Benjamin Dueck
Thanks for sharing this chapter with the group Jay, it was a deep and illuminating read! I’ve really enjoyed pondering the other comments posted here as well. John Cobb’s clear elucidation of creativity, actual entities, eternal objects, and God helped me to appreciate the interdependent role that these principles play in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Nevertheless, I am finding it difficult to grasp the “unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potential” (PR, 343) that Whitehead ascribes to the primordial nature of God. In Process and Reality, he defines God’s primordial nature as “free, complete, primordial, eternal, actually deficient, and unconscious” (PR, 345). If the realm of potentiality is infinite, it is difficult for me to imagine how the act of conceptual realization could “complete” itself in the way Whitehead describes. Personally, I find it easier to imagine conceptual realization as an ongoing process of exploration where unordered potentiality is organized into a lattice of mathematical harmony. I suppose this is what Whitehead is getting at when he speaks of the complementary nature of the primordial and consequent poles! For this conceptual realization to occur though, wouldn’t there need to be a kind of reservoir of unordered potential for God to draw upon? From what I’ve read so far, this primordial chaos does not seem to be something that Whitehead and Cobb explore in detail. At this point, the best metaphor for primordial chaos I’ve come across is the image of a formless sea in which actuality and potentiality are undifferentiated. Do you think that this primordial chaos can be equated with creativity in Whitehead’s metaphysics? I’m looking forward to reading Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, which I know touches on some of these themes.
Peace be with you! 🙂
Ben
Thanks for posting this thread Kathleen! Your point about creativity reminded me of a work by Jeffery A. McPherson that I read not too long ago. It’s called Creativity in the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (1996), and you can download it here: https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/16080/1/McPherson%20Jeffrey.pdf.
In this text, McPherson argues that creativity functions as an ultimate (dare I say monistic) explanatory principle in Whitehead’s thought. McPherson understands creativity as a “temporal concept regarding the flow of actuality” largely synonymous with the idea of activity (1996, p. 9). If we conceive of creativity as the ultimate metaphysical category, this would relegate God to a secondary status–a relative actual entity like any other, albeit a highly complex one.
I wonder too how panentheism could fit into such a framework. From what I understand, panentheism refers to the idea that our universe arises within the sphere of God. I see this resonating with Vedic cosmologies (I’m thinking of Sri Aurobindo here) that conceive of the universe as a kind of “cosmic dream” sustained inside the consciousness of a divine entity. Vedic cosmology typically frames this divinity as an eternal being who cyclically generates and dissolves our universe. Perhaps a process panentheism would relativize this activity of divine cosmogenesis? Perhaps the divine being is a temporary actual entity that emerges within a sea of primordial creativity and proceeds to hew a universe into being? Perhaps there are other divine entities engaged in an analogous processes in other universes? Perhaps our own universe is a collaborative project involving many divine entities? Perhaps these divine entities are ourselves???
I could ramble on about this all day, thanks for the food for thought everyone! To conclude, here’s a great article by Katherine Keller and Austin J. Roberts about panentheism and process thought. I’ve linked to it at the bottom of my post with a quote that stood out to me.
“Creation never occurs ex nihilo. Rather, God and world are everlastingly co-creative of one another – without absolute beginning or absolute end.” (Keller and Roberts, 2022, p. 124)
“Panentheism and Process Theism,” by Keller and Roberts (download here: https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/mb.2022.8)