Believe: Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (2023) and Specters of God: An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination (2022). His The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006), won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence in the category of constructive theology.


* * * * * * * *


5 Volume Summation Series
by John D. Caputo


Volume 1 brings together the earliest publications of John D. Caputo when the young “Catholic philosopher” was working out the relationship of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart to what Martin Heidegger called “thinking” and “Being.” The collection reflects an early interest in mathematical logic, includes his work on Kant and the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, and extends to the essays of the early 1980s where we can see the main lines of Radical Hermeneutics beginning to take shape.

“John Caputo’s extraordinary work from his earliest work on Eckhart, Heidegger and others to his later work on Derrida, and his contemporary philosophical theology have been a singular resource for all serious contemporary scholars. I heartily endorse this project.” —David Tracy, Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies,, University of Chicago Divinity School

“The John D. Caputo Archives comprise an essential resource for all scholars working in contemporary European Philosophy, especially Continental Philosophy of Religion.” —Kevin Hart, Kyle Professor of Christian Studies, University of Virginia



Volume 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction covers the period when Caputo first worked out his notion of “radical hermeneutics,” where the strategies and resources of deconstruction prove to be the way to come to grips with the “difficulty” of the hermeneutic situation, in which radical does not mean radically grounded but radically exposed to instability and undecidability. In essays on Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Lyotard and Derrida, he shows how hermeneutics is inwardly disturbed by deconstruction and deconstruction is inevitably an account of the hermeneutic condition, where each is the condition of the other. Here, too, Caputo makes his first explorations into the implications of deconstruction for faith, ethics and religion. The volume includes several essays previously unpublished or unavailable.




The Return of Religion,Volume 3 of this collection of John D. Caputo’s papers, covers the period when the “return of religion” was in the air, and, in particular, when Caputo was conducting a dialogue between Jacques Derrida and leading theologians and philosophers of religion at the Villanova University conferences. Here are the papers from that era, several of them originally published in hard-to-find forums, that articulate just what it is that theology has to learn from deconstruction—and deconstruction from theology—in the search for a postmodern or postsecular approach to religion. In these essays, Caputo enters into dialogue with Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Marion, and Wyschogrod, among others, addressing such themes as radical hermeneutics, the gift, the tout autre, the impossible, the il y a, Catholicism and postmodernity, and religion without religion.

Volume 4: Continental Philosophy of Religion collects the papers published by Caputo at the time a continental version of the philosophy of religion was taking shape, when postmodern theory provided a different way to think about God and religion, which in turn opened up a new way to think about postmodern theory. With papers on Augustine, Radical Orthodoxy, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Gadamer, and Marion and others, Caputo questions the distinction between theism and atheism, the religious and the secular, in search of the God who comes after the God of metaphysics in a religion without religion.

Volume 5: Coming out as a Theologian collects the papers published by Caputo during his first years in the Syracuse University Religion Department when, as Catherine Keller said, he “came out of the closet as a theologian”—a “weak” or “radical” theologian, nothing confessional or denominational. Caputo here puts deconstruction into the service of a “constructive theology” of the “event” in a series of lively essays, including several previously unpublished pieces, while also engaging the work of T. J. J. Altizer, Ted Jennings, Louis Mackey, Jean-Luc Marion, Calvin Schrag, Mark Taylor, Merold Westphal, David Wood, and Edith Wyschogrod.

* * * * * * * *


Other Books by John D. Caputo






* * * * * * * *

John D. Caputo


John D. Caputo
Born
John David Caputo

October 26, 1940 (age 84)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
Alma mater
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
Institutions
Doctoral studentsJames K. A. Smith
Other notable studentsTheodore George
Main interests
Notable ideas
Websitehttps://johndcaputo.com/

John David Caputo (born October 26, 1940) is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University.[1] Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity[2] and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology.[3] Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.

Education

Caputo received his BA in 1962 from La Salle University, his MA in 1964 from Villanova University, and his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from Bryn Mawr College.[4]

Work

Caputo is a specialist in contemporary continental philosophy, with a particular expertise in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Over the years, he has developed a deconstructive hermeneutics that he calls radical hermeneutics, which is highly influenced by the thought of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Additionally, Caputo has developed a distinctive approach to religion that he calls weak theology. Recently, his most important work has been to rebut the charges of relativism made against deconstruction by showing that deconstruction is organized around the affirmation of certain unconditional ethical and political claims.

Caputo has a special interest in continental approaches to the philosophy of religion. Some of the ideas Caputo investigates in his work include the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology by Jean-Luc Marion and others; the critique of ontotheology; the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with Augustine of Hippo and Paul of Tarsus; and medieval metaphysics and mysticism. In the past, Caputo has taught courses on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida.

Positions held

Caputo taught philosophy at Villanova University from 1968 to 2004. He was appointed the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University in 1993. Caputo was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, where he taught in both the departments of philosophy and religion from 2004 until his retirement in 2011. He is emeritus professor at both Villanova University and Syracuse University and continues to write and lecture in both the United States and Europe. He is active in the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and he chairs the board of editors for the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

Notable former students of Caputo

Bibliography

  • (1978) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Ohio University Press)
  • (1982) Heidegger and Aquinas (Fordham University Press)
  • (1986) The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (Fordham University Press paperback with a new "Introduction")
  • (1987) Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Indiana University Press)
  • (1993) Against Ethics - Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Indiana University Press)
  • (1993) Demythologizing Heidegger (Indiana University Press)
  • (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indiana University Press)
  • (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed./auth. (Fordham University Press)
  • (2000) More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Indiana University Press)
  • (2001) On Religion (Routledge Press)
  • (2006) Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon Press)
  • (2006) The Weakness of God (Indiana University Press)
  • (2007) After the Death of God, with Gianni Vattimo (Columbia University Press)
  • (2007) How to Read Kierkegaard (Granta; Norton, 2008)
  • (2007) What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Baker Academic)
  • (2013) The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana University Press)
  • (2014) Truth [Philosophy in Transit] (Penguin)
  • (2015) Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Fortress Press)
  • (2015) The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge Press)
  • (2018) Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (Pelican)
  • (2018) The Essential Caputo: Selected Writings, ed. B. Keith Putt (Indiana University Press)
  • (2019) Cross and Cosmos: A Theology of Difficult Glory (Indiana University Press)
  • (2020) In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (Fordham University Press)
  • (2021) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 3 [1997-2000]: The Return of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 1 [1969-1985]: Aquinas, Eckhart, Heidegger: Metaphysics, Mysticism, Thought, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2022) Specters of God: An Anatomy of Apophatic Imagination (Indiana University Press)
  • (2022) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 2 [1986-1996]: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2023) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 4 [2001-2004]: Continental Philosophy of Religion, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)
  • (2023) What to Believe? Twelve Brief Lessons in Radical Theology (Columbia University Press)
  • (2024) The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 5 [2005-2007]: Coming Out as a Theologian, ed. Eric Weislogel (John D. Caputo Archives)

See also

References

  1. ^ "John D. Caputo". Westar Institute. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  2. ^ Camilleri, René (October 18, 2009). "Reinvent the Church". Times of Malta. Retrieved August 20, 2012.
  3. ^ "John D.Caputo". College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  4. ^ "Villanova University Catalog" (PDF). Villanova University.

Online writings

Interviews



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Saturday, November 9, 2024

Origins & Critique: The Problem of "Feeling" in Whitehead's Metaphysics


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University of Alabama at Birmingham
UAB Digital Commons
UAB Digital Commons Libraries
Professional Work
Professional Showcase

2024

The Problem of “Feeling” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics
by Michael A. Flannery
University Of Alabama At Birmingham

Follow this and additional works at:
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/libraries-pw

Recommended Citation
Flannery, Michael A., "The Problem of “Feeling” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics" (2024). Libraries Professional Work. 14.

This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication.


* * * * * * *

An Observation
Historical background is always necessary to have pertaining to the origins of ideas however the datedness of yesteryear's discussion seems passe to the current force of Whiteheadian thought in process philosophy and theology.
I, like others, are not adverse to processual "feeling" all the way down into nature and the cosmos finding in it a necessary descriptor when so much of Christian thought would separate man from the animal, the flora and fauna, the inorganic kingdoms, when asserting man as unique and without peer. A Whiteheadian Process Philosopher and Theologian bears no such artificial divisions. 
Too, the early post-cursors of Whiteheadian thought over the years has only deepened with the additions of process-based panexperientialism and panpsychism to that of panrelationalism. Hence, despite the engagements of past philosophers to their contemporaries ideas and their own academic generations in context with other relevant philosophies and "noetics", we might find these discursives as but helps and aides to Whitehead's own experimentations in speaking more frankly about the voids of the current day's metaphysics. 
Whitehead's organic onus is now on the present generation of process thinkers to continue to work out the many paths and divergencies of process thought in relation to contemporaneous philosophical, psychoanalytic, and socio-cultural thought today: 1) in formalistic terms and, 2) in practical terms whereby civilizations may be aided in their language between one another.
- RE Slater, Nov 9, 2024


The Problem of “Feeling”
in Whitehead’s Metaphysics

by Michael A. Flannery
Fall 2024

Page | 1

When Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) left England for the United States in 1924 to serve as Harvard’s newest lecturer in philosophy, the department and university administration were delighted to have the co-author of the massive and masterful Principia Mathematica (19101913) on their faculty. Although he had an early foray into philosophy and metaphysics with the Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College in November 1919 (published as The Concept of Nature [1920]), it wasn’t until after he turned to the temporal and teleological ideas of Henri Bergson and formulated them into a whole system of thought that he became known as the purported “father” of modern process philosophy. With the publication of his magnum opus Process and Reality (1929), process thought was alleged to have begun, proof that academic pedigree often determines one’s fame.

But Whitehead was not the only one to introduce process philosophy. Swedish-American John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), coming as he did from the Midwest (first at Grinnell College in Iowa, then at the University of Kansas, followed by Carleton College in Minnesota) before moving to the fledgling UCLA, only recently promoted as an independent institution from its former status as the Southern Branch of the University of California, was destined for obscurity despite the fact that he already developed his own system of process philosophy. Boodin’s career as a process thinker shouldn’t be surprising given the fact that Josiah Royce, to whom Boodin was devoted, is regarded as America’s first true process philosopher (Auxier 2013, pp. 40, 63).* Armed with what he had learned from his dissertation supervisor and mentor, Boodin worked out his own process thought in A Realistic Universe in 1916, three years before Whitehead’s Tarner Lectures, four years before his Concept of Nature, nine years before his Science and the Modern World, ten years before

*Randall Auxier points out that Royce’s process philosophy can be traced to an unpublished essay, “On Purpose in Thought,” written in 1880. This was developed further in Royce’s essay, “The Problem of Job,” published in Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays Upon Life and Society (New York: Appleton, 1898). Richard Hocking (1906-2001), son of idealist philosopher and student of Royce, William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), noted this too. He observed that Royce “expressed . . . his conviction that human existence is at once thoroughly time-immersed as a sequence of practical actions and, in its rational power, capable of grasping forms of order and lawfulness which are true throughout the relativities of the temporal flux. Royce is a kind of process philosopher” (Hocking 1963, pp. xivxv). All of these elements are more fully developed in Boodin’s oeuvre.

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Religion in the Making, and eleven years before his Gifford Lectures that would become Process and Reality (1929), his magnum opus.

As with any major system or theory, differences over origination, emphasis, definition, interpretation, and consequences are common among its adherents. At the time, Boodin identified himself a creationist, which he defined as someone who believes in “the occurrence of new forms, characters and stages under the guidance of an actuality which controls and animates the course of history.” As interpreted, “creation is epigenesis or emergence (in recent terminology) together with control from a higher level” (Boodin 1934c, p. 14). On the other hand, Boodin considered Whitehead a preformationist, meaning “that evolutionary development is latent in the process so that later forms and stages are really an unfolding or making explicit what is already present in the earlier stages of the same history” (Boodin 1934c, pp. 14, 43-45). By definition, however, both were process thinkers, although the term process philosophy per se came into common use by its own independent route.

Here some sorting out of terminology is helpful. While process philosophy is generally associated with Whitehead, he actually never employed the term, preferring to call his system “the philosophy of organism.” In fact, the theme of this essay examines Whitehead’s proposal whereby in “place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling [emphasis mine]” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, p. 166). Process philosophy as a general term referring to being as becoming in a constant holistic relational interaction of change appears to have first been used explicitly in Wilmon H. Sheldon’s America’s Progressive Philosophy (1942) and elaborated upon in his Process and Polarity (1944). Sheldon did not use this phrase as a synonym for the philosophy of organism, though he regarded Whitehead as one of several of its greatest proponents (this included Dewey, a pragmatist who, as we shall see, opposed several of Whitehead’s formulations); instead, Sheldon developed his ideas independently of Whitehead (Rescher 1996, p. 23). However, it was Bernard Loomer who applied “process” to both branches of philosophy and theology. Here Looomer made it plain that in using “process philosophy” he had “reference in this case to the general Whiteheadian orientation” (Loomer 1949, p. 181). Although Loomer knew of Sheldon’s work, he probably emphasized Whitehead’s process philosophy because he saw process as “a theory which Whitehead has already exemplified” (Loomer 1944, p. 67). Here is how process philosophy became synonymous with the

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philosophy of organism. Bolstered by Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) at the University of Chicago with his evangelizing zeal for process (he preferred “neoclassical”) theology under his own interpretation of Whitehead, whom he knew and had worked with, by the 1950s the almost exclusive identification of process philosophy and theology with Whitehead was complete. In any case, given the etymology of the phrase, process philosophy casts a wide net that captures a broad genus of kindred thinkers whose specific species of beliefs can vary widely. None of these early proponents actually used the phrase.

Initially, Boodin offers little critique of Whitehead only to provide a fuller assessment by stating, “When theory goes beyond experience, it belongs to the world of fiction, albeit a useful fiction if it leads to further experience” (Boodin 1934c, p. 487). Eventually, he accused Whitehead of perpetuating a kind of fiction—and not a particularly useful one—by singling out his tendency to abstraction, over generalization, conflation of mathematical truths with causal explanations, and his overambitious metaphysical constructions (Boodin 1943). Of particular concern for Boodin was Whitehead’s use of “feeling” in his metaphysical system:

Whitehead . . . attributes little importance to sense-quality. Instead, he stresses feeling. His language of feeling is as fluctuating as the feelings. He sometimes uses feeling in the psychological sense of feeling tone. In this sense, it is a fusion of a large mass of organic sensations, especially from the autonomous system. This is an emergent fact as much as the sense-qualities which we use to characterize external things. While feelings are an important revelation of our life in nature, they are certainly not less organic than the more specific sense-qualities. Together with the specific sense-qualities, the feelings constitute the immediate awareness of our life in nature. They are more massive and in that sense richer than the specific sense-qualities. But that is no reason for putting them on a different metaphysical basis. Sometimes Whitehead uses feeling for our whole immediate awareness of nature. This immediate awareness he calls prehension, as contrasted with apprehension. Prehension suggests active seizure; and feeling, instead of being an emergent, becomes an efficient cause in nature. As all nature is organic for Whitehead, feeling becomes the efficient causation in nature. And since reality is conceived as dynamic, feeling becomes reality, and Whitehead is brought by his own route to the mysticism of Bradley. Feeling, as one type of the emergent actualization of nature—the florescence of life's activity—becomes the whole of reality. Such ambiguity will give the philosophers much material out of which they can make a living and will no doubt be perpetuated [emphasis mine] (Boodin 1934a, pp. 157-158).

Boodin’s last pithy comment was a prescient observation on his colleagues’ easy slide into the hypnotic gaze of the noetic idea.

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Like Boodin, University of Arkansas philosopher Daryl H. Rice refused to fall under Whitehead’s spell. Rice accuses Whitehead of “reductive vitalism” (1989), but not before pointing out that Whitehead’s use of “physical feeling” is deceptive because it doesn’t refer to physical reality in any meaningful way, but as a “psychical reality” (Rice 1984, p. 123). Instead, Whitehead universalizes “physical feeling” to show the relativity and continuity of events in nature. Here we have Whitehead’s philosophy of science in the service of a metaphysics of feeling and emotion. In other words, the universal relativity and continuity of the events of nature are raised to the level of a metaphysics of feeling and emotion. This is carried to questionable lengths in Whitehead’s moral philosophy where “the ought” is reduced to an æsthetic sense (see Schlipp 1951, pp. 561-618).

Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme applies “feeling” to so many things that it seems to lose coherence and all meaning. It can refer to an actual occasion as subject, to an actual occasion as object, to the apprehension of object by subject, and to the affective tone washing over the act of apprehension. We have a feeling that “feels” so obfuscatory that “Feeling seems to become what Hegel claimed became of his notion of the Absolute in the hands of some of his contemporaries: the night in which all cows are black” (Rice 1984, p. 123). Whitehead restricts feeling to “subjective form” and as such it cannot be passed on from subject to subject because it is solely internal. Whitehead’s “feeling” becomes a word spaghetti of incomprehensibly slippery usage (Rice 1984, p. 124).† There is nothing in process thinking that requires “feeling” of this sort. It is a muddle of Whitehead’s own making in his effort to understand “the whole of reality” and thus extends feeling “by overturning our thought expectations and beliefs” (Baciu, 2023, p. 67). Here the extension of feeling to inanimate things is rightly regarded with extreme Kantian distrust, but is nonetheless indispensable to Whitehead’s “actual occasions.”

Careful to keep substance out of his metaphysics, Boodin admits that since “we are concerned only with the dynamic world as it appears in our experience, . . . we must assume that reality is what it is known-as” therefore banishing “the fictitious [Kantian] thing-in-itself” (Boodin 1916, p. 28). Kant’s mistake was to assume that we link things with our intellect arbitrarily when, in fact, we are selective in that “our conjunctions tally with the conjunctions of qualities as

†Whitehead’s awkward handling of feeling is exemplary of his entire philosophy. Process and Reality, supposedly Whitehead’s grand metaphysical statement, has been called “almost the most unintelligible essay in philosophy ever written” (Urban 1939, p. 617). Many who have tried to digest its contents would agree.

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ascertained in our experience” (Boodin 1916, p. 91). Furthermore, rather than mere subjective additions as Kant would have it, things “come to figure in the contexts of our interests” (Boodin 1916, p. 93). These relations are not abstractions. In good Jamesian fashion, “Terms and relations are pragmatic. They are our emphasis in the service of the dominant interest for the time being. The real units of reality are neither terms nor relations, but energy systems from which the terms and relations are intellectual abstractions” (Boodin 1916, p. 94). For Boodin, human experience is comprised of constancy—invariable associations, permanent will, the dominant tendency, the ruling passion—and change—shifting contents and values, new experiences, unforeseen obstacles, and pleasant surprises (Boodin 1916, p. 176). Process must entail flux and that implies constancy on the one hand and change on the other. Indeed without flux growth, creativity and novelty would have no meaning. Whitehead forces energy systems into an odd context of “feeling” that seems unwarranted and unnecessary unless one subscribes to the equally unwarranted and unnecessary panpsychism or its pragmatized twin panexperientialism as some Whiteheadians have done (Griffin 2001, pp. 94-128]; Mesle 2008, pp. 93-94). This merely presses an abstraction into the service of an a priori metaphysic. Nothing in process thought requires this.

Whiteheadians will no doubt insist that the ubiquitous use of feeling avoids the dreaded bifurcation of humanity and nature but Boodin’s metaphysic was just as averse to bifurcation (Boodin 1925, pp. 50-51, 252-261, 265; Boodin 1934a, pp. 148, 170-171). Whitehead’s background and achievements in mathematics, alluded to earlier, secured his Anglo-American status, but it could be a detriment too. Boodin suggests that Whitehead made the same error as Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) by treating abstract mathematical concepts as real-world attributes. This is confirmed in Whitehead’s conflation of “value” all the way down, like Alexander, “into the elementary constituents of the universe” (Urban 1951, p. 325). While this was ostensibly an effort to head off the bifurcation of nature and experiences, it seems dubious to do so by employing such mathematizing abstractions as reading value all the down. Boodin was too close a reader of Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) not to know that mathematics simply comprises “pragmatic conventions contributed by the human mind and relative to the needs of descriptions” (Boodin 1925, p. 87). Perhaps Whitehead’s confusion stemmed from such a concerted effort, along with his colleague Bertrand Russell, to create a notation system in Principia Mathematica that would provide “the perfect language” for clarifying everything. This involved trying to fill in every

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ambiguity or ambivalence and caused serious problems (Grayling 2019, pp. 342-344). In the end, it fell under the weight of its own imposing objective by worsening a problem it sought to solve.

Famed pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952) and political scientist/philosopher Arthur F. Bentley (1870-1957) recognized the “linguistic chaos” to which logic and epistemology had fallen and attempted to clarify things in their Knowing and the Known published two years after Whitehead’s death in 1949. Dewey and Bentley called for consistency in terminology and “firm names” based upon observation that could be generally accepted by logicians and epistemologists working in the field (Dykhuizen 1973, p. 311). Their project was clearly not served by Whitehead’s neologisms, special word usages, and unusual linguistic applications. Dewey was not overly critical of Whitehead in public, choosing to emphasize those things with which his own philosophical thinking most agreed. But privately both he and Bentley knew Whitehead had problems. Like his fuzzy use of “feeling,” Bentley told Dewey in a letter dated May 1, 1942, "that Whitehead “is always trying to read the universe in mentalistic terms.... My irreverent feeling is that he [Whitehead] empties a pillow case full of feathers, and you waste a lot more time than is necessary in huffing and puffing them away. He worries me” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 101). Dewey explained his motive in not fully challenging Whitehead’s ideas: “I didn’t mean to indulge in anything like a wholehearted defense of Whitehead,” he told Bentley on December 3, 1944, “In fact, I think his thought is slippery—but the slipperiness is of a kind in which I think the alternatives are either to leave him alone or engage in a highly technical discussion—in our case I favor the first alternative” (Ratner and Altman 1964, pp. 344-345).

One of those “technical” issues was Whitehead’s background in mathematics. He simply tried to do too much with it. Einstein, like Poincaré, admitted his descriptions were useful abstractions without any direct physical significance for his space-time, but Whitehead sets out to give an account of nature in which, as Boodin explains, “abstractions are conceived as extensive abstractions. Even event-particles with their point-instants are conceived as contained in nature.” Not surprisingly, Whitehead has difficulty showing how these can be extrapolated from “events” in any reasonable sense. Boodin, therefore, concludes, “The spatial, temporal, and physical points do not possess the character of extension and inclusion. Whitehead admits that ‘the creative advance of nature,’ which is his expressive characterization of concrete reality, is ‘not serial.’ But it is easy to see that Whitehead has left himself no other locus for such entities, so he has to include

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them within nature. He has set himself to deal with nature as closed to mind. There is to be no bifurcation into subjective and objective. Nature is to be self-contained to a theory of nature. He did not leave the least hole through which he could chuck embarrassing entities” (Boodin 1925, p. 316).

All Whitehead had to do is admit mind—and by extension feeling—as a part of nature instead of shoehorning it into “occasions” or painfully demonstrating how points, instants, and point-particles can be abstracted from events. These “are not contained in the same sense as adjectives or as the objects of science. They can only be considered as part of nature if we regard the instrumental function of mind as part of nature” (Boodin 1925, p. 317). In the end, Whitehead’s effort to root out any and all ambiguity in his metaphysical system, attempting to avoid bifurcation at all costs, paid the ultimate price of mentalizing nature. Of course, mind as a part of nature is not the same as being nature. The latter is groundless panpsychism. Dewey recognized this in Whitehead, accusing him of “converting continuity of functioning into identity of contents” of which “he is very guilty” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 342).

Again, this difficulty, in part, resides in Whitehead’s mathematizing everything. Bentley noticed the same problem in Whitehead that Boodin had. Although not in the published version of his essay “Specification” that appeared in the November 1946 issue of The Journal of Philosophy, his draft, shared with Dewey the year before, pointed out that “the logical technical examination of the mathematical methods is always legitimate; but the logical carryover of goals, tests, and standards is something else. In this process of trying to make logic run mathematics, the logic [of Russell, Whitehead, et al. (brackets in the original)] has advanced (i.e., weakened itself) to the three-valued or multi-valued forms,‡ and it has tried to make probability developments oriented to the old scheme; it has had many offshoots. (Consider hypostatizations. Consider concept as a norm around which the wording circulated. Consider pure quality assumed to be capable of mathematicised treatment)” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 466). But Dewey explained to Bentley that Whitehead’s “ultra-mathematical organizations” were only part of his problem: the heart of it was “the same as Bergson’s starting from Newtonian physics,” both were struck by the significance of temporality, but with the new physics, Whitehead attempted to apply his “temporal

‡A reference in logic to what is sometimes called 3VL or many-valued systems (MVL) that include true, false, and one or more additional values (e.g., provisionally true or false, heuristically useful, etc.).

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constructions” with relativity and space-time “to mentalize his Reality” (Ratner and Altman 1964, pp. 102-103).

Of course, this looped back to Whitehead’s mathematized metaphysics. Boodin saw this better than Dewey: “The theory of relativity raises the whole question of the relation of mathematics to the real world. Einstein and Whitehead both assume the validity of the mathematical concepts of continuity and infinity, which have played such a large part in modern physical description ever since the invention of the differential calculus. They belong to the scientific method of the Newtonian era to which we owe the foundations of the physical sciences. But like the Newtonian concepts of time and space, they are purely artificial concepts. We have no evidence that nature ever has the constitution symbolized by the concepts of continuity and infinity. That nature makes no leaps is one of those a priori dicta, like nature abhors a vacuum, which we have come to distrust. So long as there was no evidence to the contrary, the Newtonian framework of science naturally compelled conviction. But we have seen how the conception of absolute spaceunits and time-units was shattered by” the new physics (Boodin 1925, p. 307). In effect, Whitehead, in following Einstein, was putting new wine into old wineskins.

It may seem that we have come a long way from Whitehead’s use of “feeling” in his metaphysics, but it is really a significant red flag to all the problems attending his philosophy, problems noted by so many. This is why Boodin’s comment concerning his colleagues’ eagerness to thrive on ambiguities such as Whitehead’s use of “feeling,” even when ostensibly rooting them out, should give pause. It is important to note that the problem is not with process thought per se, the problem is with Whitehead’s construction and presentation of it. Boodin avoided Whitehead’s complications in three ways: first, by letting most of the moral and teleological work of his metaphysics to be carried on the shoulders of cosmic immanence (Flannery 2024); second, by a frank humility and fallibilism, admitting that it is “Far better to confess honestly our ignorance and pray for light. This confession does more to honor God than a pretended wisdom” (Boodin 1934b, p. 163); third, by avoiding Whitehead’s sweeping generalizations, namely, his parallelism that “saves the principle of continuity at the price of making an assumption (i.e., that every material change is accompanied by a psychological change [more mentalizing]) for which there is no evidence. [Julian] Huxley appeals for support to A. N. Whitehead and quotes, ‘Each event is a reflection of every other event, past as well as present.’ This is mysticism and would make science

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impossible. Whitehead ignores two fundamental principles: the principle of specificity or the emergence of new qualities under specific conditions, and the principle of levels which emphasizes the discontinuity of organization in nature” (Boodin 1957, p. 111). If the Whiteheadian reply is that event means something else here entirely, then we’re back to the linguistic chaos bemoaned by Bentley and Dewey.

In the end, disputations of the kind instigated by certain aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics—from his ambiguous use of feeling to his mathematical conflations and mentalizations—will probably have influence only within the rarefied atmosphere of the philosopher’s lecture hall. And for good reason. Perhaps our philosophers—whoever they may be—need to have the same “genius” as good leaders in other more commonplace endeavors, in Walter Lippmann’s words, to leave behind them “a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal successfully.”


Bibliography

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Baciu, Claudiu. 2023. “Feeling” and Metaphysics in Whitehead. Studii de istorie a filosofiei universal. Issue 1:59-70.

Boodin, John Elof. 1916. A Realistic Universe: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Macmillan.

Boodin, John Elof. 1925. Cosmic Evolution: Outlines of Cosmic Idealism. New York: Macmillan.

Boodin, John Elof. 1934a. “Functional Realism.” The Philosophical Review. v. 43, no. 2: 147-178.

Boodin, John Elof. 1934b. God and Creation: God, a Cosmic Philosophy of Religion. New York: Macmillan.

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Boodin, John Elof. 1957. Studies in Philosophy: The Posthumous Papers of John Elof Boodin. Edited by Donald Ayres Piatt. Los Angeles: University of California. 

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Loomer, Bernard. 1944. Review of America’s Progressive Philosophy by William Henry Sheldon. The Journal of Religion. v. 24, no. 1: 66-67.

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Rescher, Nicholas. 1996. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press.

Rice, Daryl H. 1984. “Alfred North Whitehead’s Political Theory and Metaphysics: A Critical Recurrence.” PhD dissertation. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University.

Rice, Daryl H. 1989. “Whitehead and Existential Phenomenology: Is a Synthesis Possible?” Philosophy Today. v. 33, no. 2: 183-192.

Schlipp, Paul. 1951. “Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp. 2nd ed. The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 3. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

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Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality. Corrected edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press.
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