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Many “Hindus” (btw, perhaps it would be better to refer to South Asian religions) are of the view that their deities are personifications, or as Joseph Campbell would say, masks of God or Brahman, an ultimate reality. Advaitic thinkers are quite explicit about this, they certainly have an understanding of the devas that runs deeper than their surface-level identities. Ordinary devotees of various deities may be more henotheistic, worshiping a particular god but believing in the legitimacy of other worships and in the ultimacy Brahman. To answer your question “… do Hindus get past the image to all the metaphysics” I would say that some do and some are more fundamentalistic and don’t. This quote from a publication of The Hindu Association of the Northern Territory expresses the religious consciousness of many regarding Hinduism’s polytheism: “Gods and Goddesses are symbols depicting various attributes,functions and manifestations of the one Supreme Divine Absolute”. This Absolute is in the realm of a sophisticated metaphysics, which in some versions can resonate with process metaphysics. To quote the author of an article in the Mumbai Mirror, writing about what the gods mean to him and his fellow Hindus: “Hindu deities embody various philosophical concepts that help us make sense of the world”, so there is an awareness of the gods being “masks” of meanings, vehicles of existential and spiritual insights. But just as in Christianity, the diversity of Hinduism includes different degrees of literal-mindedness among the devout. As for the status and meaning of Ganesha, I’ll provide two more quotes: “Many see the union of Ganesha’s body and elephant head as a representation of how the spirit should live in harmony with nature”, and many view him as “He who harmonises all opposing categories” and “makes us embrace differences with respect and love”. He certainly has profound symbolic value for many contemporary Hindus, and some do also believe him to be an actually-existing being (I’m more Jungian, but theorists of myth of the literal school, such as Tylor, posit that mythological beings and stories originally strictly possessed a literal reality and meaning for premodern peoples, and that it’s only a modern mentality, which “projects its own incredulity”, that has come to see and legitimate them as symbolic and archetypal, so perhaps the original status of Ganesha was that he was taken to be objectively real, but today many interpret him non-literally). Once again, we can’t really generalize.

It’s really quite impossible to generalize about “Hindus” because “Hinduism” is for the most part a construct of 19th-century orientalism—which is also now being promoted by the Hindutva movement, a nationalist movement that seeks to construct and impose a collective religiocultural identity. It’s an umbrella term that covers diverse worships and philosophies. What’s true of an adherent of various bhakti (devotional) sects may not be true of an adherent of Advaita Vedanta, etc.

I don’t think that I’ve backpedaled and that I’m saying that creative self-actualization is a path for the lackadaisical, that it doesn’t require effort, self-discipline, and plenty of reflection. I’m merely saying that it doesn’t have to take formal or extreme forms, that it can be sufficient to adopt a committed meditation practice in your own home, one doesn’t necessarily have to move to Japan and become a Zen monk; if you’re an MD you can volunteer your services at the local free clinic, you don’t have to join Doctors Without Borders and uproot yourself; you can pursue a course of study and intellectual self-improvement without pursuing a PhD, etc. Spirituality, service, and learning in all of their forms yields self-actualization and growth, and none of it is for the lazy. (Thank you, btw, both Kent and Dr. Kling, for challenging me to better clarify my perspective. Much appreciated.)

I agree and absolutely would say that the kind of humanism that I was talking about as “creative self-actualization” includes humanitarianism and humaneness on any scale, grand or local or one-on-one. Humanism/creative self-actualization isn’t confined to engaging in those pursuits called the humanities: the fine arts, poetry, literature, music, philosophy, et al.; nor does one have to be engaged like a Dorothy Day or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer to morally self-actualize, so to speak, practicing virtues such as your examples of small acts of kindness are certainly a matter of ethical and spiritual human flourishing. What I was describing as a life that grievously falls short of what a human life should be, a pathological life, is one that falls short of even an interest in shalom, in a whole human life, a one-dimensional life that’s completely taken up with self-preservation or materialism.

My personal definition of self-actualization and a whole human life is the cultivation and integration of the different dimensions of our humanness, the mental, moral, and spiritual dimensions. Countless ordinary people do this in modest ways, such as taking a course like this one, taking a dish to a grieving neighbor, and doing vipassana meditation or going to church. And of course life roles such as parent and spouse, when done right, call us to muster up and integrate all dimensions of our humanness. To my mind really any interests or experiences or ways of being relational by which we create ourselves to be better people qualifies as creative self-actualization. And from a humanistic theology perspective it’s from all of these human dimensions, interests, and experiences that we derive knowledge of God and ultimate existential meanings; and it’s by developing them that we realize our potential to image God, and to follow the divine call forward—so self-actualization can actually be understood as piety and spirituality, and the Pietistic idea of Bildung comes to mind.

Well, that’s the long of it, the short of it is that I certainly agree with you.

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I would say that Iqbal’s thinking both diverges from, and resonates with Whiteheadian process philosophy. I find much value in it, and also some views that I disagree with.

Very astute questions. To my mind the idea of time without “succession” is quite at odds with a Whiteheadian conception of time. In Whitehead’s conceptuality time involves the process of transition, which is of course successive, or more aptly supersessive: an ongoing transition of atomic actual occasions which involves the inclusion and supersession of antecedent occasions by new occasions. As for God’s experience of time, although God’s primordial nature is timeless, eternal in the sense that it isn’t touched by the flow of time, the primordial and consequent natures aren’t really separate compartments of God’s metaphysical reality, and so given God’s growing experience, God’s ever-ongoing successive inclusion of new experience in God’s consequent nature, if we’re going to speak about God in God’s concrete reality we have to say that God experiences and participates in time. If we parse out God’s primordial nature to talk about it specifically we wouldn’t be wrong to say that it’s timeless, but God in God’s integrity and wholeness is involved in, not transcendent of the pantemporalism of the rest of existence. Well, that’s my understanding at any rate.

Those are some excellent musings. The kind of manque individual you describe, i.e. someone who isn’t doing anything toward creative self-actualization and fulfillment of potential, is, in my opinion, and I would say from the perspective of process ontology, an ongoing tragedy. According to process ontology the fundamental raison d’etre of all actual entities is creative self-actualization. Elementary actual occasions may exercise little creativity in terms of originality and pursuing novelty, they mostly just recreate the past, but even in their case there’s a process of concrescence, and there’s a capacity for choice which is the essence of creativity. I seem to recall a couple of our instructors in the program mentioning that primitive entities, such as electrons and viruses have been discovered by scientists to have the power of choice. Biologists who’ve studied phages say that “What they found was not unlike the decision-making process of humans” (from a sciencedaily.com article). And we have physicists saying things like “Quantum chance is better framed as quantum choice—choice, not chance, at every level of nature” (Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious). At any rate, Whiteheadianism posits that self-creative choice, i.e. creativity and responsiveness to the call forward to realize ideal creative possibilities is a property and purpose of all entities, and in the case of complex entities such as human beings self-conscious creative self-actualization is not only a possibility, it’s our species-essence, our most human of needs, the universal human vocation. There’s a line from a sci-fi novel (Station Eleven) that sums it up, for human beings “survival is insufficient”. Human beings who just pass the days of their lives merely surviving, either because of poverty which forces them to focus all of their energies on making a subsistence wage, or because they grew up in a materialistic culture in which making a living and engaging in consumerism is the whole meaning of life, are getting it wrong. Their kind of life is indeed pathological. It’s a harsh word, and I don’t mean to be judgmental by using it. In both cases, people living in poverty and individuals programmed with materialism, we’re looking at innocent victims (even in the case of your lazy underachievers seemingly with nothing standing in their way there are often extenuating circumstances, such as the way they were raised). But a human life that isn’t aimed at flourishing is a miscarriage of a human life, and a tragedy from the perspective of God as conceived by process theology. It’s something that profoundly pains the process God. The billions of human beings who are living Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation”, unfulfilled lives, lives not geared to self-actualization arguably then aren’t even pointed in the right direction. Their lives have very much taken a wrong direction. And here’s where “rituals and stories and a community” come in, and come to the rescue. Religious traditions and communities orient life to more than mere survival, making money, and consumerism. Religion, for all of its faults, is also the great orientator of human beings to higher purposes and answering God’s call forward. And yes, I think that this is certainly something that process thought can help people to better understand.

How it’s practiced depends on the individual, it’s a question of the way that she might regear her life to something constructive, the focus of her resolution to bring something good out of something bad that she might select, given her particular situation and possibilities. One example of someone who practiced what I’m calling creative acceptance was the actor Christopher Reeve. When he suffered a nightmarish injury in an equestrian accident that left him a quadriplegic he didn’t just lie in his hospital bed hating life, instead the catastrophic turn of events in his life turned him toward the dedication of his life to activism to find a cure for spinal cord injury. A nitpicker might say that this technically wasn’t really acceptance of an irreversible situation because he maintained hope for a breakthrough that would make it possible to one day reverse the damage to his spinal cord. But I don’t think that he entertained unrealistic wishful expectations about that breakthrough necessarily coming in time to benefit him personally. I think that he in fact nobly recreated his life as a life devoted to the cause of finding a treatment for currently untreatable spinal injuries for the benefit of others.

Perhaps a surprising place that people can be found putting creative acceptance into practice is prison. We’re all aware that prisons can be academies of crime where convicts often learn how to be more clever criminals. But believe it or not there are those inmates, some of whom have no hope of parole, who seek to recreate themselves as better human beings, through study and/or spirituality; or through developing a talent, even if they might never have the freedom to use it out in the world. An example that comes to mind is Archie Charles Williams. He was wrongfully convicted of a crime and spent 37 years of his life in one of the worst prisons in the United States (Louisiana’s Angola) before being fully exonerated by DNA evidence. For most of his time behind bars he had no hope of release, but rather than succumbing to a bitter acceptance of his fate, or allowing his environment to brutalize his soul, he devoted himself to the constructive life project of developing his talent for singing, becoming good enough to make it into the finals of the talent show America’s Got Talent. Remarkable individuals modeling creative acceptance can be found in every group of people who’ve been dealt a cruel injustice or tragedy by life; and countless people who are merely making the best of a less than ideal situation rather than succumbing to negativity are also examples.

As for Stoicism, yes, it’s also a philosophy that teaches the wisdom of a liberative and creative kind of acceptance of what’s beyond our control. Modern Stoics would certainly also be examples of practitioners of creative acceptance. The philosophical underpinning of their practice differs from the Whiteheadian perspective that I’m coming from, but the basic idea is the same.

Welcome back to the program. You were missed during the last course.

Thank you for the positive feedback. I think that process thought is redeeming contemporary theology from being something abstracted and irrelevant in a way that’s more intellectually profound and thoroughgoing than other schools of thought. And in my opinion John Cobb deserves an enormous amount of the credit. His pioneering work has done so much to articulate and actualize the latent theological potential of Whitehead’s conceptuality. Would process theology as we know it today exist without his work? There would still be theological thinkers working with Whitehead’s metaphysics, and Hartshorne’s writings, but I doubt that they would have constructed quite the same theological edifice without Cobb’s contribution.

Yes, any sense that an authentic reverence for life entails compassionate concern for quality of life, and support for societal measures that would guarantee the material security and well-being of children born into less than welcoming and secure circumstances seems to be missing in the case of “conservative” pro-life advocates.

(Btw, I often place the term “conservative” in scare quotes because years ago I read a great book by the academic philosopher Ted Honderich, Conservatism: Burke to Nozick to Blair?, in which he uses rigorous methods of philosophical analysis to make the case that there’s no consistent core principle or unified rationale that defines conservatism, and that defines it as conservative. “Conservative” turns out to be just an empty, and euphemistic label that “conservatives” like the ring of.)

Kudos Kent. You very astutely zeroed in on a pesky fly in the ointment of my argument. Thank you. Yes, the idea of a prioritizing God, in this case a God who prioritizes the interests and needs of a mature human female over the interests of a fetus that she’s carrying can let us in for some ethical difficulties. However, the idea of a God that doesn’t prioritize is equally problematic and troubling. With a non-prioritizing God we’re faced with coming to terms with a God who can’t choose, for instance, between the interests of the Covid-19 virus and the interests of human beings whose lives are endangered by Covid-19. We’re in between the Scylla of a hierarchizing God who might favor the young and strong over the elderly and disabled, and the Charybdis of a problematically egalitarian God who doesn’t make a distinction between your beloved dog and the parasite making it sick.

One possible solution is to posit that God responds to every entity equally at its own level, according to the principle of from every entity according to its ability, to every entity according to its need. In the case of a virus, for example, God might envisage its particular need to deal with a vaccine designed to exterminate it, and God might promote its resilience by sending it initial aims at mutating into new strains. But God working with human beings at our level, envisaging what we need in order to enjoy well-being, would also promote the human abilities, the creativity and genius of scientists, which lead to more effective vaccines. God doesn’t actually prioritize deliberately and in cold blood, so to speak. God is equally solicitous and serviceable to every actual entity, viral or human, but there’s a de facto prioritization that results from things running their natural course. The eventual natural outcome of God’s promotion of human genius is vaccines that spell the demise of viruses, i.e. a de facto favoring of the interests of the higer human life-form. God then is involved in a prioritization of more sophisticated entities, but not calculatingly.

But let’s take a close look at some of your examples. First, the assumption that a prioritizing God would favor the young and the strong. A particular 60 something-old very well might have a good deal more going for her/him than a particular vacuous and delinquent 16 year-old. And a physically weak individual very well might make a greater contribution to humanity than a bodybuilder capable of benching hundreds of pounds. As for the rich possibly getting prioritized, that one doesn’t hold up at all. A rich individual whose life is dedicated to hedonism and exploiting others for his pleasure (think Jeffrey Epstein), or an internally impoverished billionaire who isn’t satisfied with having a net worth of 20 billion dollars and spends all of his time and effort trying to accumulate more wealth would certainly not be prioritized over a low-income individual who is rich in love and creativity.

If you really want to problematize the idea of God prioritizing more complex entities, then I would suggest the mentally disabled. But even in the case of the mentally disabled it would be a bit simplistic to assume that God would necessarily have to favor a Mensa member over someone with Down’s syndrome or brain damage. An individual with Down’s might very well have more moral and spiritual beauty, and might make a greater contribution to the lives of others than someone who scores high on an IQ test. It’s by no means a sure thing that promoting the self-actualization of a mentally disabled person would be a low priority for God. I can’t really conceive of any category of human beings who would be a low priority for God, except perhaps individuals who are irreversibly comatose. We can hardly fault God for that. If we were in a When Worlds Collide scenario and had very limited space on our rocket ship for the people who would keep humankind alive on another planet I doubt than any of us would not prioritize the conscious over the comatose.

At any rate, personally I’ll opt for the Scylla of a prioritizing God.

Thank you for a thoughtful and civil reply on a topic that all too often leads to uncivil debate. To be quite blunt, in my process view a human person is a process of becoming, and at the early stage of gestation an embryo isn’t yet sufficiently far along in that process to be given the consideration due to a fully-formed human person. A zygote, for instance, is arguably not a person; very arguably not one with the same capacity for suffering or moral status as its mother. It’s not outlandish then to assert that terminating it is not taking the life of a human person. One might argue that it’s taking the life of a potential person, but not that it’s the killing of a current person. As for the argument that abortion is the snuffing out of the human potential of a fetus, well, that will take you down a pretty knotty path, one that’s fraught with difficult questions. How far might that argument hold good? Would it hold good for a just fertilized ovum? Should we consider terminating a just fertilized egg cell to be an act of infanticide like some anti-choice hardliners do? And if terminating fertilized ova is acceptable then we have to ponder where we should draw the line, which means acknowledging that there’s a line to be drawn and that it’s not an absolute that abortion is always an impermissible act of homicide. In any event, the process view is that God is not a soothsayer and can’t know the future potential of a fetus, can’t weigh its long-range potential against the immediate prospects and needs of the higher life form that is a full-fledged human woman; rather, God can only weigh it’s current possibilities and value against the current possibilities and value of the woman carrying it, and that being the case God is arguably liable to prioritize the woman and her needs and rights. At any rate, I have an expansive concept of what it means to be pro-life. Being pro-life for me, and arguably for God, is favoring women having the rights and freedoms that they need to realize an optimally rich and flourishing human life.

I would also argue that the very debate about the issue, its interminable debatableness, it being a debate about something intangible and unsettleable such as the beginning of human life, is also an argument for individuals having the right to decide for themselves whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Clearly the ethically correct position on abortion is not clear to everyone, not the way it’s clear to everyone, tangible, and incontrovertible that bank robbery, arson, and manslaughter are morally wrong and should be outlawed. Therefore it’s not a question of Griffin’s hardcore common sense settling the issue of legality for us the way that it does in the case of the aforementioned felonies. Rather, it’s a question of whose opinion and authority should decide: should government and anti-choice lawmakers have the authority to decide, or should individual pregnant women. To my mind it should be up to pregnant individuals.

This is not because I subscribe to the asocial individualism of our society, I don’t. I’m an adherent of the social-relational ontology of process philosophy, which recognizes that we’re all individuals-in-community, not absolute individuals, and that our choices are never entirely private. However, I would note that although our individual selves are socially created, and although our choices impact and are of legitimate concern to our community, although the collective good is the name of the organic world’s game, the self-actualization and well-being of individual actual entities is also the name of the game and individual rights shouldn’t fall by the wayside on our journey to social-relational enlightenment. An individual’s rights should indeed sometimes take precedence, and to my mind this is obviously the case when it comes to the abortion question.

But on the level of politics the ethical and philosophical dimensions of the abortion question are quite academic. We need to recognize that the anti-choice movement is dominated by folks who are not genuinely motivated by a heartfelt reverence for life. They make this crystal clear with a host of uncompassionate, downright anti-compassionate positions that they take on social issues. The harsh truth be told about them, they’re reactionaries who are deeply unhappy and anxious about the waning of the cultural dominance of their “traditional values” identity group, its loss of social and cultural power. They’re regresives who oppose the positive aspects of modernity, such as feminism and the acceptance of nonnormative others, and desire to create a society that would be a throwback to a time when people with their anti-emancipative attitudes ruled our culture. “Pro-lifeism” is a vehicle for their reactionism, identity politics, and regressivism, for their drive for social and cultural dominance. They use it as a pretext to wage a culture war for control of public policy and women’s bodies. Their true motives boil down to identity, power, and dominance. Theologically, ethically, and philosophically inclined folks such as you and I can debate questions such as when life begins, but at the level of politics, and certainly for the MAPA (make America patriarchal again) crowd it’s really a question of who will control our culture. I for one very much hope that it isn’t going to be the MAPA militants, that they don’t retake the White House in 2024. (Apologies for my opinionated political digression.)

You’re very welcome.

Thank you for the kind feedback. Yes, both a measure of openness and a measure of skepticism or critical thinking (I prefer to think in terms of critical thinking rather than skepticism because I’ve often found that folks who self-identify as, and who pride themselves on being “skeptics” can be just as invested and dogmatic in their disbelief as “believers” can be in their belief) are both ingredient in intelligent reflection on any question.