Charles Bledsoe
The process theologian Lewis Ford (his name might not be as well known as Cobb or Griffin, but he’s nevertheless in their league) has thought and written extensively about the future and how it should figure into process theology. He’s worked out an interesting reinterpretation of process theology that conceives God as the “particular but indefinite creativity or universal activity of the future”. Here’s a link to the publisher’s page for his book. (You can get it for a better price at Amazon or AbeBooks).
I just sent you an email with a link that will enable you to download it from my Google Drive account. The file size is too large for it to be sent as an email attachment. Happy reading.
I just sent it. The file size for the book was too large for a Gmail attachment, so I put a download link in the email that will enable you to download it from my Google Drive account. It’s a very interesting book, I hope that you enjoy it.
Oh dear.
Yes, books like Weber’s are marketable to a pretty small market, consequently the only way that publishers can make a profit is by charging a rather steep price for them. I could send you a PDF copy as an email attachment if you’re okay with posting your email address.
A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity
Btw, I agree with Wilcox that Whitehead’s creativity can be interpreted monistically, or monisically-pluralistically. I interpret it that way myself. But again we’re back to it being a pancreativism, not a pantheism, since God remains an individual “primordial” actual entity and is not what’s being interpreted monistically—rather, it’s creativity that’s monistic in Wilcox’s, and my interpretation.
Thank you for your reply. It’s very gratifying to know that my posts have been of help to fellow participants in the program. I’ll include some links to articles that might be of help.
As for where Whiteheadians should come down on the pantheism vs. panentheism question, I think that Whitehead certainly can be interpreted to provide a metaphysical basis for subscribing to a version of panentheism. And the fact that his God is an individual actual entity who is internally related to every other actual entity, but not identical with them; and not identical with creativity, Whitehead’s ultimate reality, of which everything is an instance, I think means that pantheism is not really supported by Whiteheadian metaphysics. I think what Whitehead’s metaphysics better supports is what some have termed “pancreativism” (there’s a book by Michel Weber about Whitehead’s pancreativism, titled Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics). Personally, I thinks both in terms of Whiteheadian process philosophy and theology being a panentheism and a pancreativism rather than a pantheism. But Whitehead is complex and open to multiple interpretations, so in my opinion it would be perfectly legitimate for someone to endeavor to reinterpret his metaphysics to be a form of pantheism. I might not agree with that interpretation but I agree with the legitimacy of attempting it. I once sent an email to Joseph Bracken, and in his reply he made a critical remark about what he described as the “scholasticism” and tendency of some Whitehead scholars to adhere to a certain consensus version of process philosophy perhaps too faithfully. I’m not going to accuse my fellow Whiteheadians of suffering from that foible in any chronic way, but I think that sometimes we may succumb to it, and need to make an effort to be open to creative alternative interpretations that may diverge from the standard interpretation, so if anyone devises a good argument for pantheism based on Whitehead’s thought I’d certainly be interested in and not dismissive of it. I certainly think that your MO of “bumping around” and “stumbling” upon new perspectives and insights can be fruitful even for those of us who are deeply steeped in Whiteheadian philosophy.
(See the two posts below for two more links. The site would not allow me to place more than one link in a post.)
Classically truth, goodness, and beauty are all fundamental joint properties of substantial being, they all integratively inhere in substantial being. That would be one answer to your first question. But I think that we can also find an answer to your question in Whitehead’s theory of reality, in its root idea that it’s both relationality and plurality all the way down and up. All the way down to the world’s building-block internally related but individual actual entities, but also all the way up to related but discrete eternal objects in the primordial nature of God, such as truth, goodness, and beauty. What I gather from my study of the theory of eternal objects is that all eternal objects, all creative possibilities are creative relationality in an individual form of definiteness. And Whitehead certainly conceives eternal objects to have both a relational nature, and an individual nature. To quote Leemon McHenry: “As pure potentials, eternal objects have an individual essence and a relational essence. As an individual, we discern the definite self-identity of an eternal object, and as relational, we understand its status as a relatum in the general scheme of relationships”. From a Whiteheadian ontological perspective then, transcendentals, as ontologically basic and intrinsically desirable eternal objects like truth, goodness, and beauty might be called in Scholastic jargon, are both individuals and relata, and I would say that they’re capable of being integrative due to their relationality, and to the relatedness or commonalities of their individual essences.
I’ll elaborate on that last bit, the commonalities of their individual essences. To my processist way of thinking what goodness, beauty, and truth all have in common is what I’ll term fundamental, and virtuous and desirable unitivity. Of course in the process universe unitivity is the name of the game for everything, but in the case of the transcendentals what we’re dealing with is fundamental and innately virtuous and desirable unitivity. Goodness, for instance, in my Whiteheadian definition is the creative-unitive process at its axiological best, operating virtuously to actualize constructive and desirable values and existential possibilities. Beauty I would likewise define as creative-unitive, as the integration of complexity and contrasts into a pleasing and desirable harmonious unity. As for truth, the dictionary defines it as “the body of real events or facts”, and “agreement with fact or reality”. Well, looking at these definitions through a Whiteheadian lens I’d say that perhaps “real events” might be expressed as actual occasions, which are fundamental unitive processes. And “facts” can be understood as the units of unitivity, in the form of the desirable qualities of coherence, agreement, and noncontradiction, which actual entities have made a decision to be. In either case what’s again at issue is a fundamental and desirable unitivity. Desirable expressions of creative integrativity and unitivity then characterize all of the transcendentals; in that sense they’re one, or variations on that one theme. Ultimately there’s only one direction, as you put it, and it’s a nisus and process of creative relationality toward unification; ontological and axiological unification. The values of goodness, beauty, and truth all stem from that fundamental unific axia-ontological drive of reality, and are all synthesized into a desirable axiological unity by it—a unified axiological field as it were. But although one unified axiological field comprises all three transcendentals I would not quite agree that they’re “all beauty”. I don’t think that we should pick one, either beauty, goodness, or truth, and use it as a catch-all for all three transcendentals. We need to respect their “individual essences” as well as their “relational essences”. Well, this is what I come up with when I attempt to think through the question along Whiteheadian lines. Some of my language here isn’t quite what you’ll find in Whitehead, but I think that what I’ve attempted to say is consistent with his views.
As for usefulness, well, although we don’t want to instrumentalize fellow human beings or actual entities of any species in a way that disregards the fact that they all have intrinsic value for themselves, relationality means that none of us just has value for ourselves, that to some extent we should be instrumental for the well-being of others; we should be useful in relation to others and the holistic big picture, not geared to just looking out for our own private interests. Usefulness is also a desirable form of relationality, so I would agree that “usefulness” is indeed worthy of being added to goodness, beauty, and truth.
Although I’m not a Catholic I’ll wrap up by noting that Roman Catholic theology seems to also be onto the importance of the concepts of relationality and unity with respect to understanding the transcendentals, in that it also recognizes unity as a transcendental.
(Btw, classical theology held that the transcendentals are merged in God. I think that Whiteheadians can agree with this sans the substantialism of classical theology. The transcendentals would also then be integrative in our prehensive experience of God, making the possibility of their integrativeness something that’s appealing rather than inconceivable or alien to our minds.)
Whitehead essentially reworks Spinoza’s substance into what he terms “substantial activity” in Science and the Modern World, and into his processual creative ultimate reality which is only actual in its ever-ongoingly emergent individual instances in Process and Reality. So Whitehead’s ultimate reality is processive and pluralistic, and Spinoza’s ultimate reality is substantial and monistic. Whitehead’s reworking of Spinoza’s substance is also significantly divergent from Spinozistic substance in that Whitehead doesn’t equate it with God. Rather, Whitehead conceives God to be a “primordial” particularization of creativity. God characterizes creativity pervasively in all of its individual occasions, with divine initial aims, but actual occasions are all units of their own creativity and subjectivity, not mere modes of either God or one monistic substance. So God is not creativity in toto for Whitehead, God is one ontological instantiation of creativity. And not only does Whitehead not make God the ultimate ground of creativity, and actual entities just modes of God, he also doesn’t conceive God to be a mere mode or aspect of creativity, God is a subject of God’s own immediacy, to put it in Whiteheadian language, and genuinely individuated by that subjectivity (like all actual entities). So to recap, in Whitehead we have a processive and pluralistic ultimate reality; and therefore a genuinely relational ultimate reality, interrelationality between actual entities being possible and being the case; and we have a panentheistic God who is integral with all of the world’s actual occasions of creativity, but a distinct actual entity rather than creativity in toto. In Spinoza’s metaphysic we have instead an ultimate reality which is substantial and monistic, with everything in nature being mere modes of one substance rather than relational individuals; and God is equated with this ultimate substance leading in some interpretations to a pantheism in which everything in the world is a mode of God, and in other interpretations to an atheism in which God is just a word for this world comprising substance’s many modes and not an actual subject. I hope that this helps.
From a process theological point of view, eudaimonia, shalom, wholeness, defined as making one’s processive being a process toward wholeness in terms of personally and socially salogenic relationality (involving fellow human beings, the world, and God), and well-rounded self-actualization (in Christian terms, fully living up to being the image of God) is the mark, the ideal human “satisfaction”. The essence of sin is missing that mark for oneself, and causing others to miss it. So yes, process theology has some concept of sin.
The fact that not all individuals lead lives, and not all societies have socioeconomic systems that are geared to and give evidence of this ideal “mark” for human life doesn’t mean that it isn’t our objectively and universally ideal telos, it just means that not everyone recognizes it to be such. Ignorance of it then is the etiology of sin.
And as far as universality goes, this ideal “mark”, and basis for morality is more universal than postmodernist cultural relativists think. All human beings, in every culture desire well-being—I can’t think of any culture in which it’s believed that a pathetic kind of existence is preferable, even cultures and religions that go in for austerity believe that it leads to some manner of well-being and have some sense of the desirability of well-being—and recognize that behaviors that severely harm the well-being of at least certain others is wrong. The problem is not that there isn’t a universally shared sense of our inalienable natural right to well-being, it’s that for some individuals and some cultures that right is wrongly restricted to a certain in-group (for instance, in the antebellum American South it was recognized but restricted to white males, the equal right of African American slaves, and white women to well-being was what wasn’t recognized; and although the Vikings didn’t believe in the right to well-being of the inhabitants of the villages they pillaged they were certainly keen on their own well-being, etc.). But in every society, and in every age human beings have desired shalom by that or some other name, and have felt it to be an injustice for it to be denied either to that group deemed worthy of it, or to any fellow human beings. So there is indeed a universal and perennial norm, it has unfortunately been too selectively applied in some cultures but it’s a universal constant nonetheless. Violating this universal norm, harming the shalom, the wholeness of human beings as defined above, is sin (this can of course be expanded to also take in other living creatures, their ecosystems, and the earth). Process theology holds this insight, and most certainly is not deficient when it comes to hamartiology.
(Btw, on a trivial note, Merriam-Webster says that “jive” is indeed a now common and acceptable variant of “jibe”. There’s nothing wrong with substituting it for “jibe”.)
I think that it would only be fair to accuse process theology of misrepresenting Whitehead’s ideas if its proponents claimed that their perspective is pure Whiteheadianism. I’m not aware of any process theologian who has made that claim. For instance, if you read someone like John Cobb you’ll find that he both forthrightly acknowledges his indebtedness to Whitehead; and also the fact that he has taken some creative license, so to speak, with Whitehead’s ideas—something which Whitehead would be perfectly okay with, since he didn’t want anyone to become a dogmatic fan or adherent of his philosophy. What’s more, Whitehead’s ideas are complex and therefore not univocal, which is to say that they’re legitimately subject to interpretation. Process theologians have simply put their own interpretations on them. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it doesn’t constitute misrepresentation, it’s merely creative interpretation. Misrepresentation would connote either conscious or unconscious dishonesty (here’s one technical definition of the word: “a false or misleading statement or a material omission which renders other statements misleading, with intent to deceive”), but, again, process theologians have never dishonestly claimed to be purveyors of absolutely pure Whiteheadiansm. So I think that it’s a bit unduly polemical to say that they’re guilty of misrepresentation. Personally, I think that it’s very much to the credit of process theologians such as Wieman, Hartshorne, Cobb, Bracken, et al., that they’re original and innovative thinkers in their own right, not just Whitehead scholars. If process theology was nothing more than Whitehead scholarship and scholasticism it would not be the rich and living tradition that it is.
That’s an interesting theoretical question. As I understand the concepts of actual occasions and prehensions, an actual occasion is largely constituted by, but never just the experience that it internalizes. An actual occasions is invariably also a “subject of its own immediacy”, as Whitehead put it. It has its own subjectivity and intentionality, and is not hijacked by its prehensions. It assimilates data from, but is not assimilated to other actual occasions, thereby losing its subjective individuality. What’s more, an actual occasion prehends experience from antecedent occasions, not contemporary occasions. Channeling seems to involve a channeler’s subjecthood being hijacked; his/her consciousness doesn’t merely communicate with, it’s displaced by another consciousness. The channeler seems to cease to be a subject of his/her own immediacy and is taken over by another consciousness. And the other consciousness seems to be a contemporary ongoing consciousness. All of this seems to me to run afoul of Whitehead’s understanding of actual occasions and prehension. And personally I don’t have a problem with process ontology ruling out the possibility of channeling, since all of the channelers I’m aware of strike me as frauds (individuals such as JZ Knight and Ramtha, and Thomas Jacobson and Dr. Peebles, for instance). I do agree with David Ray Griffin, and other process thinkers, that various paranormal phenomena are consistent with, and explainable by process ontology, but I don’t include channeling. To my mind it seems to be quite at odds with process ontology. Perhaps according to some interpretations of a Whiteheadian subjective immortality since we prehend God it’s conceivable that we could also prehend the subjectivity of a departed person now residing in God’s consequent nature, but prehending and channeling it are two different things. Prehending, and prehensively communicating with the dead might indeed be possible according to theories of subjective immortality; but channeling I think is out if one subscribes to any understanding of actual occasions and prehension that I’m aware of.
Thank you for this informative reply. Our thinking is very much on the same wavelength, so to speak. I read your book Mind, Value, and Cosmos a couple of years ago and recall that I found the thesis and writing to be very helpful for someone striving to better understand the ideas found in the process thought tradition. You probably don’t want to put a plug in for your own books, but I would definitely recommend it to everyone here. And while I’m recommending books, I would also highly recommend John Cobb’s classic A Christian Natural Theology. In the preface to the second edition he states that some of his interpretations of various concepts have changed, and that he no longer holds all of the views that readers will find in the book, but I think reading, or rereading it is still well worth the time of anyone interested in better understanding process thought, and especially its theological applications. Here’s a link to it: A Christian Natural Theology
I would identify Whitehead’s theory of prehension as a good candidate for the distinction of being his main contribution of novelty to the philosophical tradition. Its comprehensive explanatory value can’t be overestimated. To quote Charles Hartshorne on prehension: “In a single conception it explains the spatiotemporal structure of the world, the possibility of knowledge, and the reality of freedom. It is, in my opinion, one of the supreme intellectual discoveries.” I would add that prehension is the essence of Whitehead’s conception and analysis of actual occasions, and a world that’s composed of actual occasions, and that his actual occasions are truly a breakthrough. Leibnitz of course had his monads, but they lacked prehension and any genuine interrelationality; their only relationality was a pre-established harmony imposed by God. They were in this important regard fundamentally different from Whitehead’s actual entities. The actual entity is truly rather unprecedented. And the actual entity as a model even for naturalistically understanding God is something theologically quite out of the ordinary. So my answer to your question, “what precisely is new in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism” would be 1) prehensions, 2) his analysis of actual entities, and 3) his model of God. In my opinion the newness of his philosophy largely flows from these elements. We find the rejection of substance thinking in the Buddhist doctrine of sunyata, and relationality conceived as ultimate reality in the Buddhist doctrine of pratityasamutpada, and elsewhere; and ultimate realities roughly along some of the lines of Whitehead’s creativity in various philosophies, but nothing quite like these there elements.