John Cobb - Whitehead's Process & Reality, Part III

I've been thinking, everything I've been working on since 2011-2012 has been pointing towards this direction. That the non-process Western philosophies I grew up with, and the Continental philosophies I recently have learned, were not revealing a process-based world shown to us in quantum physics, the neurosciences, the postmodern arts, and so many other disciplines. It took a process-driven cosmology that knows how to dip its toes into the paradoxical realms of metaphysics and ontologies of the natural and spiritual worlds to do this. Like the many layers of an onion, the more you peel the onion the deeper its layers go down until there is nothing left. And in its nothingness you've missed the whole. Process says the reality was the relationship of the onion to itself in its parts, to its whole, and including the exploration of the observer and his/her/its connection to the cosmos. A dualistic, or binary, concept of today's postmodern world is no longer relevant. We must turn to nonlinear complex processes to better explain the world of the unseen, the hidden, and the sublime structures and purposes driving nature and man. - re slater

PART III - DISCUSSIONS AND APPLICATIONS 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I. Fact and Form 39

• I. Appeal to Facts, European Tradition; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant; Intrinsic Reasonableness; Footnotes to Plato; This Cosmology Platonic; Participating Forms; Divine Ordering; Ontological Principle; Facts the only Reasons; Facts are Process; Prehension, Satisfaction. 
• II. Rationalism a Faith, Adventure of Hope; Limits of Theory, Givenness, Professor A. E. Taylor on Plato; Decision, the Ontological Principle; Entities and Process, Actual Entities and Decision; Stubborn Fact. 
• III. Platonic Form, Idea, Essence, Eternal Object; Potentiality and Givenness; Exclusiveness of the Given; Subject-Superject, Becoming and Being; Evaporation of Indeterrnination in Concrescence, Satisfaction Determinate and Exclusive; Concrescence Dipolar; Potentiality, Givenness, Impossibility; Subsistence. 
• IV. Actual Occasions Internally Determined, Externally Free; Course of History not Necessary, No Perfection; Efficient Causation and Final Reaction; God's Primordial Freedom; Each Concrescence between Definite Free Initiation and Definite Free Conclusion, the Former Macrocosmic, the Latter Microcosmic. 
• V. Universals and Particulars, Unsuitable Terms with False Implication; Illustration from Descartes, also Hume; Descartes' Alternative Doctrine, Realitas Objective, Inspectio, Intuitio, Judicium; World not Describable in Terms of Subject and Predicate. Substance and Quality, Particular and Universal; Universal Relativity. 
• VI. Locke's Essay, Agreement of Organic Philosophy with It; Substitute 'Experience for Understanding'; Ideas and Prehensions; Locke's Two Doctrines of Ideas, Ideas of Particular Things; Representative Theory of Perception; Logical Simplicity and Genetic Priority not to be Identified; Substance, Exterior Things, Societies; Solidarity of the Universe. 
• VII. Locke's Doctrine of Power, Power and Substance; Causal Objectification and Presentational Objectification; Change Means Adventures of Eternal Objects; Real Essence, Abstract Essence; Doctrine of Organism and Generation of Actual Entities. 

Chapter II. The Extensive Continuum 61

• I. Continuum and Real Potentiality, Atomized by Actual Occasions; How the Continuum is Experienced, Presentational Immediacy, Sensa; Real Chair and Chair-Image; Complex Ingression of Sensa. 
• II. General Potentiality and Real Potentiality; Standpoints of Actual Occasions, Determined by Initial Phase of Subjective Aim; Extensive Relationships; The Epochal Theory of Time, Zeno, William James. 
• III. Newton's Scholium.
• IV. Newton's Scholium, Comparison with Philosophy of Organism and with Descartes; 'Withness of the Body,' Status of the Body in the Actual World; Ontological Status of Space for Newton, Descartes and the Organic Philosophy.
• V. Undifferentiated Endurance and the Passivity of Substance, Source of Errors. 
• VI. Summary.

STUDIES WITH JOHN B. COBB

Alfred North Whitehead, Process & Reality

Notes from Session 3

*Disclaimer. These are my notes from reading and listening to

John Cobb which may not truly reflect his learned positions or sentiments

built over a lifetime of study and interaction with historic material.


CHAPTER III - SOME DERIVATIVE NOTIONS

God & Eternal Objects

pg 31 ff

Observation by John Cobb:

Everything has to be somewhere. The whole realm of

pure potentials must include all creation somewhere.

Thus begins a brief discuss of God & Eternal Objects.

Eternal objects are ordered for the sake of influencing creation to make possible an increase of value in creation.

We tend to think of the world as a static thing without novelty. But this type of thinking would be incorrect. There does exists real novelty in the world. And it is by this observation the "process of organism" or "process of philosophy" begins its trajectory towards metaphysics and ontology.

Observation by John Cobb:

To exclude God from the world is to exclude novelty.

Atheism has a very difficult time affirming novelty.

Let's go further. God is like all other actualities. But God is also unlike all actualities. In one sense God is a "creature" or "organism." But in another sense God is neither creaturely nor organic. What we're driving at here is that God has real connectivity to the world.

Further, God is the only Actual Entity which is NOT an Actual Occasion unless it be in Himself. Though all creatures and aspects of creation "come-and-go," that is, they are perishable, it is God who is the everlasting Entity and Occasion. There is no other Entity or Occasion before Him.

There are three categories of "The Ultimate":

1 - Temporal ~ Creation
2 - Eternal Objects ~ Not real entities but a "category"
3 - Everlasting ~ an Entity or Process which is not momentary

The notion of the "Ultimate" usually is understood as something, or some ideal, which is inert, inactive, (im)passive, or distinct from the cosmos/creation/world. This would be the Aristotelian sense of the word.

In Process Philosophy the notion of the "Ultimate" speaks to something which is active - not inert nor (im)passive. Something which is integrally connected to the world. Something which moves towards novelty and creativity:

God / Being ----> Creativity / the Act of Being

Creativity implies activity vs. Inert, passive objects of inactivity

Process Philosophy vs. Aristotelian Philosophy

In the Whiteheadian sense of the Ultimate, God cannot be divorced neither from Himself nor from His creation nor from His act of creativity. He is the ultimate explanation of physical phenomena as He participates in all of it at every moment everlastingly.

* * * * * * * * * * *

NOTHING EVENTS

pg 82, last Paragraph

This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: "But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is." Bergson, in his protest against "spatialization," is only echoing Plato's phrase "and never really is."

John Cobb - Opinion without Reason is always something that "never really is." This latter phrase indicates the characteristics of something whether it is ever really "spiritual, liberating, despairing, or distressing." If the reality of an Actual Event (AE) or Actual Occasion (AO) ever really is then there will be valuative outcomes by its concrescence. If not, "it never really was, is, or ever will be" anything but a potential prehension.

Process Philosophy (and by congruence, Process Theology) share a lot in common with the Asian Culture in its nominative verb structure of the language, thought processes, and lingual agreements. As example, in Buddhism, the idea of "NOTHINGNESS" is not something reality will cling to. As such, neither should we (even though existentially we never could, if something is nothing).

Nothingness, used in the perishing sense, says that neither you, nor I, are things we may cling to. That we are always in the process of transition, of becoming, and then perishing, and then becoming, and then perishing, eternally while we live. In this sense, this idea of becoming ever more than we are might free us from the stress and anxiety of never amounting to much, or having lost out in earlier stages of life of missed opportunities. It actually releases us to the idea of freedom and compassion to others as well as to ourselves that we may elect to become even as we have been becoming all our lives in one sense or another. That we might release our being into the hands of the God of process to be used in reflective ways which has congruency to our being-of-becoming seeking remission and efficacy in relationships and personal/societal/ecological valuation.

---

As God is, who was the Primordial God of eternity past, and is the God of the Present, the God of the Now, who is the God of the Becoming Past, and the God of the Becoming Future, so God is the Prehending Ultimate. These statements then are multiple sides of the same coin, or orb, or whatever shape a multiple prehending Ultimate might be described as. But in process terms, the immediate present is so slim a thing and so transitory a momentary event that is is nearly always eclipsed by the preceding past and incoming/becoming future meshing and molding together with its present state.

Stepping out of time as a process one might imagine that the only process state we have to live in is the state of the present, the ever living now, the becoming moment where we receive our past, meditate on it, and release it into the future without allow our present to be lost in the flows of our many lives. Our value is in the now, which is never static. In our acts of the moment which determine who we are, where we are going, what we're about, and how we might think and act. What process gives to the present is the gift of connection, wholeness, relationship to the All which surrounds us, encompasses us, enmeshes, enfolds us, holds us, influences us, and abides with us. - res

Our present is perpetually perishing as it presses forward from eventful occasions of our past pushing us onwards towards an enmeshing future which I once spoke of in one of my poems as a "membrane" or "BRAN" (in the quantum mathematical expression of the concept) of becoming (cf. poem, School Days). Succinctly, all our past, all our perishable moments of our reflective being, are scooped up and accumulated into the everlasting Presence-and-Being of the God of our unforgettable moments of ourselves. In God we never really perish but are an "everlasting are" of many moments held in one everlasting essence of God. The God of process then is the God who is our timeless Keeper.

---

Descartes describes man's reality by the static statement of "I think, therefore I am." Whereas Whitehead describes man as an always actuating "Am" who never perishes but always moves forward moment by moment as an "everlasting becoming." (sic, "I am, therefore I become").

Contra Plato re his thoughts on the perishable object, Whitehead describes a creation in which everything perishes with continuing influence upon a future filled with existential consequentiality.

If nothing endures then what's the point of life? Of living? But in God all is PRESERVED.

THE NATURE OF A STONE

AND CHAOS

pg 78 ff

We may describe a stone by its whole or by its parts. If by its parts we might describe it by color, weight, shape, appearance, relationship to the terrain and topology, its geography, or its regional location on this planet or another; or by its crystalline molecules, or its molecular structure, or by its quantum states, or even by its dimension quantum string states epitomized by its dimensional vibratory structure (sic, how it "sings" or "sounds" to the quantum universe around it).

One part of the process of description might grow from the stone itself upwards to include an ever-expanding universe of inclusion. That is, how it might relate from itself to the universe. Another way of describing the stone was within itself in a cascading sequence of ever-descending worlds of the small. And finally, we might describe the stone in all its parts and its wholeness as a thing in flux, movement, and chaos with the rest of creation. That even in its seeming structure of eternality there are interior and exterior forces without, and within, which will affect its balance and harmony of the now, the present, the moment. Who knew there was so much going on with that stone!

So much so then with living things, a living cosmos, or transitioning inorganic matter! All of creation "sings, claps its hands, shouts for joy, or roars its thunder" throughout its rhythms and motions. This is its nature. It is a nature in process with itself. It is the restless nature of God given to creation to order its chaos into new chaoses of being and becoming through event and occasion.

Chaos in itself is not evil if structured with an evolving, valuative process of concrescence. But chaos can and does become evil dependent upon how it disrupts the valuative concrescing processes of living things. Rains may become floods; fires destructive; breezes become gales; fresh water too briny; and so forth. Chaos is how creation runs. It is part of creation's evolving structure. Without it there can be "normative" growth. No "novelty, wonder, or creativity."

Chaos is a good thing which ever orders itself as a quality which is shared with its Creator. A Creator who orders chaos to become move than it is. It involves both life and death. Chaos has its cycles. But, being indeterminate, it may also create bad disrupts instead of good disruptions. The nature of God is not bad but the freewill agency He has granted to creation may devolve as well as evolve. With non-living, inorganic matter, it goes where it pleases.

But if left alone, as exampled by nature in its evolving stages, it always moves towards wholeness, balance, harmony, and rhythm. It can settle out and be mitigated by sources of life spring up everywhere underneath its forces (biblically, "wings"?) which lend stability to its times of fury and fickleness. Green landscapes have the power within itself for such mitigation. The winds die down, the water is tamed and made healthy, the light of the sun finds fields to feed and trees which offer shade. Rhythm and harmony. These are valuative consequences of concrescing processes.

LANGUAGE: OBJECT (noun)
or EVENT (verb)?

HOW WE THINK IN A LANGUAGE DEFINES

OUR UNIVERSE, BELIEFS, AND METAPHYSICS

pg 79

The simple sentence consists of a noun or pronoun, a verb, and an actionable event:

Noun/Pronoun + Verb --> Event

If the language of a society is highly visual, then its "world" or "metaphysics" or "beliefs" are prejudiced towards objectifying what it sees. If a language of a society is shaped towards actions, events, hearing, or narrative, then that language is prejudiced towards actionable events or occasions. This latter is where process philosophy/theology lives. Actual Entities (or Occasions) which are always transitioning towards something.

In English, and the Indo-European languages, both have roots in the Latin and Greek languages of the ancient world where nature and life were objectified. We see all around us in a material sense and wish to then reduce its components into orderly consequences of finally states. This is the science of empiricism. It is the basis of modern science.

It grows out of a visual world of many types of enduring objects and actions. It is what drives Western philosophy; and it has also been produced in parts of Continental Philosophy as it breaks metaphysics down into worlds of idealism, phenomena, existentialism, dialectic, etc. Such societies inform themselves of their universe by predominantly their visual experiences hidden within the sublime sensory organ of vision over all other sensory organs and conceptualized perceptions.

In Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese these languages differ. They concentrate on the "VERB" of the responding event where all is in motion with itself. Such motion-based languages "hear" the wind, the trees, the mountains and valleys. They write of its narratives in a flowing majesty of resplendent living life bounding across a universe of joy and gladness. Its stories are stories of harmony, flow, rhythm, and balance. There is no object, no substance, in its attitudes as all have become one and the one the many. Its language informs its speakers of another kind of world which non-Semitic and non-Oriental worlds cannot "hear" very well.

Language then may express a succession of event without a need for an objectifying that event as a substance. When one listens to a symphony one does not easily hear the entirety of the notes or the musical phrases which for the sections of that symphony. It is very hard to do. Like ourselves, a symphony of sound washes our us, our feelings, our being. It is very difficult to try to remember a symphony's collection of tonalities and phrases while hearing the symphony itself. It is very hard to take a fluid, liquid language of succession and objectify it.

If we focus on its moments we cannot hear the score. If we hear the score we cannot focus on the notes. This kind of processional language involves not seeing but feeling. Even processional language has a hard time describing poetically what it hears, feels, senses in its being. Consequently, if we are to "tune in" to a process universe than we will need another kind of language even beyond that dominated by verb structures. We'll need a language which cannot be spoken, written down, perhaps even scored. One may call it the language of the trees or the universe, but I suspect even those languages will not be enough to hear the many tonal forms of a process creation.

---

Of note, when Alfred North Whitehead wrote his process philosophy he did not consider any other language than his own, English. Hence, his philosophical "empirical breakdown" of its conceptual components is very Continental-like. It has its good insights and its problems or restrictions. Perhaps a new endeavor might take Continental Philosophy's process-based parts, mix it up in a verb-based societal language, and try re-writing it in the new world of quantum science. But to do that will require a cross-discipline between a competently versed quantum theoretical physicist, a thorough-going abstract Continental philosopher, and contemporary processed-based orthodox theologian. As such, there are very, very few of these types around. So, I will expect many different forms of process philosophy/theology to result over the years to come as searches are made to better express the kind of metaphysical cosmology we live in.

---

We see the world through ourselves. The ever dominant "I". In Whitehead, the I is different in every moment of its being while affecting a new future which hadn't existed before the I had entered into it. In a process world, the I is called into being the best it can be as a valuative component moving from one future to the next towards best possible outcomes.

(As an aside, I personally wonder if a disruptive form of bad chaos might be helpful here in the sinful world of men. But then again, bad may seem good though it never seems to engender good through bad means. Thus, if we change the disruptive form of bad chaos to good chaos, here we might better obtain a formative sequencing where good may birth good. However, other freewill agents might just as will resist such positive choices to continue and perhaps enhance bad outcomes. The point is, it is still the onus placed upon the individual to move towards a future of every hour and every day with greater resolve against a persisting state of disruptive processes resulting from non-valuative choices.)

CAUSAL EFFICACY &

PRESENTATIONAL IMMEDIACY

With the terms of causal efficacy (CE) and presentational immediacy (PI) we must now ask the question as to how the past shapes the present with effect and causality. According to Whitehead, the past is represented in the present as the present's initial phase. The diagram of light helps to demonstrate light's journey from past to immediate past to present to immediate future to future futures.

Again, Whitehead thinks that a causal past is how we might prehend our contemporary world before either we or the world enter into a relationship of presentational efficacy. But once we do than at that moment the prehended past becomes a concrescing present pressing forward even as it quickly perishes. Therefore, any discussion of immediacy will also show how dependent it is on the past. 

Too, presentational efficacy involves both sensory and non-sensory organs. Not only the eyes et al but the mind which conjectures, rationalizes, reasons, and speculates. The wall in a room presents itself with color to our eyes and a solid surface to our touch but to our mind it projects itself as a barrier we shelter behind or must go around to get pass.

As causal efficacy occurs and presentational immediacy takes place, by extension, time and distance projects the causal efficacy into the past so that presentation immediacy may create its own causal efficacy on a future occasion.

---

Whitehead's categories organized in Peircean triads The physical categories on the left represent what Whitehead (1929) called "the ultimate facts of immediate actual experience." The three categories Whitehead defined for actual entities, prehensions, and (societal) nexûs make up a triad of physical categories characterized by the Kantian triad under Relation: Inherence, Causality, and Community.

AE/AO ---> derivations / extensions ---> AE / AO

There are three or four kinds of prehensions:

1 - Physical
2 - Conceptual
3 - The Intermixture of both 1 with 2 and 2 with 1
4 - The Strain of Experience and Extension

As time and displacement take place as a continuum from the experience moment a new process begins. The process world of reality is thereby "extended" beyond what it was into another world of becoming. But not as independent realities but as collective realities joined together, though perhaps not affecting one another because of displacement between its remote organs in relation to nearer organs (e.g., process philosophy is also a philosophy of "organism").

For example, a star is born, lives, and dies and yet we may see or not see its light because of its remoteness, time and distance between us, and the brevity of life we bear. This discussion then might enter into discussions of spacetime and how objects move in relationship to one another:

A moves through ST ---> In respect to B's causality

B moves through ST ---> In respect to A's causality

And yet, time and space are never fixed. They are fluid and move relatively to one another. Things that move within this world or spacetime such as light or radiation contort with its gravitational effects among other factors creating a unique kind of "extensive continuum".

Newton's Substance Reality (Materialism) ---> Is replaced by Einstein's Motion / Event

In Relativity Theory anything can be used as a spacetime reference point where each "organic event" moves relative to another "organic event".

I --> Others

Others --> I

Earth --> Stars

Stars --> Earth

The Sun's Solar System --> Milky Way

The Milky Way --> The Sun's Solar System

The Milky Way --> Nearby Galaxies

Nearby Galaxies --> The Milky Way

etc

As example, current quantum theory states that the Big Bang resulted from a compressed chaotic state of one-dimensional plasmic space we might think of as a "spatial void." A void where time and infinity are lost within this spatial state of timeless dimension consisting in a "liquid" plasmic state where there is no time as there are no reference points. Only energetic radiation bound to itself through intense gravitational forces forming an "unobservable" spatial void.

When birthed, this spatial void began an everlasting birthing process which changes with the varying spacetime dimensions it has created. Now weather the Big Bang was borne from the collision of one uniquely separate universe with one or more uniquely separate universes; or whether in itself, it began the very process of everlastingly bubbling multi-verses we may never know. What we do know is that cosmic evolution tells of a process-based evolution allowing for all parts of process formature as underlying themes to our present cosmic context.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Plato's Naturalistic Realism evolved in the 17th Century as British Empiricism forming the basis of modern science. Descartes, Hume, and Locke spoke of final and efficient causes where our observations tell us what the world is like. Hume said that causality is fundamental to science. That is,

cause A-->led to cause B-->led to C--> led to D.

Then one day he asked an unthought question... "What is Cause?" If it is not visible, or able to be empirically testable, then what is cause in the metaphysical sense? With this observation Hume effectively ends British Empiricism.

At which point Immanuel Kant awakens from his dogmatic slumbers and proposes a philosophical Transcendentalism. Having assumed experience gave us reality he noticed immediately upon Hume's observation that with the inability to perceive cause one cannot know from the study of Science its causal relationships. These are hidden from us as observers empirically. Therefore, it is the Mind! Reason! Which is the ultimate causality. Which give necessary ordering to the multiplicity of observed data.

Data --> Mind ---> Organizes Data

In effect, Kant says to forget the empiricism of data to concentrate on the empiricism of the mind. Pure reason. Thus, was birthed the Age of German Idealism into which Hegel next responded. And with Hegel began the course Continental Philosophy in its many directions to contemplate the unseen, the untestable, the unthought. An Age of Critical Thinking. And it was into this era which A.N. Whitehead, being American, and living in a Western tradition, responded. But because he wasn't considered to be a "critical thinker" the worthies of German Idealism were not impressed by his metaphysical theories on cosmogony while they were concentrating on the metaphysical suborders within cosmogony. Here then was an impasse. The parts of the whole were the subjects of study rather than the whole itself, which Whitehead deigned to discuss, and conjecture, as a superseding whole to all other suborder discussions.

This is not to throw Continental Philosophy under the bus. In many ways it has enlivened philosophy for contemporary undertakings of the universe and how things work. But in another sense, Process Philosophy is becoming the conceptual bridge over which both Western Philosophy and Continental Philosophy might find agreement with one another as each concentrates on an aspect of a reality deemed important to their discipline.

Beginning then with Kant, we move from Kantian Dualism (sic, noumenal worlds of reality we cannot understand) to Descartes' Cartesian Dualism (sic, Mind v Body Dualism) which states that mental phenomena are non-physical, and that metaphysical/ontological matter exists independently of the mind (which can or cannot be known). In all of this, what Whitehead wished to do was to restore to nature its mystery by incorporating its causality into the experiential world of processes which are no longer mechanistic, material-based objects that could be measured or determined.

To rely on mystery as an explanation is not sufficient for a coherent theology of God, nature or man. Conversely, one may never state with absolute certainty a surmise in an ever-evolving cosmogony between God and creation. The best we can do is to approximate reality that it sufficiently explains pain and loss, joy and passion. In this might a theology be described as coherent but never static as a dynamically evolving system. - re slater

Alfred North Whitehead "Process and Reality," Corrected Edition, Complete Book Outline

PROCESS AND REALITY: AN ESSAY IN COSMOLOGY 

by ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Presented at the Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh

During the Session 1927-28

F.R.S., ScD. (Cambridge), Hon. D.Sc. (Manchester), 

Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews), Hon. D.Sc. (Wisconsin), 

Hon. Sc.D. (Harvard and Yale) 

CORRECTED EDITION 

Edited by DAVID RAY GRIFFIN

& DONALD W. SHERBURNE

THE FREE PRESS - 

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co,, Inc., New York 

Copyright © 1978 by The Free Press 

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 

Copyright, 1929, by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 

Copyright renewed 1957 by Evelyn Whitehead. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Editors' Preface v
Preface xi

PART I - THE SPECULATIVE SCHEME 

Chapter I. Speculative Philosophy

• I. Speculative Philosophy; Coherent, Logical, Necessary System of Ideas; Interpretation of Experience.
• II. Defects of Insight and of Language; Conditions for Observation; Rigid Empiricism, Imagination, Generalization; Coherence and Incoherence; Creativity, the Ultimate. 
• III. Rationalism and Dogmatism; Scheme as a Matrix, False and True Propositions, Use of the Matrix; Experimental Adventure. 
• IV. Philosophy and Science, Grades of Generality; Dogmatic Influence of Mathematics; Progress of Philosophy.
• V. Defects of Language; Propositions and Their Background; Metaphysical Presupposition; xxcessive Trust in Language; Metaphysics and Practice; Metaphysics and Linguistic Expression.
• VI. Speculative Philosophy and Overambition; Overambition, Dogmatism and Progress; Interpretation and Metaphysics; The Higher Elements of Experience, Subjectivity and the Metaphysical Correction; Morality, Religion, Science, Connected by Philosophy; Contrast between + Religion and Science; Conclusion.

Chapter II. The Categoreal Scheme 18

• I. Four Notions, namely, Actual Entity, Prehension, Nexus, the Ontological Principle; Descartes and Locke; Philosophy Explanatory of Abstraction, Not of Concreteness. 
• II. The Four Sets of Categories; The Category of the Ultimate; Conjunction and Disjunction; Creativity, the Principle of Novelty, Creative Advance; Togetherness, Concrescence; Eight Categories of Existence; Twenty-Seven Categories of Explanation. 
• III. Nine Categoreal Obligations. 
• IV. Preliminary Notes; Complete Abstraction Self-Contradictory; Principles of Unrest and of Relativity; Actual Entities never Change; Perishing of Occasions and Their Objective Immortality; Final Causation and Efficient Causation; Multiplicities; Substance. 

Chapter III. Some Derivative Notions 31

• I. Primordial Nature of God; Relevance, the Divine Ordering; Consequent Nature of God; Creativity and Its Acquirement of Character; Creatures, Objective Immortality, Appetition, Novelty, Relevance; Appetition and Mentality, Conceptual Prehensions, Pure and Impure Prehensions; Synonyms and Analogies, namely, Conceptual Prehension, Appetition, Intuition, Physical Purpose, Vision, Envisagement. 
• II. Social Order, Defining Characteristic, Substantial Form; Personal Order, Serial Inheritance, Enduring Object; Corpuscular Societies. 
• III. Classic Notion of Time, Unique Seriality; Continuity of Becoming, Becoming of Continuity, Zeno; Atomism and Continuity; Corpuscular and Wave Theories of Light. 
• IV. Consciousness, Thought, Sense-Perception are Unessential Elements in an Instance of Experience. 

PART II - DISCUSSIONS AND APPLICATIONS 

Chapter I. Fact and Form 39

• I. Appeal to Facts, European Tradition; Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant; Intrinsic Reasonableness; Footnotes to Plato; This Cosmology Platonic; Participating Forms; Divine Ordering; Ontological Principle; Facts the only Reasons; Facts are Process; Prehension, Satisfaction. 
• II. Rationalism a Faith, Adventure of Hope; Limits of Theory, Givenness,t Professor A. E. Taylor on Plato; Decision, the Ontological Principle; Entities and Process, Actual Entities and Decision; Stubborn Fact. 
• III. Platonic Form, Idea, Essence, Eternal Object; Potentiality and Givenness; Exclusiveness of the Given; Subject-Superject, Becoming and Being; Evaporation of Indeterrnination in Concrescence, Satisfaction Determinate and Exclusive; Concrescence Dipolar; Potentiality, Givenness, Impossibility; Subsistence. 
• IV. Actual Occasions Internally Determined, Externally Free; Course of History not Necessary, No Perfection; Efficient Causation and Final Reaction; God's Primordial Freedom; Each Concrescence between Definite Free Initiation and Definite Free Conclusion, the Former Macrocosmic, the Latter Microcosmic. 
• V. Universals and Particulars, Unsuitable Terms with False Implication; Illustration from Descartes, also Hume; Descartes' Alternative Doctrine, Realitas Objective, Inspectio, Intuitio, Judicium; World not Describable in Terms of Subject and Predicate. Substance and Quality, Particular and Universal; Universal Relativity. 
• VI. Locke's Essay, Agreement of Organic Philosophy with It; Substitute 'Experience for Understanding'; Ideas and Prehensions; Locke's Two Doctrines of Ideas, Ideas of Particular Things; Representative Theory of Perception; Logical Simplicity and Genetic Priority not to be Identified; Substance, Exterior Things, Societies; Solidarity of the Universe. 
• VII. Locke's Doctrine of Power, Power and Substance; Causal Objectification and Presentational Objectification; Change Means Adventures of Eternal Objects; Real Essence, Abstract Essence; Doctrine of Organism and Generation of Actual Entities. 

Chapter II. The Extensive Continuum 61

• I. Continuum and Real Potentiality, Atomized by Actual Occasions; How the Continuum is Experienced, Presentational Immediacy, Sensa; Real Chair and Chair-Image; Complex Ingression of Sensa. 
• II. General Potentiality and Real Potentiality; Standpoints of Actual Occasions, Determined by Initial Phase of Subjective Aim; Extensive Relationships; The Epochal Theory of Time, Zeno, William James. 
• III. Newton's Scholium.
• IV. Newton's Scholium, Comparison with Philosophy of Organism and with Descartes; 'Withness of the Body,' Status of the Body in the Actual World; Ontological Status of Space for Newton, Descartes and the Organic Philosophy.
• V. Undifferentiated Endurance and the Passivity of Substance, Source of Errors. 
• VI. Summary. 

Chapter III. The Order of Nature 83

• I. Order and Givenness Contrasted; The Four Characteristics of Order; Attainment of End, Lure of** Feeling; Causa Sui. 
• II. 'Society' Defined, Defining Characteristic and Genetic Inheritance; Environment, Social and Permissive; Cosmic Epoch, Social Hierarchy. 
• III. Evolution of Societies, Decay, Chaos, the Timaeus, the Scholium, Milton. 
• IV. Societies in this Cosmic Epoch; The Extensive Society, the Geometric Society. Electromagnetic Society; Waves. Electrons, Protons. 
• V. Enduring Objects, Corpuscular Societies, Structured Societies. 
• VI. Stability, Specialization. 
• VII. Problem of Stabilization, Exclusion of Detail, Conceptual Initiative, Life. 
• VIII. Inorganic Apparatus for Life. 
• IX. Life a Reaction against Society, Originality. 
• X. Life and Food, Life in Empty Space, Catalytic Agent. 
• XL Living Persons, Canalization of Life, Dominant Personality only Partial. 

Chapter IV. Organisms and Environment 110

• I. Reaction of Environment on Actual Occasions; Narrowness and Width, Dependent on Societies, Orderly Element; Chaos, Triviality, Orderliness, Depth; Triviality, Vagueness, Narrowness, Width; Incompatibility, Contrast; Triviality, Excess of Differentiation; Vagueness, Excess of Identification; Nexus as One, Vagueness, Narrowness, Depth; Coordination % of Chaos, Vagueness, Narrowness, Width. 
• II. Intensity, Narrowness; Philosophy of Organism, Kant, Locke. 
• III. Sensa, Lowest Category of Eternal Objects, Definition; Sensa, Contrasts of, Intensity; Contrasts in High and Low Categories, Patterns; Eternal Objects, Simplicity, Complexity; Sensa Experienced Emotionally. 
• IV. Transmission, Diverse Routes, Inhibitions, Intensification; Vector Character, Form of Energy; Physical Science. 
• V. Environmental Data as in Perception; Visual Perception, Most Sophisticated Form; Originated by Antecedent State of Animal Body, Hume; Animal Body and External Environment, Amplifier.
• VI. Perception and Animal Body, Causal Efficacy. 
• VII. Causal Efficacy, Viscera; Presentational Immediacy, Delusive Perceptions, Secondary Qualities, Extension, Withness of Body; Hume, Kant. 
• VIII. Loci Disclosed by Perception; Contemporary Regions, Causal Past, Causal Future; Immediate Present, Unison of Becoming, Concrescent Unison, Duration; Differentiation between Immediate Present and Presented Duration; Presented Locus. 
• IX. Presented Locus and Unison of Becoming; Presented Locus, Systematic Relation to Animal Body, Strains, Independence of External Contemporary Happenings, Straight Lines, Measurement; Unison of Becoming, Duration. 
• X. Summary.

Chapter V. Locke and Hume 130

• I. Hume, Perceptions, Substance, Principle of Union; Ideas, Copies of Impressions, Imaginative Freedom. 
• II. Hume and 'Repetition/ Cause and Effect; Memory, Force and Vivacity. 
• III. Time, Hume, Descartes, Independence of Successive Occasions; Objective Immortality. 
• IV. Influence of Subject-Predicate Notion; Hume, Descartes, Locke, Particular Existence. 
• V. Hume and Locke, Process and Morphology; False Derivation of Emotional Feelings; Sensationalist Doctrine; Santayana.

Chapter VI. From Descartes to Kant 144

• I. Descartes, Three Kinds of Substance: Extended, Mental, God's; Three Kinds of Change, of Accidents, Origination, Cessation; Accidental Relations, Representative Ideas; Unessential Experience of External World. 
• II. Locke, Empiricism, Adequacy, Inconsistency; Particular Existent, Substance, Power; Relativity, Perpetually Perishing. 
• III. Analogy and Contrast with Philosophy of Organism. 
• IV. Hume and Process, Kant, Santayana. 
• V. Contrasted Procedures of Philosophy of Organism and Kant. 

Chapter VII. The Subjectivist Principle 157

• I. The Subjectivist Principle and the Sensationalist Principle; The Sensationalist Doctrine Combines Both; Locke, Hume, Kant; Statement of the Principles; The Three Premises for the Subjectivist Principle; Philosophy of Organism Denies the Two Principles and the Three Premises; Descartes; 'That Stone as Grey/ Substance and Quality, Organs of Sensation; Descartes' Subjectivist Modification; 'Perception of that Stone as Grey'; Failure to Provide Revised Categories; Hume. 
• II. Knowledge, Its Variations, Vaguenesses; Negative Perception the General Case, Consciousness is the Feeling of Negation, Novelty; Consciousness a Subjective Form, Only Present in Late Derivative Phases of Complex Integrations; Consciousness only Illuminates the Derivative Types of Objective Data, Philosophy Misled by Clearness and Distinctness. 
• III. Primitive Type of Physical Experience is Emotional; Vector Transmission of Feeling, Pulses of Emotion, Wave-Length; Human Emotion is Interpreted Emotion, Not Bare Emotional Feeling. 
• IV. Decision Regulating Ingression of Eternal Objects, Old Meeting New; The Three Phases of Feeling:! Conformal, Conceptual, Comparative; Eternal Objects and Subjective Forms; Continuity of the Phases; Category of Objective Unity. 
• V. Reformed Subjectivist Principle is Another Statement of Principle of Relativity; Process is the Becoming of Experience; Hume's Principle Accepted, This Method only Errs in Detail; 'Law' for 'Causation' no Help; Modern Philosophy Uses Wrong Categories; Two Misconceptions:! (i) Vacuous Actuality, (ii) Inherence of Quality in Substance. 

Chapter VIII. Symbolic Reference 168

• I. Two Pure Modes of Perception, Symbolic Reference; Common Ground, Integration, Originative Freedom, Error; Common Ground, Presented Locus, Geometrical Indistinctness in Mode of Causal Efficacy; Exceptions, Animal Body, Withness of Body. 
• II. Common Ground, Common Sensa; Modern Empiricism, Make-Believe, Hume; Sensa Derived from Efficacy of Body; Projection. 
• III. Mistaken Primacy of Presentational Immediacy, Discussion, Causal Efficacy Primitive. 
• IV, Further Discussion; Causation and Sense-Perception.
• V. Comparison of Modes; Integration in Symbolic Reference.
• VI. Principles of Symbolism, Language. 

Chapter IX. The Propositions 184

• I. Impure Prehensions by Integration of Pure Conceptual and Pure Physical Prehensions; Physical Purposes and Propositions Discriminated; Theory, Not Primarily for Judgment, Lures for Feeling; Objective Lure; Final Cause; General and Singular Propositions; Logical Subjects, Complex Predicate; Propositions True or False; Lure to Novelty; Felt 'Contrary' is Consciousness in Germ; Judgment and Entertainment; Graded Envisagement. 
• II. Truth and Falsehood, Experiential Togetherness of Propositions and Fact; Correspondence and Coherence Theory; Propositions True or False, Judgments Correct or Incorrect or Suspended; Intuitive and Derivative Judgments; Logic Concerned with Derivative Judgments; Error. 
• III. Systematic Background Presupposed by Each Proposition; Relations, Indicative Systems of Relations; Propositions and Indicative Systems; Illustration, Inadequacy of Words. 
• IV, Metaphysical Propositions; One and One Make Two.
• V. Induction, Probability, Statistical Theory, Ground, Sampling, Finite Numbers. 
• VI. Suppressed Premises in Induction, Presupposition of Definite Type of Actuality Requiring Definite Type of Environment; Wider Inductions Invalid; Statistical Probability within Relevant Environment. 
• VII. Objectification Samples Environment.
• VIII. Alternative Non-Statistical Ground; Graduated Appetitions, Primordial Nature of God; Secularization of Concept of God's Functions. 

Chapter X. Process 208

• I. Fluency and Permanence; Generation and Substance; Spatialization; Two Kinds of Fluency: Macroscopic and Microscopic, from Occasion to Occasion and within Each Occasion. 
• II. Concrescence, Novelty, Actuality; Microscopic Concrescence. 
• III. Three Stages of Microscopic Concrescence; Vector Characters Indicate Macroscopic Transition; Emotion, and Subjective Form Generally, is Scalar in Microscopic Origination and is the Datum for Macroscopic Transition.
• IV. Higher Phases of Microscopic Concrescence.
• V. Summary. 

PART III - THE THEORY OF PREHENSIONS 

Chapter I. The Theory of Feelings 219

• I. Genetic and Morphological Analysis; Genetic Consideration is Analysis of the Concrescence, the Actual Entity Formaliter; Morphological Analysis is Analysis of the Actual Entity as Concrete, Spatialized, Objective.
• II. Finite Truth, Division into Prehensions; Succession of Phases, Integral Prehensions in Formation; Five Factors: Subject, Initial Data, Elimination, Objective Datum, Subjective Form; Feeling is Determinate. 
• III. Feeling Cannot be Abstracted from Its Subject; Subject, Aim at the Feeler, Final Cause, Causa Sui.
• IV. Categories of Subjective Unity, of Objective Identity, of Objective Diversity. 
• V. Category of Subjective Unity; The One Subject is the Final End Conditioning Each Feeling, Episode in Self-Production; Pre-established Harmony, Self-Consistency of a Proposition, Subjective Aim; Category of Objective Identity, One Thing has one R61e, No Duplicity, One Ground of Incompatibility; Category of Objective Diversity, No Diverse Elements with Identity of Function, Another Ground of Incompatibility. 
• VI. World as a Transmitting Medium; Explanation; Negative Prehensions, with Subjective Forms. 
• VII. Application of the Categories.
• VIII. Application (continued).
• IX. Nexus. 
• X. Subjective Forms; Classification of Feelings According to Data; Simple Physical Feelings, Conceptual Feelings, Transmuted Feelings; Subjective Forms not Determined by Data, Conditioned by Them. 
• XL Subjective Form, Qualitative Pattern, Quantitative Pattern; Intensity; Audition of Sound. 
• XII. Prehensions not Atomic, Mutual Sensitivity; Indefinite Number of Prehensions; Prehensions as Components in the Satisfaction and Their Genetic Growth; Justification of the Analysis of the Satisfaction, Eighth and Ninth Categories of Explanation. 

Chapter II. The Primary Feelings 236

• I. Simple Physical Feeling, Initial Datum is one Actual Entity, Objective Datum is one Feeling Entertained by that one Actual Entity; Act of Causation, Objective Datum the Cause, Simple Physical Feeling the Effect; Synonymously 'Causal Feelings'; Primitive Act of Perception, Initial Datum is Actual Entity Perceived, Objective Datum is the Perspective, In General not Conscious Perception; Reason for 'Perspective'; Vector Transmission of Feeling, Re-enaction, Conformal; Irreversibility of Time; Locke; Eternal Objects Relational, Two- Way R61e, Vector-Transference, Reproduction, Permanence; Quanta of Feeling Transferred, Quantum-Theory in Physics, Physical Memory; Atomism, Continuity, Causation, Memory, Perception, Quality, Quantity, Extension. 
• II. Conceptual Feelings, Positive and Negative Prehensions; Creative Urge Dipolar; Datum is an Eternal Object; Exclusiveness of Eternal Objects as Determinants, Definiteness, Incompatibility. 
• III. Subjective Form of Conceptual Prehension is Valuation; Integration Introduces Valuation into Impure Feelings, Intensiveness; Three Characteristics of Valuation: (i) Mutual Sensitivity of Subjective Forms, (ii) Determinant of Procedure of Integration, (iii) Determinant of Intensive Emphasis. 
• IV. Consciousness is Subjective Form; Requires Its Peculiar Datum; Recollection, Plato, Hume; Conscious Feelings always Impure, Requires Integration of Physical and Conceptual Feelings; Affirmation and Negative Contrast; Not all Impure Feelings Conscious. 

Chapter III. The Transmission of Feelings 244

• I. Ontological Principle, Determination of Initiation of Feeling; Phases of Concrescence; God, Inexorable Valuation, Subjective Aim; Self-Determination Imaginative in Origin, Reenaction. 
• II. Pure Physical Feelings, Hybrid Physical Feelings; Hybrid Feelings Transmuted into Pure Physical Feelings; Disastrous Separation of Body and Mind Avoided; Hume's Principle, Hybrid Feelings with God as Datum. 
• III. Application of First Categoreal Obligation: Supplementary Phase Arising from Conceptual Origination; Application of Fourth and Fifth Categoreal Obligations; Conceptual Reversion; Ground of Identity, Aim at Contrast. 
• IV. Transmutation; Feeling a Nexus as One, Transmuted Physical Feeling; R61e of Impartial Conceptual Feeling in Transmutation, Category of Transmutation, Further Explanations; Conceptual Feelings Modifying Physical Feelings; Negative Prehensions Important. 
• V. Subjective Harmony, the Seventh Categoreal Obligation. 

Chapter IV. Propositions and Feelings 256

• I. Consciousness, Propositional Feelings, Not Necessarily Conscious; Propositional Feeling is Product of Integration of Physical Feeling with a Conceptual Feeling; Eternal Objects Tell no Tales of Actual Occasions, Propositions are Tales That Might be Told of Logical Subjects; Proposition, True or False, Tells no Tales about Itself, Awaits Reasons; Conceptual Feeling Provides Predicative Pattern, Physical Feeling Provides Logical Subjects, Integration; Indication of Logical Subjects, Element of Givenness Required for Truth and Falsehood. 
• II. Proposition not Necessarily Judged, Propositional Feelings not Necessarily Conscious; New Propositions Arise; Possible Percipient Subjects within the 'Scope of a Proposition.'
• III. Origination of Propositional Feeling, Four (or Five) Stages, Indicative Feeling, Physical Precognition, Predicative Pattern (Predicate), Predicative Feeling; Propositional Feeling Integral of Indicative and Predicative Feelings. 
• IV. Subjective Forms of Propositional Feelings, Dependent on Phases of Origination; Case of Identity of Indicative Feeling with the Physical Recognition, Perceptive Feelings; Case of Diversity, Imaginative Feelings; Distinction not Necessarily Sharp-Cut; The Species of Perceptive Feelings: Authentic, Direct Authentic, Indirect Authentic, Unauthentic; Tied Imagination.
• V. Imaginative Feelings, Indicative Feeling and Physical Recognition Diverse, Free Imagination; Subjective Form Depends on Origination, Valuation rather than Consciousness; Lure to Creative Emergence; Criticism of Physical Feelings, Truth, Critical Conditions. 
• VI. Language, Its Function; Origination of the Necessary Train of Feelings.

Chapter V. The Higher Phases of Experience 266

• I. Comparative Feelings, Conscious Perceptions, Physical Purposes; Physical Purposes More Primitive than Propositional Feelings. 
• II. Intellectual Feelings, Integration of Propositional Feeling with Physical Feeling of a Nexus Including the Logical Subjects; Category of Objective Identity, Affirmation-Negation Contrast; Consciousness is a Subjective Form.
• III. Belief, Certainty, Locke, Immediate Intuition. 
• IV. Conscious Perception, Recapitulation of Origin; Direct and Indirect Authentic Feelings, Unauthentic Feelings; Transmutation; Perceptive Error, Novelty; Tests, Force and Vivacity, Analysis of Origination; Tests Fallible. 
• V. Judgment, Yes-Form, No-Form, Suspense-Form; In Yes-Form Identity of Patterns, In No-Form Diversity and Incompatibility, In Suspense-Form Diversity and Compatibility; Intuitive Judgment, Conscious Perception. 
• VI. Affirmative Intuitive Judgment Analogous to Conscious Perception, Difference Explained; Inferential Judgment; Divergence from Locke's Nomenclature; Suspended Judgment.
• VII. Physical Purposes, Primitive Type of Physical Feeling; Retaining Valuation and Purpose, Eliminating Indeterminateness of Complex Eternal Object; Responsive Re-enaction; Decision. 
• VIII. Second Species of Physical Purposes, Reversion Involved; Eighth Categoreal Obligation, Subjective Intensity; Immediate Subject, Relevant Future; Balance, Conditions for Contrast; Reversion as Condition for Balanced Contrast; Rhythm, Vibration; Categoreal Conditions; Physical Purposes and Propositional Feelings Compared.

PART IV - THE THEORY OF EXTENSION 

Chapter I. Coordinate Division 283

• I. Genetic Division is Division of the Concrescence, Coordinate Division is Division of the Concrete; Physical Time Arises in the Coordinate Analysis of the Satisfaction; Genetic Process not the Temporal Succession; Spatial and Temporal Elements in the Extensive Quantum; The Quantum is the Extensive Region; Coordinate Divisibility; Subjective UnityIndivisible; Subjective Forms Arise from Subjective Aim; World as a Medium, Extensively Divisible; Indecision as to Selected Quantum. 
• II. Coordinate Divisions and Feelings; Mental Pole Incurably One; Subjective Forms of Coordinate Divisions Depend on Mental Pole, Inexplicable Otherwise; A Coordinate Division is a Contrast, a Proposition, False, but Useful Matrix.
• III. Coordinate Division, the World as an Indefinite Multiplicity; Extensive Order, Routes of Transmission; External Extensive Relationships, Internal Extensive Division, One Basic Scheme; Pseudo Sub-organisms, Pseudo Super-organisms, Professor de Laguna's 'Extensive Connection.'
• IV. Extensive Connection is the Systematic Scheme Underlying Transmission of Feelings and Perspective; Regulative Conditions; Descartes; Grades of Extensive Conditions, Dimensions. 
• V. Bifurcation of Nature; Publicity and Privacy. 
• VI. Classification of Eternal Objects; Mathematical Forms, Sensa. 
• VII. Elimination of the Experient Subject, Concrescent Immediacy. 

Chapter II. Extensive Connection 294

• I. Extensive Connection, General Description. 
• II. Assumptions, i.e., Postulates, i.e., Axioms and Propositions for a Deductive System. 
• III. Extensive Abstraction. Geometrical Elements, Points, Segments.
• IV. Points, Regions, Loci; Irrelevance of Dimensions.

Chapter III. Flat Loci 302

• I. Euclid's Definition of 'Straight Line'
• II. Weakness of Euclidean Definition; Straight Line as Shortest Distance, Dependence on Measurement; New Definition of Straight Lines, Ovals. 
• III. Definition of Straight Lines, Flat Loci, Dimensions. 
• IV. Contiguity. 
• V. Recapitulation. 

Chapter IV. Strains 310

• I. Definition of a Strain, Feelings Involving Flat Loci among the Forms of Definiteness of Their Objective Data; 'Seat' of a Strain; Strains and Physical Behaviour; Electromagnetic Occasions Involve Strains.
• II. Presentational Immediacy Involves Strains; Withness of the Body, Projection, Focal Region; Transmission of Bodily Strains, Transmutation, Ultimate Percipient, Emphasis; Projection of the Sensa, Causal Efficacy Transmuted in Presentational Immediacy; Massive Simplification; Types of Energy; Hume; Symbolic Transference, Physical Purpose. 
• III. Elimination of Irrelevancies, Massive Attention to Systematic Order; Design of Contrasts; Importance of Contemporary Independence; Advantage to Enduring Objects. 
• IV. Structural Systems, Discarding Individual Variations; Physical Matter Involves Strain-Loci. 
• V. The Various Loci Involved: Causal Past, Causal Future, Contemporaries, Durations, Part of a Duration, Future of a Duration, Presented Duration, Strain-Locus.

Chapter V. Measurement 322

• I. Identification of Strain-Loci with Durations only Approximate; Definitions Compared; Seat of Strain, Projectors; Strain-Loci and Presentational Immediacy.
• II. Strain-Locus Wholly Determined by Experient; Seat and Projectors Determine Focal Region; Animal Body Sole Agent in the Determination; Vivid Display of Real Potentiality of Contemporary World; New Definition of Straight Lines Explains this Doctrine; Ways of Speech, Interpretation of Direct Observation; Descartes' Inspectio. Realitas Objective, Judicium. 
• III. Modern Doctrine of Private Psychological Fields; Secondary Qualities, Sensa; Abandons Descartes' Realitas Objectiva; Difficulties for Scientific Theory, All Observation in Private Psychological Fields; Illustration, Hume; Conclusion, Mathematical Form, Presentational Immediacy in one Sense Barren, in Another Sense has Overwhelming Significance. 
• IV. Measurement Depends on Counting and on Permanence; What Counted, What Permanent; Yard-Measure Permanent, Straight; Infinitesimals no Explanation; Approximation to Straightness, Thus Straightness Presupposed; Inches Counted, Non-Coincident; Modern Doctrine is Possibility of Coincidence, Doctrine Criticized; Coincidence is Test of Congruence, Not Meaning; Use of Instrument Presupposes Its Self-Congruence: Finally all Measurement Depends on Direct Intuition of Permanence of Untested Instrument; Theory of Private Psychological Fields Makes Scientific Measurement Nonsense.
• V. Meaning of Congruence in Terms of Geometry of Straight Lines; Systems of Geometry; Sets of Axioms: Equivalent Sets, Incompatible Sets; Three Important Geometries: Elliptic Geometry, Euclidean Geometry, Hyperbolic Geometry; Two Definitions of a Plane; Characteristic Distinction between the Three Geometries; Congruence Depends on Systematic Geometry. 
• VI. Physical Measurement, Least Action, Presupposes Geometrical Measurement; Disturbed by Individual Peculiarities; Physical Measurement Expressible in Terms of Differential Geometry; Summary of Whole Argument. 

PART V - FINAL INTERPRETATION

Chapter I. The Ideal Opposites 337

• I. Danger to Philosophy is Narrowness of Selection; Variety of Opposites: Puritan Self-Restraint and Aesthetic Joy, Sorrow and Joy; Religious Fervour and Sceptical Criticism, Intuition and Reason. 
• II. Permanence and Flux, Time and Eternity. 
• III. Order as Condition for Excellence, Order as Stifling Excellence; Tedium, Order Entering upon Novelty is Required; Dominant Living Occasion is Organ of Novelty for Animal Body. 
• IV. Paradox: Craving for Novelty, Terror at Loss; Final Religious Problem; Ultimate Evil is Time as 'Perpetually Perishing'; Final Opposites :t Joy and Sorrow, Good and Evil, Disjunction and Conjunction, Flux and Permanence, Greatness and Triviality, Freedom and Necessity, God and the World; These Pairs Given in Direct Intuition, except the Last Pair Which is Interpretive. 

Chapter II. God and the World 342

• I. Permanence and Flux, God as Unmoved Mover; Conceptions of God: Imperial Ruler, Moral Energy, Philosophical Principle. 
• II. Another Speaker to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Primordial Nature Deficiently Actual, Neither Love nor Hatred for Actualities, Quotation from Aristotle. 
• III. God's Nature Dipolar, Conceptual and Physical; This Physical Nature Derived from the World; Two Natures Compared. 
• IV. God's Consequent Nature, Creative Advance Retaining Unison of Immediacy, Everlastingness; Further Analysis, Tenderness, Wisdom, Patience; Poet of the World, Vision of Truth, Beauty, Goodness. 
• V. Permanence and Flux, Relation of God to the World; Group of Antitheses: God and the World Each the Instrument of Novelty for the Other. 
• VI. Universe Attaining Self-Expression of Its Opposites. 
• VII. God as the Kingdom of Heaven; Objective Immortality Attaining Everlastingness, Reconciliation of Immediacy with Objective Immortality. 

Index 353

Editors Notes 389

Thomas Jay Oord - 7 Models of Divine Sovereignty

Models of God’s Action

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/models-of-gods-action

by Thomas Jay Oord

March 1, 2020

A few podcast hosts have asked me to “locate” my theology in relation to other views of God. This is natural, and I like to compare views of God. Comparisons help me explain my Uncontrolling Love of God theology, which I also call Essential Kenosis.

In my book The Uncontrolling Love of God, I explore seven models of God and sketch out their implications. I don’t claim they are the only possible models. But they represent major options for understanding divine action in Christian theology. Here are the models…

In the book, I describe in some detail how each model of God portrays creaturely randomness, free will, goodness, evil, and God’s love and power. Below I’ve excerpted descriptions of each as they address evil. Find a fuller account in The Uncontrolling Love of God.

Amazon Link

1 - God is the Omnicause

This model says God causes all things. What appears to be random or activities of free-will creatures are in accordance with God’s will, in such a way that God ultimately makes them happen, as they happen. God is in complete control.

According to this model, all occurrences are part of the “secret providence of God,” to quote John Calvin. “The great works of the Lord are carefully crafted,” says Calvin, “so that in a wonderful and ineffable way nothing happens contrary to his will, even that which is contrary to his will!” Paul Kjoss Helseth, a contemporary advocate of the model, calls it “divine omnicausality.”

This model sounds to critics like God promotes sin and evil. It is hard – in fact, impossible for me – to believe God perfectly loves while also being the ultimate cause of every rape, torture, disease, and terrorist act. To me, this model makes little, if any, sense.

2 - God Empowers and Overpowers

This model of God is most common among “average” Christian believers. It says God creates and empowers humans by giving them free will, at least sometimes. But God sometimes overpowers human freedom or interrupts the causal regularities of existence. God’s will is sometimes permissive and sometimes controlling.

Some versions of Arminian theology embrace the God Empowers and Overpowers model. Arminian theologian, Jack Cottrell, says that “even though [God] bestowed relative independence on his creatures, as Creator he reserved the right to intervene if necessary. Thus he is able not only to permit human actions to occur, but also to prevent them from occurring if he so chooses.” This allows God, says Cottrell, to “remain in complete control.”

Those who embrace this model typically say God does not cause evil. They usually blame human freedom gone awry, chance, or demonic forces. But they believe God permits or allows evil. After all, the God in this model has controlling power.

Although this model may allow advocates to say God is not the source of evil, it makes God responsible for failing to prevent evil. It’s hard to believe God loves perfectly when God can prevent genuine evil. This God may not cause evil but is culpable for failing to prevent it.

3 - God is Voluntarily Self-Limited

This model starts with the premise God essentially has the kind of power to create something from nothing and control others. Despite having the capacity to be controlling, God made a voluntary decision to give freedom to at least some creatures. In doing so, God voluntarily gave up total control but can intervene to control if God desires.

John Polkinghorne is an advocate of the Voluntarily Self-Limited God model. God’s “act of creation involves a voluntary limitation,” says Polkinghorne, “in allowing the other to be.” This means “God does not will the act of a murderer or the destructive force of an earthquake but allows both to happen in a world in which divine power is deliberately self-limited to allow causal space for creatures.”

This model says God could withdraw, override, or fail to offer freedom/agency to creatures. God could momentarily overturn the regularities/natural laws of the universe. But God rarely does so.

I can think of numerous evil events a voluntarily self-limited God should have prevented. This God should momentarily become un-self-limited to prevent those evils. A perfectly loving God should and would prevent genuine evil, if it were possible. Consequently, I cannot believe the God described in this model loves perfectly.

4 - God is Essentially Kenotic / Uncontrolling Love

The God is Essentially Kenotic model says God’s eternal nature is uncontrolling love.

Because of love, God necessarily provides freedom/agency to creatures in each moment. God works by empowering and inspiring creatures of all levels of complexity toward well-being. And God necessarily upholds the regularities of the universe, because those regularities derive from God’s eternal nature of love. God is not a dictator, mysteriously behind the scenes pulling strings.

Although this model says God never totally controls others, it claims God sometimes acts miraculously in noncoercive ways. Miracles occur when God and creatures work in tandem. God providentially guides and calls all creation toward love and beauty.

God’s nature of love logically precedes God’s sovereign will. Kenosis derives from God’s eternal and unchanging nature of love and not from voluntary divine decisions. And because God’s nature is love, God always gives freedom, agency, and self-organization to creatures and sustains the regularities of nature.

This model says God can’t prevent singlehandedly, because God’s love is always uncontrolling. God loves everyone and everything, so God can’t control anyone or anything. I explain this view in The Uncontrolling Love of God and God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils.

5 - God Sustains as a Steady State Force

This model says God exists as an impersonal force creating and sustaining all creation. God’s steady-state influence never violates the integrity of the universe. The divine presence never varies, and God never interacts in give-and-receive relationships.

Paul Tillich advocates this model of God. “It is an insult to the divine holiness to treat God as a partner with whom one collaborates,” says Tillich, “or as a superior power whom one influences by rites and prayers.”

Overall, this view affirms divine constancy. God sustains the natural laws, creates conditions for creaturely freedom, and makes chance possible. But it fails to offer support to the idea God is personal, interactive, and involved in relations with creation. It fails to give hope that God will act any differently to help when we encounter evil.

6 - God is Initial Creator and Current Observer

This model says that after creating the universe, God did not stick around or stay involved. God created all things, set natural laws in motion, and has since withdrawn. God is now, to quote Bette Midler, “watching us from a distance.”

Historians identify several thinkers during the Enlightenment with this model. It typically goes under the name “deism.” Deist Michael Corey says, God’s creative activity “is confined to the initial moments of creation,” and afterward, God “allowed [the first atoms and molecules] to develop on their own entirely according to natural cause-and-effect processes.”

Corey believes “a God who continually has to intervene to accomplish His creative purposes is clearly inferior… in the same way that a car-maker who is clever enough to design self-building cars is far more impressive than one who has to be directly involved during each step of the creative process.”

Putting God’s action only at initial creation means this model has difficulty explaining how an omnipotent God would have created a world with so much evil. One wonders: is this the best God can create? To use Corey’s illustration, Couldn’t a really clever car-maker design self-building cars that function more reliably?

This model offers no hope God acts to overcome evil eventually or console those in pain now.

7 -God’s Ways are Not Our Ways

Versions of this final model vary widely. Each shares the fundamental belief we ultimately have no idea what God’s actions are like. No language, no analogy, and no concepts can tell us the nature of divine providence. All is mystery.

The technical word sometimes used for this model is “apophatic theology.” It says we cannot describe God or divine activity positively. We can only talk about what God is not.

This model of God obviously cannot provide a satisfying answer to why a loving and powerful God fails to prevent evil.

Advocates of most other models of God resort to this mystery card when their views make little sense. “Remember: God’s ways are not our ways,” they say. In fact, the “God’s Ways are Not Our Ways” view is not probably a model of God’s action at all. But I included it, because many who talk about God and evil eventually appeal to this model.

Conclusion

This is not an exhaustive list of models of God. But I consider these the main ones. These brief sketches give a taste of what each thinks about God’s actions in relation to evil.

I have argued in various publications that the “God is Essentially Kenotic – Uncontrolling Love” model best accounts for evil. This brief essay shows how this model compares to other models of God.

Amazon Link

Catherine Keller - How to think about the pandemic

CV19 link

It awaits us to determine how we will react to crises in our lives

always with God as our helper as we work towards resolution.

- Catherine Keller, "How to think about the pandemic"

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Keller_(theologian)

A Letter from Catherine Keller

https://medium.com/@dostlund_42808/a-letter-from-catherine-keller-1930029c4914

April 2, 2020

Dear Ones,

Particularly, in this letter, ones who claim some seriously biblical, or explicitly theological, orientation. Amidst this pandemic, ones who may be wondering….

Is God punishing us?

We — the human species — certainly deserve it; we have gone way out of kilter in our most basic creaturely responsibilities. We’re out of balance, way out of sync with the wisdom, the Word, of the creation. We have taken our materiality for granted, in utter ingratitude. Isn’t this pandemic, and maybe worse to come, just what we have coming to us?

Is God testing us?

We surely are being tested, tried, exposed in our multiple vulnerabilities — challenged at our edges, both spiritual and physical. And that is not just as individuals and families and local communities. It is also our systems of life together, our economics and our politics, that are being tested. Some are failing worse than others. And our big national system is so far failing

big-time. But are we all together tested? By God?

Is God teaching us a lesson?

If so, we better learn it fast. So often, we have let the most aggressive and greedy portions of our species organize our material interactions, our global economies. Not that they asked our permission. But we who have less power have ceded much of the life of the planet, local and global, to the systems of power. We blame the powerful, but we do not reclaim the power. We have much to learn…so terrifyingly much.

Is God fixing the world?

Our carbon emissions are coming down, with millions of flights grounded. If emissions keep coming down, we might just prevent that 1.5C rise in global temperature. And pandemic can also bring down population levels, which have grown beyond sustainability. After all, the Bible teaches that it took the Great Flood to bring about a fresh start for humanity — and everything else. Almost total decline of the human population and the nonhuman ones too. Later, it took ten plagues to make Pharaoh “let my people go.” Huge collateral damage to the innocent, like Egyptian children and non-Hebrew slaves! Is our present plague the way God — like it or not — is fixing our world?

For many folks who find solace and guidance from their biblical faith, those questions must somehow be answered ‘yes.’ And this sense of divine intervention may lead them to do good, moral things. They can find biblical passages to read literally, to rip out of their context, to ignore millennia of history between an ancient text and our context, and find this kind of God who is directly and violently punishing, telling, testing, fixing.

I respect anyone’s sincere faith. But faith can get trapped in misguided interpretations. So, in the interest of the truth without which faith is an illusion — let me answer those four questions I posed.

Is the pandemic God’s punishment?

The coronavirus is having punishing effects, largely on the most vulnerable and least deserving. But “punishment” is supposed to signify justice. And yet in this and in most of the plagues of world history, the poor and the frail are the main victims. Doesn’t this make them the objects of a horribly unjust punishment? Besides, if God were the direct controlling agent of history, surely such unjust side-effects, such sloppy collateral damage, could have been avoided! Indeed, our getting to this point would never have been necessary.

God, in scripture, wants justice. So…no. God is not deploying the coronavirus to whip, execute, or otherwise punish us. Not even just to send us to our rooms like naughty children. Besides — isn’t punishment far too crude a notion for what we call God’s will?

Well then, testing us? That isn’t so punitive.

No, it’s not as punitive. But do you mean that God designed the pandemic to try our faith or our character, individual or collective? Again…no. Yes, our capacities are being put to the test as a society, as communities, as individuals — but not because God has selected this means to make folk grow better or stronger through suffering. Often, this “test” will have the opposite effect: we may grow weaker and die. Or we will fail the moral test and stock up for mere survival. Or the political system will pour maximum resources into reviving the economic system — rather than into the screaming needs of the suddenly jobless.

But then, isn’t God teaching us a lesson? Teaching us that we are all interdependent with each other — with all creatures, even with viruses?

No. Not if you mean that God has designed the disease to teach the lesson. It is too little too late, on the front of climate justice. And it is too much too fast, in the assault upon the weak. So, even if, improbably, we do collectively, globally — maybe even nationally — learn a great lesson about our togetherness as creatures, it won’t be because God has decided on pedagogy by plague.

Like it or not, you may insist: this crisis may be how the omnipotent God is now intervening to fix a sinful world. Don’t you believe that the Lord works to repair His world — whatever it takes?

Oh, I do think God works always for tikkun olam, the repair of the world. But no! Not by big destructive omnipotent interventions. No, God is no Big Fixer. The story of the flood powerfully narrates the radical new start that is possible after systemic human ugliness and tremendous natural disaster. And let us remember it is a highly condensed story, as is that of the Exodus — not a natural or literal history. Besides, the repair of the world in the Bible is a work of deep care, not careless destruction. The flood and the plagues, including COVID-19, do not care.

The God of Jesus, however, cares infinitely. And precisely for that reason, that God cannot, must not, be understood any longer as “in control,” as the omnipotent Lord who either always already determines all that is (in which case the world shouldn’t need repair in the first place); or as the One who occasionally steps in Big Time to Fix it.

Yet that is a big debate. “Theodicy” names an old theological argument about how to justify God — as just — in the face of unfair suffering. Christians often just go for the afterlife answer: whatever happens here, God will reward His own in heaven. As to this world, with its COVID-19 and other plagues — they assume it is somehow God’s will that we suffer (as punishment, as test, as lesson, as fix) and, well, it doesn’t matter anyway because I and my own are going to heaven when we die. The big supernaturalist shrug of — whatever.

So, no, I do not think that even the heavenly “out” works to relieve us of our collective human responsibility to be and do this world — better. Now.

Well, then, how is God working? Or are you saying that “God” is just a delusion of my wishful thinking or my unthinking tradition?

No, not that either! It is because we inherit some delusions about God that I offer this theological exercise. Those notions that God is an all-powerful force of control — always or when “He” deems fit — may actually obstruct God’s work in the world and in each of us. And it might be that God’s work in the world depends upon our work — precisely because the mystery called “God” is not a projection of sovereign dominance. Not something, someone, that works by top-down control.

If no, no, no, and no — how, then?

How about — by creative collaboration with the creatures?

The coronavirus is not sent as a divine punishment. But something not unrelated: in this crisis, God may well be calling us all to account, holding us responsible for the wellbeing of our world. It doesn’t mean God willed this crisis to happen — or any of the horrors and holocausts of history. It means that nothing happens apart from God, because God isn’t something that exists

apart from the world: the world is a part of God, and God participates in each part of the world. God feels and suffers it all — with us. But God also calls to us to face the meaning of this punishing plague, to face the interdependence of us all — an interdependence that our civilization conceals from us, that this contagion reveals to us.

God did not create the pandemic in order to test any of us; God didn’t create the pandemic! But perhaps we are being tested. Not by the torments of a bully God, but by invitation to rise to the occasion. To find the courage and the care that will sustain us.

And as a species, are we not being tested — to see if we might come to terms with our creaturely connections to each member of our species and to all the other species of the planet? If we fail the test, it is not that God will punish us but rather the consequences of our collective actions. It is the consequences of our actions and inactions that will bring us down. If not to the virus, then to the catastrophic effects of global warming. Coming soon. But isn’t the ultimate biblical test always and only love? If we rise to the occasion, it is because we grow in that dauntless love that casts out fear.

God is not spreading the coronavirus to teach us a lesson. The disease is the effect of imbalances between culture and nature. In this case, maltreatment of wild animals and systemic disregard for environmental regulations triggered the outbreak. But maybe God is trying to teach a lesson in and through the pandemic. Doesn’t God mean — the one who is always calling, inviting, us each and all? Trying to teach, to inspire, in the midst of whatever is happening?

Why then doesn’t the divine voice break through better? So many who declare themselves God’s spokespersons teach anything but that love — anything but the biblical love of the least, of the stranger, of every other. How can they confine love to their own community, race, religion, kind? How do they manage to drown out God’s teaching? Perhaps, because it comes in such “a still, small voice.” Might this pandemic, demanding so much sudden solitude, give us a chance to enter that stillness?

No, God is not going to fix the world through this or any disaster. So how can we hope for repair of the world? Certainly not by waiting for God to do it for us. Not by ignoring the spirit of wisdom that whispers, that breathes, within each of us always. Each of us individually.

But each, only in our all-togetherness — human, animal, vegetable, mineral. That togetherness takes on new meanings now, in all the layers of planetary interdependence, deadly or benign, oppressive or just, at home or in public. Now, as we learn that social distance does not mean separation, right in the midst of catastrophe, that Spirit might turn you, turn me, turn us together — into catalysts of transformation.

We might not fix much that is already too badly broken. But in a new, dark hopefulness, might we become creative collaborators? Even with the Creator, the one who triggers the simplest matter and the subtlest minds to new creation?

This is not a story of top-down creating. This new creation comes as we cooperate with each other and with the divine source of every other. This is new creativity in and through whatever chaos besets us. The chaos might feel like the Apocalypse. But remember that apokalypsis, at least in the Bible, does not mean The End of the World. It means revelation: not a final closing down, but a great dis/closure.

In whatever chaos we experience, we recycle everything that we can: ecologically and socially, democratically and theologically. We do not wait for a dictatorial fix from on high. We enter into creative collaboration in a process we can neither predict nor control. For the process of the new creation remains mysterious. “The new heaven and earth” translate no longer as supernatural intervention or afterlife escape — but as the radical renewal of atmosphere and earth.

I hope each of the four no’s have morphed into an odd kind of yes. Into affirmations of something of what you — you wondering ones — already deeply sense, feel, consider. And begin to do.

Love,

Catherine

March 2020

catherineekeller.com