Charles Bledsoe
Thank you for a very thoughtful and eloquent reply. I don’t take issue with anything that you wrote, nor do I disagree with the emphasis in twelve step programs on transcending a self that is absorbed in personal demons, vulnerability to alcohol, and self-destruction by recognizing what Schleiermacher termed our “dependence” on ultimate reality. What I find fault with in the concept of a “higher power” in the twelve step movement is the idea that one is “powerless”, and that one’s higher power is omnipotent (the adjective “absolute” in the Schliermacherian term “absolute dependence” also suffers from the same drawback, it can also suggest divine omnipotence). That’s not the process perspective. In process theology all actual entities have some measure of power of their own, the power of self-determination and self-creation. And God is not traditionally omnipotent, God’s power to help us is limited by our willingness to cooperate with God. On the one hand, the twelve step philosophy holds that one needs to exercise some personal power by acknowledging one’s need to rely on a higher power, and by taking the step of placing one’s sobriety in the hands of one’s higher power. But the word “powerless”; and the implication of resorting to reliance on a higher power out of a sense of powerlessness, the implication that one’s higher power therefore has all of the power to bring one into recovery (omnipotence), this is where for me, thinking from a process perspective, the language and concept of “higher power” becomes problematic. In my process view God is indeed integral to our self-creativity, including the ability of an alcoholic or addict to create herself anew as a recovering addict, but recovery is actually a process of synergism, it’s achieved and sustained through God and the addict making common cause for the ongoing creative transformation of the addict into a sober individual. I’m sure that many twelve-steppers fully realize this, even though they haven’t heard of process theology, but for some the stress on the powerlessness of the individual, and the power of one’s higher power can perhaps foster an underappreciation of one’s own self-creative power; and promote what Hartshorne termed the theological mistake of attributing omnipotence to God, which then lets us in for all sorts of theological problems (theodicy, and whatnot).
To be clear, none of this is meant to detract from AA’s approach, it clearly has what William James would call cash value, it passes the pragmatism test, having worked for millions of people. It’s just that for me the idea of embracing a cooperative relationship with God is more simpatico than the idea of grudgingly surrendering to divine omnipotence. Personally I like the Whiteheadian language (for describing God) of “great companion” and “fellow-sufferer who understands”, with its emphasis on relationship; more than the term “higher power”, with its emphasis on, well, power. And I think that I’m engaged in more than just quibbling about semantics, our language can profoundly, for good or ill, condition our entire theology and experience of God—and history teaches us that power language can condition theology in some very negative and tragic ways.
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.
Thank you for your reply. It’s very gratifying to know that my posts have been of help to fellow participants in the program. Here are some links to articles that might be of help:
A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity
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.
Thank you for your reply. It’s very gratifying to know that my posts have been of help to fellow participants in the program. Here are some links to articles that might be of help:
A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity
Whitehead vs Spinoza & Deleuze on the virtual
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.
Thank you for your interest in my post. Here are links to the Garland, Wilcox, and Cloots articles, in which they seek to develop a conception of creativity as a reality that transcends individual actual occasions, but without falling into a substance monism like Spinoza’s.
http://www.anthonyflood.com/garlandcreativity.htm
Thank you for your interest in my post. Here are links to the Garland, Wilcox, and Cloots articles, in which they seek to develop a conception of creativity as a reality that transcends individual actual occasions, but without falling into a substance monism like Spinoza’s.
http://www.anthonyflood.com/garlandcreativity.htm
I’d also like to thank you for a great post on the Whiteheadian understanding of empathy. To get technical empathy in Whitehead’s conceptuality is hybrid prehension, the feeling of the feelings of others; and of course prehensions, all types of prehensions are what are involved in the process of concrescence, so certainly empathy can be conceived in terms of its contribution of data to one’s concrescence.
Looking at empathy, and also the formation of a perspective through a process lens the experience of empathy and the formation of a perspective on something includes empathy in this strict sense of the internal taking account of, and integration into one’s concrescence of the pathos of what’s at issue, and the more of such an internal taking account the better.
However, personally I don’t agree that empathy in a Whiteheadian sense is really just confined to internalizing the pathos of something, in my expansive interpretation it’s ideally a leaning into internalizing all of the data, to use a Whiteheadian word, that’s tied in with that pathos. And it follows that the formation of a perspective should not just involve taking account of the most immediately heart strings-pulling data about something, it should involve integrating into the concrescence of our perspective as much relevant data as possible, ideally the whole gestalt of what one is taking a perspective on, which makes for a better perspective in terms of soundness, depth, and ethicality.
For example, when watching a nature program on television about predators our empathy and perspective should not be limited to just favoring the animals we see them kill and consume, but rather should take in the whole of the ecosystem that they’re an integral part of, and which would collapse without them performing their function of controlling the populations of other species, causing a catastrophe for all life in that ecosystem.
With this sense of the importance of a holistic empathy and perspective in mind, and going with your example of the painful tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, we should, with a Whiteheadian emphasis on interrelatedness, and as Pope Francis advises, take into account all of the interrelated elements. We might want to take into account and to heart the following quotes and perspective of Pope Francis:
“I am simply against turning a complex situation into a distinction between good guys and bad guys, without considering the roots”.
“Little Red Riding Hood was good, and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in the abstract,”
“a wise man who speaks little, a very wise man indeed … told me that he was very worried about how Nato was moving. I asked him why, and he replied: ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia'”
“Something global is emerging, with elements that are closely intertwined with each other.”
And after condemning the cruelty of the war he went on to say: “But the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and miss the whole drama that is unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not-prevented”.
What he’s alluding to is the perspective that our media’s narrative of Russia’s morally criminal invasion of Ukraine leaves out its backstory, a backstory which includes the culpability of the Western powers that be who have provocatively expanded NATO right up to the borders of Russia (imagine how the United States would likely react if another superpower established a military presence right next-door in Mexico or Canada!); a perspective in which the relevance of NATO’s expansion isn’t just an excuse used by Russian leaders, but a real factor.
None of this is meant, by either Pope Francis, or me, as a justification of the Russian aggression, or a downplaying of its heinousness. It’s a cruel aggression that doesn’t meet the key criterion of a just war since it wasn’t Russia’s only option. The point of recognizing the culpability of the NATO powers is not to lessen the culpability of Russian leaders, the point is to not allow our leaders to be simplistically and hypocritically righteous and thereby prolong or escalate the situation rather than working for a diplomatic solution. The point is to sincerely seek a diplomatic solution by being honest about the West’s portion of guilt for the war. Guilt here is not a zero-sum proposition, acknowledging the West’s guilt doesn’t absolve Russia, it just enables us to negotiate for peace in a forthright fashion that’s more likely to be successful.
Sorry for going off on a bit of a digression, but the example of the Russia-Ukraine war does, I think, illustrate the importance of a full-scope empathy that takes into account, and into the concrescence of our perspective the complete big picture whose face is the human, or in other cases nonhuman, tragedy of innocent victims. A more technical Whiteheadian would correct me and say that what I’ve really been talking about are other types of prehension and subjectivity, not empathy, but I think in terms of empathy in a strict sense proceeding to incorporate, or being incorporated with, not something that can or does stand apart from the rest of our prehensivity and sensibility.
(Btw, here’s a link to the website of a great prophetic organization called CODEPINK, it’s “a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs” It has a genuinely ethical take on the war: https://www.codepink.org/nato_escalating_towards_russia_war.)
Also, here’s a link to a great, a very informative video:
I would be first in line to purchase a process study Bible! I recently found myself wishing that a Bible like The HarperCollins Study Bible, but from a process perspective, was available. Perhaps Dr. Slettom and Process Century Press might commission some process theologians to produce it!
One insight of process ontology and theology that contributes to both knowledge of self and knowledge of God that immediately leaps to mind is that they’re interrelated for the ontological reason that God, God’s input (of God’s superjective nature, and values, and vision for our lives) is deeply constitutive of our selves. Here we have two radical (from the perspective of conventional ontological and theological conceptualities) realizations about our selves and God: that our selves are not separate and self-made (rather, our selves are made not only by our own choices, but by our choices working with the contribution of God, and other actual entities; our real ontology then is creative interbeing—and so being selfish doesn’t make as much rational sense as we might sometimes think); and the realization that although God is a distinct individual (contra pantheists) God is also not a separate and entirely transcendent entity (rather, God is also an integrant in all of the other actual entities that populate the world). This is just some of the value that process thought can have for those who are seeking to understand self and God more deeply.
This is a bit off-topic, not really about process theology, but I just read Andrew Schwartz’s obit for David Ray Griffin, and clicked on the link for his last book, America on the Brink: How the US Trajectory Led Fatefully to the War in Ukraine, to check out the description and was happy to read a bit of validation for my own minority and controversial point of view. Like me, Dr. Griffin takes the critical perspective that there’s more to the war than merely a villainous Russian political oligarch (Mr. Putin) deciding that he wants to dominate a neighbor; that there’s a backstory (downplayed and denied by our corporate-owned media) in which the West in fact owns much of the responsibility for Mr. Putin’s decision to aggress against Ukraine, repeatedly breaking its promises to Russia and expanding NATO right up to its borders (something that the United States certainly would not accept lying down if the proverbial shoe was on the other foot and Russia or North Korea deployed troops and weapons in Mexico), and provocatively moving in the direction of extending EU and NATO membership to Ukraine despite Russia’s legitimate objections and national security concerns. Of course none of this means that the atrocities being perpetrated by the Russian military in Ukraine aren’t evil, but it does mean that we should be seeking a diplomatic resolution rather than supplying Ukraine with firepower, as if there are no issues to be resolved and militarily defeating the Russian invasion will settle matters. I would recommend Dr. Griffin’s book to everyone here. I expect that it does a brilliant job of debunking the simplistic and dualistic good Ukraine vs. evil Russia picture of the situation that’s being painted for us by our complicit government and media. I’ll post the description and Amazon link below.
The description of Dr. Griffin’s book: “The American government, through its media, has convinced most Americans to support the Ukrainian government. This books shows why this is a mistake: The United States promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand ‘one inch eastward’; and there had been ample warnings, by George Kennan and others, that moving NATO eastward, especially moving into Georgia and Ukraine, would cause problems for Russia.
In Ukraine prior to 2014, Ukrainian and Russian speakers were coexisting tolerably well. But in 2013 and 2014, neocons in Obama’s administration engineered a coup, with help from neo-Nazis, turning Ukraine into a Russia-hating nation. The war in Ukraine began that year (not in 2022, when Russia attacked in order to protect the Russian-speaking regions under attack by the new coup government in Kiev).
Although this book is primarily about the war in Ukraine, it also shows how, in one sense, the war in Ukraine is simply one more instance in the trajectory of American imperialism. as illustrated by previous US interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Greece, Dominican Republic, Panama and Iraq.
In another sense, this war reveals just how committed America is to maintaining a unipolar world order: Because this war illustrates that America is willing to threaten nuclear holocaust. it is almost as if people in the U.S. State Department and military believe that life is not worth living unless the US can control the world.”
Great post. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for your reply. I agree that episodes of “dryness” are bound to occur on the mystic’s journey, and adopting a Whiteheadian process theology isn’t going to prevent them altogether. I would only argue that oftentimes interior vicissitudes such as the dark night of the soul might have been avoided if God wasn’t believed to be a supernatural other, and was instead conceived to be a fellow actual entity who’s internally related to us.
Thank you for your reply. You articulate some sensible and sage thoughts which I can’t take issue with or improve upon. I would just like to clarify that I never meant to suggest that adopting a process theological perspective is a golden ticket to an easy and trouble-free kind of spirituality. I merely hold the perspective that traditional theology, with its transcendentization of God into an unrelatable absolute, and its anthropomorphization of God into a sometimes forbidding man upstairs, makes it more challenging to be in intimate relationship with the divine than need be; and sometimes causes devout men and women to needlessly undergo a dark night of the soul episode (in some cases one which they tragically never escape from, which was the case with Mother Teresa).
I’m open to the possibility of subjective immortality, but I also agree with Whitehead’s view that perhaps it isn’t an important question, that what matters from a cosmological big picture perspective is our participation in, and contribution to the creativity of the universe, our embodiment and enrichment of the creative universe; and that we unquestionably have a kind of immortality, objective immortality, through our addition of our self-creative uniqueness to the world. I also agree with Schubert Ogden that perhaps the desire for subjective immortality, for our ego self to know eternal life is a bit egocentric and amounts to a desire to arrogate a quality that belongs only to God. Below is a link to an interesting Process Studies article that explores the question of subjective immortality in relation to the question of the resurrection of Jesus.
According to process ontology our minds and selves are a series and society of actual entities that are processes of the prehension and synthesis of experience derived from our brains and bodies, from the world, and from their own self-determining subjectivity. This suggests to some process thinkers that when the body perishes and is no longer a source of experience then the mind, which was not a mere epiphenomenon of the brain but was still heavily dependent on the body and brain for so much of its constitutive “data”, must also perish. I suppose a crude analogy might be removing one or two batteries from a device that takes four batteries. It’s simply impossible to turn it on without all four. Similarly, if key sources of the experience that’s integrated into the actual occasions of our minds and selves are removed from the equation, then the continuation of our minds and selves becomes impossible. Consequently the death of our bodies also spells the end of the ongoingness of our subjectivity.
But of course some quite brilliant process thinkers, such as Suchocki and Griffin, have worked out a process eschatology, a theory of subjective immortality in which God so completely prehends our subjectivity that it takes on a new life and continues in God. Although their reasoning is quite cogent, to my mind the theory is still full of questions if not holes. For instance, perhaps I’m being too literal but as I understand God’s internal relations to us (and the rest of the world’s entities) God doesn’t wait until our last moment of life to prehend us, God is ongoingly prehending us from cradle to grave. If God prehends your subjectivity completely from second to second, so to speak, well, then are there 2.27 billion (the number of seconds in an average lifespan) of you residing in God? (Lewis Ford speculated that an actual occasion of human experience has a duration of 20 milliseconds, if the subjectivity of every one of those occasions is fully preserved and ongoing in God then there’s truly an astronomical number of you in God’s consequent nature.) Another problem with subjective immortality within God’s consequent nature is what I’ll term an identity problem. If our bodies and brains are supplanted by God, if God becomes the source of experiential input for our actual occasions, well, that’s going to make for a radically different subjectivity. Despite the continuity between our subjectivity as embodied subjects and our subjectivity as subjects residing in God’s consequent nature, there’s still the question of whether the subject that we become in God’s consequent nature will still be us, given such a radically different environment? Will our identity really survive the transference of our subjectivity into the mind of God? And to what extent will our autonomy be preserved? Will it be preserved enough for it to be the case that we actually continue as individuals in God’s consequent nature? Or will we become integrants in God to such an extent that we’re really no longer ourselves and therefore didn’t really survive death by being prehended into God? Although perhaps less comforting, to my mind objective immortality is a less problematic theory.
Personally, for now, I’m okay with settling for objective immortality. I don’t feel the desire to arrogate to my ego self the immortality that perhaps belongs only to God.