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That Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism has generated much scholarly interest since its inception is well established, according to one measure at least, by the wealth of serious commentary devoted to the explication, criticism, and/or revision of his work. The mainstay of that research, however, has concentrated primarily on only three areas of Whitehead’s philosophy: the process metaphysics of his cosmological scheme, his views concerning the nature of God, and his early work in the philosophy of natural science. As provocative as these areas are to Whitehead’s overall philosophical thought, they by no means exhaust all relevant areas of inquiry. There remain, on the contrary, other aspects of his philosophy which are equally worthy of serious study, but which for the most part have been either ignored altogether or only partially examined.

Undoubtedly the most neglected aspect of Whitehead’s copious philosophical system is his social philosophy, in general, and his views on civilization, in particular. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that no other major area of Whitehead’s philosophy has received less attention than has his theory of civilized society. Of the many issues yet to be adequately investigated in this area is the principal question concerning the metaphysical foundation, and thereby justification, for civilized society according to Whitehead’s organic cosmology. More specifically, the question comes down to how well a civilized society exemplifies the ultimate principles and derivative notions of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme. The short version of the question, and the one I will address here, is simply: What is the metaphysical status of a civilized society? In other words, what is its classification as an existent thing?¹

First of all, there is no doubt but that Whitehead himself took it as a matter of course that sociology and cosmology should be not only compatible but also fundamentally consistent lines of inquiry. Though the objects of study for each of the two disciplines are different, nonetheless both should be answerable to the same philosophical scheme, and appropriately enough we find in the very opening chapter to Process and Reality just such an assertion on Whitehead’s part -- note the justification which Whitehead offers for his cosmology. He writes:

Accordingly every aspect of human experience, including civilized experience, is to be interpreted by virtue of this one general scheme, and thus "no entity," including a civilized society, is to be omitted as an instance which exemplifies the metaphysics therein entailed. For Whitehead, human activity has just as much place in the "system of the universe" as does any other type of event, and thus any ‘coherent and applicable system of general ideas’ designed to explain that universe can only be finally justified to the extent that human civilized activity is likewise interpretable in terms of that universal system. It follows then that Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism is, in part at least, an overt attempt to situate ontologically that type of entity known as a ‘civilized society’ within the framework of a universally consistent metaphysics.

Now it stands to reason that, given Whitehead’s own perspective of the correlation between cosmology and sociology, the key to resolving the issue as to the status of a civilized society should be sought in the context of that more general metaphysical scheme. In particular, the key to our question can be found, I believe, in Whitehead’s appropriation and adaptation of the concept ‘society’, for by his choice of the term "society" as the generic designation for a certain type of existent thing, i.e., to denote a social nexus, Whitehead laid the foundation in terms of which any such entity is essentially referent. Of this type of existent he includes such things as an electron, a molecule, a rock, an animal, or an individual human being (in ordinary language, any ‘physical object’). And technically speaking for Whitehead, any such ontologically derivative and composite thing is simply a ‘society.’²

That Whitehead should have borrowed from human experience the term "society" and then employed it systematically to refer to a certain type of ‘derivative existent’ without intending any metaphysical implication in the context of human social affairs, would have been not only careless on his part, but what is worse, fraudulent. And to be sure, Whitehead is not playing a word game here. Thus by no arbitrary whim, a civilized society falls under this same ontological classification, at least in more than merely a nominal sense. The pertinent question then becomes: To what extent is a civilized society a real instance of this more technical class of derivative existent? In other words, in what sense metaphysically is a civilized society a Society per se? Is the correspondence between these two types of entities one of analogy, equivalence, or identity?

In terms of Whitehead’s organic metaphysics, the most consistent of the three possible correlations between a civilized society and a Society per se is an equivalent status. For the correspondence between the two to be identical, a civilized society would have to be the exact same kind of entity as some other type of Society, inanimate or personal for example, which of course is not the case. (A civilized society is not a chair or type of vertebrate.) Besides, to treat a civilized society as purely the same as any other type of event in nature would be to downgrade the significance of one of those things Whitehead finds most peculiar to the human species, namely, civilization. On the other hand, if the correlation were simply analogical, then no coherent metaphysical connection could be maintained respecting the affinity between human activity and the rest of the natural world, and thus mankind is exiled from nature and a civilized society is merely an aberration of human invention, a consequence which is completely contrary to Whitehead’s naturalistic view of sociology.³

Thus the only coherent and applicable option, given Whitehead’s assumption, it seems to me, is to argue that a civilized society is generically the same as any other Society even though it is distinctive unto itself. That is, a civilized society and a Society per se are equivalent types of entities which only vary to an unusual degree. Or alternatively stated, a civilized society is simply a special case of the generic type. Given the issue as now formulated, the most profitable route of inquiry will thus be to establish this equivalent metaphysical status by evaluating a civilized society against the same basic principles which ground all Societies.⁴

As a preliminary point it is worth noting that neither a civilized society nor a Society per se is to be classified as an instance of what Whitehead calls an "actual entity" or primary existent. At the very minimum both a civilized society and a Society per se are entities which derive their reality from constituents which are ontologically more ultimate: a civilized society from the interrelationships of individual human beings, and a Society per se from the interrelations of actual entities. Thus the status of a civilized society is equivalent to that of a Society per se in that both types of ‘entities’ are composed of constituents which are ontologically superior to the whole of which each of those constituents is a component. That is, just as a Society is metaphysically a derivative type of existent inasmuch as its constituent actual entities are ontologically ultimate, so in an equivalent fashion, a civilized society is metaphysically secondary inasmuch as human beings are more real, ontologically speaking, than is the larger civilized society. Thus each type of entity is a dependent existent, one which derives its being from the actuality of its constituents.

The correlation here is more than merely analogical since in neither case would either type of entity exist as such were it not for this ontological dependence of the whole on its parts. On the other hand, the correlation is not identical at least for the reason that the respective constituents of each are not ontologically of the same kind. Simply put, an individual human being is not an actual entity, and thus a civilized society is not a Society per se, literally speaking.

But even as derivative types of existents, a civilized society and a Society per se are nonetheless both real in this secondary or dependent sense, and thus metaphysically speaking, they both must belong to some "category of existence other than that reserved for a primary existent. What then is that other category? In particular, to what ontological category does a Society belong, and in what manner does a civilized society meet those same metaphysical standards?

As a derivative type of existent thing every Society, of whatever kind, is properly classified by Whitehead as an instance of the category which he terms "Nexus, or Public Matters of Fact."⁵ Presented as one of eight derivative categories of existence the concept "nexus" denotes that type of entity which is brought into being as the relational complex of two or more actual entities grouped together into a composite whole. The so constituted compounded existent thing is a ‘nexus’ whose constituent parts are actual entities related to one another in such fashion that their interconnections form a real and particular unity of relationship. The essential feature of a nexus which qualifies it as an existent thing is then precisely the composite unity brought about through the relational "mutual immanence" of its many constituents.⁶

Equally important, the ontological status of a nexus must differ essentially from that ascribed to an actual entity. And this difference is adequately established when Whitehead asserts that a nexus arises as a "particular fact of togetherness" (PR 20/30), e.g., a nexus comes into being as an entity constituted by the relations of mutually interacting entities of a more primary type. Be it that the real particularity of a nexus is then a relational unity, and not an atomic unity (which is the case with actual entities), clearly denotes a fundamental metaphysical distinction. Nonetheless, a nexus is a real and particular existent thing, even though it is such in an ontologically dependent sense.

A civilized society is likewise constituted as a composite and relational unity in that its primary constituents, individual human beings, are interrelated socially via this same principle of mutual immanence. According to Whitehead’s cosmology, the ultimate ground of every type of physical relation, and thus the basis of any type of social relationship, be it human or otherwise, is to be derived from the generic character of experience itself, i.e., from the primacy of the subject-object relation as constituted in experience. It is, he further clarifies, by the primarily emotive nature of this relation of subject and object in experience that there arises a "conformity of feeling," a "sympathetic bond," between the two relata found in experience. As he writes of this most fundamental form of relationship:

In the simplest terms then, human social experience is a form of togetherness in which there is a sharing of feeling, a concordance of emotion, between two or more individuals who become immanently related one to another by the very character of their mutual experience.

Because the primary disposition of human experience necessarily entails this essential feature of mutual immanence, the basis of all human social relationships is, for Whitehead, likewise primarily emotive. As he addresses the question, human societies are founded on "emotions of respect and friendliness between man and man -- the notion of brotherhood. These emotions are at the basis of all social groups" (AI 37). Whitehead reiterates the same point by stating that human social development "depended on the slow growth of mutual respect, sympathy, and general kindness" (AI 100). The operative concept here is "cooperation." Indeed, as Whitehead is convinced, all ecological systems and by extension all naturally occurring social groups of whatever type, human included, are fostered upon the principle of cooperation, and not competition or antagonism. Force, in any of its various forms, is decidedly anti-social, for Whitehead.⁷ Thus rooted in human emotional and instinctive experience, human social relations are not principally rational or artificially instituted, but instead are founded on natural feelings of accommodation and mutual beneficence.

Derived as it is from the cooperative nature of human beings then, a human society comes into existence, is maintained, and continues to develop, insofar as individuals are able to interrelate with one another in ways which are reciprocally sustaining. In this way, social cooperation among human beings brings about the cohesion, and therein the unity, required of a society by interrelating the personal experience of individuals in such a way so as to emotionally bond those individuals together. The composite and relational unity of a civilized society is thus constituted in terms of the mutual immanence of individual human beings related to one another by the ‘sympathetic’ character of their experience. The correlation to a Society per se is more than simply analogical in these terms since the subject-object structure of experience is generic to all things, and yet neither are a civilized society and a Society per se identical, owing to the unique type of experience manifested by human social interaction. Thus, according to the general conditions set forth by the category Nexus, a Society per se and a civilized society are equivalent ontologically.

But as an existent thing, a Society per se, and likewise a civilized society, is more than simply an indeterminate assortment of relationships, something greater than merely a ‘composite togetherness.’ Both types of entities manifest, according to Whitehead, the special quality of ‘social order.’ A Society is, in Whitehead’s scheme, a type of nexus wherein the relations between its constituents exhibit an ordered relatedness to one another, i.e., some common pattern of relations is manifest wherein the nexus takes on the additional feature of social unity which thus constitutes it as a social nexus, or in Whitehead’s terms, a Society per se. He writes: "The term ‘society’ will always be restricted to mean a nexus of actual entities which are ‘ordered’ among themselves" (PR 89/136); and again, "A Society is a nexus which ‘illustrates’ or ‘shares in,’ some type of ‘Social Order’" (AI 203). Whitehead’s concept of Society thus explicitly calls attention to the essential orderliness of social relations; that is, groups of existing things are related socially because those things share a particular order among themselves.

The concepts of ‘social relatedness’ and ‘order’ are inextricably connected in Whitehead’s cosmology such that in effect the very notion of ‘society’ is intelligible only in terms of the creation of those types of relationships which exhibit a ‘common pattern of togetherness’ between things. Succinctly stated, a ‘society’ presupposes groups of existing things ordered one to another. Whitehead writes: "the general notion of Society . . . introduces the general consideration of types of order, and the genetic propagation of order" (AI 203). Accordingly, Societies arise in the scheme of things, they literally come into being, solely by virtue of the order that is manifested and propagated as actual entities mutually interrelate.⁸

In the case of a civilized society, the principles of ‘order’ and ‘genetic propagation’ are no less fundamental as regards its status as an existent thing than are those same principles required of a Society per se. What Whitehead offers to effect this particular translation of cosmology and sociology is the reintroduction of a theory of "social custom" to serve as the founding principle of order in human society. He writes:

In the generic sense, for Whitehead, the customs of any given civilized society function as the requisite ‘patterns of relationship,’ which not only define but also substantiate the particular order of that society. The various and diverse customs of a civilized society, be they economic, political, religious, etc., essentially organize the assorted activities of individuals into determinate and meaningful relationships, and thus there is ‘order’ in civilized society. In the absence of such established social customs, a civilized society would be merely a random group of individuals inadvertently related -- a disorganized, perhaps even chaotic, gathering of humanity. In short, there is order in civilized society because there is custom, Whitehead maintains.

As such, these self-generated, widely adherent, and historically enduring traditions of society, whether formally or informally instituted, are, in a literal sense, the ‘defining characteristic’ of civilized society. And inasmuch as the individual members of society to whatever degree mutually and steadfastly enact these customs, there is an efficacious transmission, i.e., propagation, of social order throughout civilized society over time. The customs of any society are thus a shared and likewise inherited form of social order as is the case with any other form of order in any other Society, notwithstanding the peculiarities of human social experience. Accordingly, the ‘order’ of a civilized society is ‘genetically propagated’ in terms of commonly accepted and habitually enacted social practices which are passed on from generation to generation, and thus in the most general terms a civilized society is metaphysically constituted as a ‘social nexus’ in a fashion equivalent to that of a Society per se. ¹⁰

Several other points of equivalence are relevant in comparing the status of a civilized society to that of a Society per se. These have to do with the closely allied qualities of endurance, identity, agency, and individuality.

First, concerning endurance, Whitehead’s metaphysics makes it clear that the quality of endurance is something which pertains exclusively to the nature of a socially composite entity, albeit a Society per se or a civilized society. Fundamentally, the quality of endurance refers to the continuity of order propagated among a plurality of things and not to the simple duration, i.e., occurrence, of social order in any single occasion. Whitehead writes: ". . . endurance is the process of continuously inheriting a certain identity of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events" (SMW 108). The endurance of a Society is thus founded on the repetitious enactment and propagation of its defining characteristic, a ‘continuity of pattern’ genetically transmitted among member constituents. The realized pattern of relations, or defining characteristic, is re-enacted customarily (to borrow a phrase) and thereby endures -- is continuous -- throughout the whole composite set of relations which constitutes the Society.

Whitehead further elaborates the status afforded a Society as an enduring existent by citing both its essential and accidental qualities, noting therewith its unique metaphysical status as compared to that of an actual entity. He writes:

That a Society has both essential and accidental qualities thus enables it to be a type of entity which endures throughout change as a "complete existence" with an ongoing historical development of its own: it remains what it is essentially and yet changes accidentally in "reaction to changing circumstances." In contrast, the constituent actual entities of a Society are not historical entities since they neither endure nor change.¹¹

With the distinction that a Society has this historical dimension to its existence, but that actual entities do not, it follows that a Society is in some manner a self-sustaining process which endures beyond the individual activity of any number of its member constituents. The actual entities of a Society come and go, as they become and perish. but the Society to which they belong carries on despite the transitions in membership which occur constantly. In this sense, the defining characteristic of a Society transcends any one set of relations pertaining at any one moment of the Society’s existence; it pertains instead to all moments in the life of the Society so long as it endures as what it is essentially.

In an equivalent light, a civilized society is constituted as an enduring, i.e., historically continuous, entity which manifests a definitive set of social relations that transcends the invariable changes in its membership. The factor in human social experience which Whitehead identifies as responsible for generating this correlative kind of ‘continuity’ is routine, namely, the repetitive activity of daily social intercourse. It is, he reasons, by way of the day-to-day repetition of commonly accepted and uniformly executed social practices that there arises a certain consistency, and thus persistence, of social order in society. And even though for Whitehead human social interrelationships are primarily instinctive (owing to the ‘sympathetic’ nature of human experience), nonetheless it requires the repetitive occurrence of inherited social activity to establish a social order stable enough to secure the continued social interaction of individuals, and therein the endurance of society as a whole. Simply put for Whitehead, routine begets continuity and continuity yields endurance. Thus, in terms of the enduring temporal continuity produced by routine, a society has a history of its own.

So crucial is the factor of routine to the endurance of social order within a civilized society that Whitehead quite earnestly asserts that, "Routine is the god of every social system. . . . Unless society is permeated, through and through, with routine, civilization vanishes" (AI 90). Consequently, without routine, social relations within a society would be capricious and chaotic, subject to the fluctuations of individual whim or the expediencies of the moment. Indeed, without the factor of routine, activity in a society would not be ‘social’ as such, in Whitehead’s terms, since it would lack the overriding order requisite to ground that activity as essentially interrelational in a social context. Accordingly, no matter how social human beings may be by nature, the endurance of society, the ‘continuity’ of the ‘social composite,’ is founded outright in the routine re-enactment of standardized social practices. It follows too that because of the enduring continuity of its now definitive social order, the society as a whole transcends individual constituent activity and survives in its own right despite the constant changes in its membership. The quality of endurance, therefore, is no less relevant to the status of a civilized society than it is to that of a Society per se.

The issue concerning the extent to which a civilized society manifests a certain ‘identity’ of social character -- that is, the extent to which it is a self-identical entity -- can likewise be resolved by comparison to a Society per se. In that both a civilized society and a Society per se are defined in terms of the particular social order which is dominant therein, and as existents are derived wholly from the immanent interrelations of their respective constituents, it follows that both types of entities exhibit only a relational self-identity. As Whitehead writes: "The self-identity of a Society is founded upon the self-identity of its defining characteristic, and upon the mutual immanence of its occasions" (AI 204). Thus the identity of any ‘socially composite’ entity is completely relative to the endurance of an established social order and dependent upon individual constituent interaction, and cannot under any circumstance be regarded as something which is manifested unto itself. Every Society is, after all, an ontologically derivative type of entity.

Likewise, a civilized society is never a self-sustaining entity apart from the ordered relationships of individual human beings immanently engaged in social activities, even though its definitive social order is historically propagated. A civilized society does endure, its social order is continuous, it does enjoy a history, but that does not entitle it to an identity independent of the interrelations of its constituents. In short, no socially composite entity is an atomic entity, and thereby both a civilized society and a Society per se are never self-identical in an absolute sense.

Civilized societies do come to manifest various socially peculiar characteristics, in some cases extremely divergent and seemingly strange, as do some Societies, but no social characteristics can ever be more fully exhibited than in the individual persons who enact those peculiarities, and thus the identity of a civilized society is always relative to those enactments. Commenting on American society, Whitehead writes: "There is no one American [social] experience other than the many experiences of individual Americans" (ESP 53, bracket word substitution). So it is with the identity of any civilized society, as it is with that of all Societies.

The problem of causal agency, i.e., the question of whether it is the larger social whole or the individual constituent which is the primary efficacious factor in society, is also relevant metaphysically. Certainly a Society per se is really only efficacious through the coordinated agency of its constituent actual entities, for whatever activity be manifested in the whole is ultimately to be derived directly from the interrelated and creative activity of its constituents. Whitehead’s ontological principle guarantees this eventuality. As he writes: "But [a] Society is only efficient through its individual members" (PR 91/139); and elsewhere: "The composite group illustrates its qualities passively. The activity belongs to the individual actualities" (AI 213).

Equally so, a civilized society, as one whole and regardless of its particular political orientation, exerts its influence solely in terms of the individual effort of persons, acting either alone or in concert with one another. And while the social customs, civil laws, and authoritatively sanctioned principles of a society can be said to have determinative influence on the social practices and development of a society, still it is the case that these social customs, etc., have that efficacy only as enacted by individuals in daily social intercourse. Even the compelling power of legal statutes is only as effective as is the action of those individuals whose task it is to judicially enforce those civil laws, or as the laws themselves are commonly upheld by the citizenry. Speaking of the efficacy of a society as a whole, via its inherited social customs and the like, Whitehead makes the following point: "In the end nothing is effective except massively coordinated inheritance" (AI 64). Thus the inheritance of acquired social order, in all its forms, must be "massively coordinated" in order to be effective. In other words, it is only through the coordinated activity of individual persons acting concordantly that the social order of society has any real and lasting efficacy at all. The agency of the larger social whole is thus to be compared to an ensemble of persons acting as one voice: an activity manifested as a whole, but one derived from and enacted by its parts; one voice made up of many separate voices, socially interrelated.

Another point of equivalence concerns the quality of ‘individuality,’ i.e., whether or not a civilized society is an individual entity in some sense, and if so, of what sort. According to Whitehead’s cosmology, there are three fundamental types of individuality manifested in the natural order of things. First, there is the inorganic form of individuality in which the composite whole is merely the sum of its parts, i.e., the entity in question is a simple ‘aggregate,’ a non-individual, so to speak. Second, there are basically two organic forms: the vegetative and the animate, the lower of which manifests a type of ‘collective’ individuality, ("a tree is a democracy," as Whitehead is fond of saying); and the higher animate form, in which the whole manifests a centrally unified field of experience wherein ‘subjective’ individuality is the norm. (These distinctions as to types of composite individuality are admittedly simplistic, but they are nonetheless consistent with Whitehead’s naturalistic approach to metaphysics.)

Within the range of these three options, the individuality of a civilized society correlates most appropriately to that of the collective individual, the intermediate type. The social unity of a civilized society is certainly more complex and interrelated than that which a mere aggregate of parts would allow. A civilized society is at least something greater than a simple mixture of homogenized persons. For one, the members of a civilized society are mutually and immanently related to one another in a host of ways: personally, religiously, economically, politically, etc.; each member of society is socialized, to varying degrees, in terms of the efficacy of prevalent social customs, institutions, etc.; and functionally speaking, a civilized society is itself a vast network of interdependent activities and enterprises, civilized and non-civilized. Thus a civilized society does manifest some form of real individual unity.

On the other hand, it is certainly the case that a civilized society does not exhibit any type of overriding unity greater than that which is manifest by the many individual efforts of its constituents. There is no centrally consolidated social experience which has dominion over the affairs of society as a whole; and consequently, a civilized society is not a subject as such, either structurally or functionally. In technical Whiteheadian terms, there is no ‘regnant nexus’ into which and out of which flows the experience of society, and thus there is no subjective unity characterizing the whole. While there is continuity of function in a civilized society, it is the kind of continuity defined by a plurality of interrelated things and not the continuity of any one single individual.

Thus utilizing Whitehead’s distinctions, a civilized society is best described as a collective individual, or communal whole, as opposed to either an aggregational composite or a subjective unity. To return to a metaphor already employed, a civilized society is, in effect, an ensemble of separate but variously interrelated human constituents and social activities, a ‘social assemblage’ of many voices acting in consonance with one another. It is a ‘social event’ founded on the basic need for human beings to interrelate with others of their kind within the context of a nourishing social environment; it is a ‘living-togetherness’ constituted of individual human beings sharing a common and, to some extent, mutually satisfying form of social experience. From its instinctively cooperative origins in human nature to the self-initiated perfection of its civilized enterprises, a civilized society is, in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, a community of social beings who belong to one another essentially. And although it is true that different civilized societies manifest varying degrees of ‘communal unity’ depending on their particular social-historical situation, and/or political orientation, still it is the case that there is a general metaphysical equivalence in this regard.

In a number of essential ways then, a civilized society is metaphysically equivalent to a Society per se, and thus its status as an existent thing is explicable in terms of Whitehead’s organic cosmological scheme. A civilized society is, in the universal hierarchy of social order, simply a particular form of social creativity made uniquely distinctive by human effort. Consequently, a civilized society is but one further instantiation, among a myriad of such instances, of the ultimate creativity which underlies the very process of the world -- it is the realization in human social experience of the inherent principle of "creativity-one-many" at work in all things. It is fitting then that the final issue to be resolved regarding the status of a civilized society should concern the question of the creativity of one and many, e.g., is a civilized society a ‘one’ or a ‘many’ metaphysically?

Rightfully enough, according to Whitehead’s cosmology, the primary exemplification of the creative interplay of one and many is to be found in the becoming and perishing of an actual entity: each such primary existent a "conjunctive unity" arising out of the "disjunctive diversity" of things, which in its turn takes its place among that plurality as the ground of further such acts of creation. As Whitehead so aptly explains it, "The many become one and are increased by one" (PR 21/32). In short, the ultimate creativity of things is the process of many becoming one’ and ‘one perishing into many’. So too at the level of social interaction, the world of Societies, the creativity of one and many is not lost to the nature of things. Every Society is, although derivatively, a composite unity which arises out of the social interrelation of its many diverse constituents, which in its turn perishes, thereby adding to the ongoing creativity of things in its own fashion.

But there is an essential difference in that the functions of a Society and that of an actual entity are reversed in this creative process of one and many. An actual entity is a concrete unity, self-creative, ontologically primary, and thus a one of many, whereas a Society is a composite whole, created in terms of the interaction of its constituents, ontologically secondary, and thus a one in many. To put it another way, every Society is a relational one constituted solely as a plurality of actual existents, while each actual entity is an atomic one constituted out of a diversity of potential existents. Thus a Society is actually many and potentially one, while an actual entity is actually one and potentially many. The creative interplay of one and many is real in both worlds, but inverted metaphysically.

The basic correlation of Society and civilized society is again fundamentally equivalent as regards the issue of one and many. A civilized society as one is actually many, and as many it is potentially one, or what amounts to the same thing, a civilized society is really many and ideally one. In the first place, a civilized society is a secondary type of entity derived exclusively from the social interrelationships of its constituents, and is not, therefore, a concrete one in any sense of the term. Since each of the constituent human beings of a civilized society is itself more ultimate metaphysically than is the larger social whole, it follows that a civilized society is really only a relational unity composed of many individuals related as one socially. The individual constituents are the actual primary units of a civilized society, and therefore the larger society exists solely as a ‘composite one’ and not as an indivisible or atomic one. The real unity of a civilized society is vested in the actual interrelations of many individuals, and not in itself as such. It is real in the actuality of many, but ideally one insofar as the many individuals of society strive to create a social environment which is truly civilized.

So too, the qualities of endurance, identity, and efficacy, intrinsic to the nature of a civilized society, each exhibit the essential social creativity of one and many.

A civilized society is indeed an enduring, and thus historical, entity which survives changes in membership, but it does so only by virtue of the continuity generated by many actual individuals passing on the customs of society from generation to generation. While the quality of endurance does pertain to the society as a whole and not to its constituents per se, nonetheless the reality of that endurance is vested in the many who are solely responsible for bringing about the continuity of social order which ensures the endurance of civilized society. Endurance is made real for the whole by the many through the routine of individual social interaction. Thus as one, a civilized society endures in the many, and as many, it survives as one; in the many, it actually endures, and as one, it endures ideally.

The identity of a civilized society is likewise completely a matter of the actuality of many, and the potentiality of one, for whatever distinctive qualities a society may manifest it does so purely in terms of the various social enactments and characteristics exhibited by the many individuals who populate that society. The uniformity of its social identity always involves abstraction from the many, and is never concrete in and of itself. As one, its identity is exhibited in the many, and in the many, it is identified as one.

The agency of any socially composite entity, a civilized society included, is entirely to be derived from the coordinated activity of its many constituents, and never by any simple act of the whole. The efficacy of a civilized society, regardless of its apparent authority in the affairs of individuals, is in reality nothing but the cooperative agency of many persons functioning, either officially or informally, to carry on the daily exercise of accepted practice. And apart from the actuality of such individual effort, the efficacy of society is only a potency waiting to be realized. In the many lies the reality of social action; in the one lies the potentiality.

Lastly, the collective individuality, or solidarity, of a civilized society is realized as one community of many persons. It is a one constituted by the immanent and mutually satisfying relationships of unique human beings living together socially, working in concert to attain the civilized aims of Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace. It is a one founded on the real needs of the many, and a many aspiring to the ideal of one.

In sum, for a civilized society the reality of its existence is the social togetherness of many, and its ideality is their civilized perfection as one. So it is that a civilized society, itself a one living in the many, and a many striving to live as one, comes to exemplify the ultimate creativity of things.

Thus, according to the cosmological scheme as laid out by Whitehead in the Philosophy of Organism, a civilized society is metaphysically equivalent to a Society per se in the most basic and essential respects, and therein its generic status as an existent thing is secured. But in what way is a civilized society a special case of Society? What is its distinctive status? What is its precise, albeit unique, classification? Perhaps the simplest and most apt designation would be: a civilized society is a civilized Society.

Notes

1The only major work to date dealing with the metaphysics of Whitehead’s philosophy of civilization is David Hall’s book, The Civilization of Experience: A Whiteheadian Theory of Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1973). A highly competent and generally successful study, Hall’s work attempts to establish the fundamental connection between Whitehead’s cosmology and sociology by utilizing the "primary analogate" (root metaphor) approach to interpret Whitehead’s speculative metaphysical scheme in the context of his theory of culture.

2Whitehead identifies a number of different types of "societies," for instance, corpuscular, structured (both non-living and living), and personal -- all of which vary according to complexity and function. A rock, for example, is an inorganic structured society, while a human being is an organic complex structured society that includes a regnant personal society. Because the term "society" has a highly technical meaning in Whitehead’s cosmology, a meaning which differs significantly from common parlance, it will be necessary to note that distinction in the present discussion so as not to confuse their respective contexts. To this end, whenever the term "society" is employed in Whitehead’s technical sense it will be written as "Society," and when employed in the more standardized sense as "society." (This same stylistic device will also be adopted when quoting Whitehead directly, as was his practice on occasion.)

31n Whitehead’s cosmology the universe is conceived in terms of a structure of background-foreground "layers of social order" beginning with the most general, and thus most simple, level of the extensive continuum, ascending through consecutive layers of non-living and living things, culminating in the most specialized, and thus most complex, level of human activity, each more specialized level in the foreground presupposing the more general levels in the background. Human social life is thus essentially derived from more fundamental types of animate social order, although it is unique in many respects.

4No attempt will be made to correlate the status of a civilized society to any particular type of Society -- organic structured Society, for instance -- though that might be interesting. Instead, the determination as to status will be made in terms of the most general features common to all Societies, thus situating a civilized society within the same basic metaphysical scheme.

5Note that the term "public" is another example of Whitehead borrowing something from human social experience for metaphysical purposes, and note too how that appropriation is relevant to his use of the term "society" in this same context.

6 Whitehead writes: "Any set of actual occasions are united by the mutual immanence of occasions, each in the other. . . . Any set of occasions, conceived as thus combined into a unity, will be termed a nexus" (AI 197); and also, "[the] sole principle of unity [of a nexus) is derived from the bare fact of mutual immanence" (AI 203, brackets added).

7See SMW pp. 205-6, and AI chapter V.

8So essential is the occurrence of order to the constitution of a Society as an existent thing that Whitehead contends, "a non-social nexus is what answers to the notion of ‘chaos’" (PR 72/112).

9Just as Whitehead’s organic cosmology is a refutation of Newtonian material atomism with respect to the problem of "simple location," so in a correlative fashion his organic sociology stands in sharp contrast to the modern contractual theory of civil society, which conceives of individuals as autonomous existents externally related only by agreement. The refutation in one context necessitates a parallel refutation in the other. For a masterful account of the value of social custom to the life and well-being of society, see George Allan’s book, The Importances of the Past: A Meditation on the Authority of Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986). Not only immensely insightful and beautifully written, it also enlists a Whiteheadian perspective of the issue.

10In a narrower sense, the order of a human society is said to be ‘civilized,’ as opposed to merely social, when, according to Whitehead, that society is able to instantiate and sustain, at least to some degree, five characteristics deemed essential to the realization of a higher, more ideal social order. These civilized qualities are Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace. See AI. part IV.

11An actual entity does not endure as such, since its process of becoming is epochal in nature (it has duration, but not endurance), and every actual entity is ‘changeless’ inasmuch as each is the self-same individual. Given this contrast between a Society and an actual entity, Whitehead is thus able to assert, "there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming" (PR 35/53), respectively.

In 1924 Whitehead retired from a long and distinguished teaching career in mathematics, mathematical physics and logic, first as a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884-1910), and subsequently at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and in the University of London. Remarkably, however, Whitehead essentially began a second career in philosophy at Harvard University during 1924-25 at the age of sixty-three.

The question I am tackling in this paper is the following one: is a third career for Whitehead in the making? His thought has in recent years begun to travel back across the Atlantic to Europe. Some works of Whitehead have been translated into German, French and Dutch; and international conventions have been organized in Leuven (1978), Bonn (1981), Bad Homburg (1983), and Sigriswil, Switzerland (1987). A Hegel-Whitehead symposium organized at Fordham University has brought together European and American Whiteheadians in a fruitful dialogue. Smaller meetings of process people have also taken place. The proceedings of those conferences are published. A European Society for Process Thought was formed in 1978, and in Leuven a Center for Process Thought was established. Notwithstanding all these, it is difficult to decide whether Whitehead has become "a classic" in Europe, and to assess in a sober way how much of an impact he has made on the European cultural scene.

In certain respects, the interest of European philosophers in the thought of A.N. Whitehead has proven often to be (after the title of a recent popular movie) a "Fatal Attraction." (I owe these stories to George Lucas.) In 1956, Professor John E. Smith of Yale University paid a visit to the venerable Martin Heidegger. Their conversation lasted for three hours, during which time Heidegger expressed his passionate interest in turning toward a new, post-Hegelian pursuit of a philosophy of nature. Smith responded that in America A.N. Whitehead had already spawned such a movement. Heidegger was most pleasantly surprised and interested, and expressed a desire to read some of Whitehead’s philosophy. It was, in fact, at Heidegger’s request that the tremendous project of translating Process and Reality (PR) was begun at Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt). However, before the translation could be made available to him, Heidegger died.

The great French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, had read Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (SMW) while on an exploration in the Gobi desert. He had vowed to continue the study of this great thinker "when time permitted." In 1955, Teilhard came to New York to begin a period of retirement and study; in his case of books were many works of Whitehead which he now planned to study closely. Unfortunately, in 1955, Teilhard died.

Merleau-Ponty, toward the end of his life, read a French translation of The Function of Reason (FR) and declared Whitehead to be one of the most original and creative philosophers he had ever read. He planned to embark on a further study of Whitehead’s works; but unfortunately, at that time, he died.

Let me now trace my personal way to process thought. In 1965 I finished a doctoral dissertation on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I was truly interested in the so-called "later Merleau-Ponty" who was in search of a new metaphysics. Only in The Visible and the Invisible (VI) some sketchy outlines can be found. There are also the "Résumés des Cours" (notes from the lectures) and there, in a rather astonishing way. Merleau-Ponty turns to a philosophical study of Nature, mentioning such authors as Schelling and even Whitehead (only once). At that time I was also looking for some new inspiration on how to think about God, in a way which would not imply a complete break with my own philosophical and theological tradition.

I still remember vividly how a friend of mine during a conference mentioned his recent discovery of two books which seemed to be quite inspiring to him: Schubert M. Ogden’s The Reality of God (RG) and John B. Cobb’s A Christian Natural Theology Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead (CNT). In 1967 Robinson’s second book, Exploration into God (EG) appeared. This book is frankly imbued with the process spirit.

In 1972 I met for the first time real process people, such as John B. Cobb and Lewis Ford, at the Convention of the Learned Societies in the field of Religion, held in Los Angeles. In 1973 I attended the Theological Institute, organized by Bernard Lee, in Saint Louis, Missouri. This Institute included lecturers such as Eugene Fontinell, Bernard Loomer and Charles Hartshorne himself. In 1974 I was invited to teach a course on process thought at the University of San Francisco. During that same year I spent a research semester at Claremont. While there I was urged to participate in the East-West Conference in Honolulu. There I met Japanese scholars, mostly Buddhists, who were also interested in process thought. Many of them later came to Leuven.

That semester, of course, had been a great breakthrough in my interest in process thought. I started teaching, lecturing and writing on it. At that time almost nothing on process thought had been written in Dutch, so that we even had to invent the terminology, which was not always easy. Students of mine, such as Professor André Cloots, Abraham Koothottil, James Eiswert, Paul Thelakat and many others started to be interested in process thought and wrote doctoral dissertations on the subject.

At Claremont I had discovered such a wealth of documents on process thought that I really felt that something analogous -- although far more modest -- should be created in Leuven. This has been the origin of the Louvain Center for Process Thought, which is flourishing, thanks to the help of the Claremont Center.

In 1978 Charles Hartshorne accepted the invitation to lecture for one semester at Leuven. On the occasion of the conferral of the honorary degree upon Charles Hartshorne, we tried to bring together all the process people we could contact in Europe for a weekend devoted to Whitehead s Legacy. The proceedings of this colloquium have been published as a volume in a (modest) series of publications, issued by the Center in Leuven. During that weekend the European Society for Process Thought (ESPT) was created, with Charles Hartshorne as the honorary president. From then on Leuven assumed the responsibility and the chair of the ESPT.

The Center in Leuven has hosted many scholars, from all over the world. In the meantime, interest in process thought has emerged in Germany: H. Holz and E. Wolf-Gazo organized the Bonn Conference, and F. Rapp and R. Wiehl the Bad Homburg Conference.

II

Now I would like to state in a more philosophical way what process thought can mean to us in Europe.

In a remarkable survey of recent publications on Whitehead, Werner Stegmaier (AZP13:61-77), Bonn, tackles the question as to whether Whitehead can be considered a classic in philosophy on the European scene. What would be a classic? Three things are necessary. An author should not be read only in a limited circle, but important connections should be made with the classical authors in the field. A philosophical classic should contribute in a significant way not only to the problems of his time, but also to our everyday philosophizing. A classical author should impress the readers of the following generations by the wealth of his ideas, and the fertileness of their formulation.

In important ways Whitehead is on the way to becoming a classic. A real contribution to the dialogue between Whitehead and mainline European philosophy has been made by the contributors to four important volumes, which are in fact the papers of four major conferences:

Also in the Dutch-language area some initiatives have been taken. Journals such as the Tijdschrift voor Filosofie (TF), Louvain Studies (LS) and Wijsgerig Perspectief (WP) have devoted special issues to process thought. A series of smaller publications and reprints has been published by the Center of Metaphysics of Leuven (PD, GC, WR and reprints of TF and LS). Religion in the Making has been translated into Dutch, with a running commentary and notes under the title De dynamiek van de religie (DR). An anthology of important texts on process thought appeared in Dutch, with an introduction and a glossary (GW).

It is impossible to give a detailed analysis of all the contributions. As far as the individual contributions are concerned, it will suffice to point to the excellent article of E. Wolf-Gazo in the Bonn-volume ("Die Whitehead-Rezeption im deutschen Sprachraum seit 1945") and to the study of W. Stegmaier. It must be said, however, that a new problem emerged. It surfaced again and again that Whitehead has a very special way of relating to classical authors, such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant. Whitehead does not really qualify as a specialist in the history of philosophy. Too often it has to be said that, as far as the details are concerned, Whitehead makes a onesided use of his sources. For instance, he quotes several times a phrase from Locke (about "power") which hardly attracts the attention of other Locke commentators. The relationship between Kant and Whitehead is a much debated issue (to which I will return later): in a candid way Whitehead calls his philosophy a return to certain pre-Kantian modes of thought. Even more startling is Whitehead’s relation to Hegel. Although the connections with German idealism seem to be most obvious, White-head confesses that he has not read Hegel at all. Of course, there are enough indirect influences to make the dialogue meaningful and fruitful. So many technical questions have arisen, but the dialogue between Whiteheadians and non-Whiteheadians is relatively new.

A second feature is the fruitfulness of Whitehead’s philosophy in other domains. Here it is evident that Whitehead’s philosophy is attractive to many of us because it makes a real contribution to mainly two domains: theology and contemporary philosophy of nature. It will be clear from my personal account that the interest of many of us in process thought has its starting point in theology. My position, however, is that process thought is first of all a metaphysical system, which by no means should be limited to its theological implications. I even suggested in a paper with the startling title, "Whitehead’s God is not Whiteheadian Enough," presented at the Bonn-Conference, that Whitehead himself should have made a clearer distinction between what can be said on the basis of a particular religious experience and tradition, and that which follows from a strict philosophical analysis.

In Science and the Modern World Whitehead conceived "God" not as an actual entity, but as a first characterization (or limitation) of substantial activity. "Some particular how is necessary": this is what can be said on the basis of an analysis of the philosophical situation itself. What "further can be said," however -- i.e., whether the Principle of Limitation should be conceived as "Allah, Brahman, Yahweh or Father in Heaven" -- is left to be decided on the basis of particular experiences of the different religious traditions. Whitehead leaves open even the possibility of a non-theistic interpretation of the Principle of Limitation, talking about Chance as a possible name for that principle. So I think that there is even textual evidence to show that on a purely philosophical basis alone, Whitehead’s system does not require us to postulate the God of religion. Why is it then that in the other works of the "trilogy" the God-problem receives such a vital place? My thesis is that this is mainly due to the particular situation in which those books were written. Religion in the Making is a series of four Lowell Lectures, delivered in a chapel and addressing explicitly the topic of religion. Process and Reality reflects the Gifford Lectures offered in 1927-1928 at Edinburgh. Those lectures, devoted by Lord Gifford to the topic of natural theology, have quite evidently to address that topic. That explains, I suggest, that Whitehead thought it appropriate to devote the last chapter of Process and Reality to "God and the World," whereas the series of lectures as a whole is an "Essay in Cosmology."

In fact, I think that it is important to stress that Whitehead is more than a natural theologian, and offers a metaphysical conceptuality which is also able to tackle questions raised by contemporary science. That this was publicly recognized by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (the writers of Order out of Chaos) was a real encouragement to me, and fostered the cause of process thought in Europe. Ilya Prigogine is a chemist, born in Russia and naturalized as Belgian, who obtained the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1973 for his work on "dissipative structures." Prigogine tackles problems such as the irreversibility of time and the emergence of order out of a less complex situation. Prigogine is an advocate of a "metamorphosis of science." The criticisms that he addresses to classical science are strikingly similar to Whitehead’s views in Science in the Modern World. Isabelle Stengers, who is a close collaborator of Prigogine, and who, in fact, "holds the pen," is very much interested in Whitehead’s conceptual framework and feels that it is quite adequate to address problems raised by contemporary science, such as the emergence of order and newness. My colleague of the Université Catholique de Louvain, professor Ladrière, a mathematician and philosopher, sees also the relevance of Whitehead for contemporary thought which takes seriously the findings of recent science.

Whitehead is also attractive to us, because he really offers a philosophy of culture. In that respect, I particularly like Whitehead’s post-technical works, such as Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thoughts. What Whitehead says about Truth, Beauty, Adventure and Peace is truly inspiring. Although the moral implications of his philosophy are less elaborated, I see here great prospects for process thought. Whitehead describes morality as concern for the consequences of our actions in the long run. Whitehead transcends a morality which is just a morality of short relations, based on duty. A student of mine, Emmanuel Agius, wrote a doctoral dissertation on "The Relevance of Whitehead for the Issue of the Rights of Future Generations."

I think that it is a real advantage that Whitehead also allows for intercultural dialogue. I already mentioned the East-West conference in Honolulu. There it seemed that the non-substantialist philosophy of Whitehead was particularly attractive to Buddhists, because of the doctrine of the no-self. A theme which emerged again and again was the possibility of contemporaries and the reality of time. In 1984 I was able to attend the East-West Conference on Process Thought in Nagoya, and in 1987 the Conference organized by Tokiyuki Nobuhara on "Process, Peace and Human Rights" in Kansai Seminar Home, Kyoto. Here the issues related to the moral implications of process thought were tackled. I see a great future for process thought in domains such as the concern for justice and peace, and we have to add, the concern for the integrity of creation.

"JPIC" is a new acronym that is becoming popular in Europe these days. It points to the theme of the Convention of Basel in May 1989, organized by the European Council of Christian Churches, and devoted to "Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation." It seems to me that there is no philosophy today which is better equipped than process thought to link together ethical and ecological problems. John Cobb devoted much attention to this topic, and Charles Birch, as an eminent biologist and process thinker, has contributed much by his writings and lectures to the wider acceptance of a process style of thought in the circles of the World Council of Churches.

It is obvious that process thought by itself can offer no ready-made answer to the great challenges of our time. But process thought can offer a viable conceptuality with which to explore these issues thoroughly. Process thought stresses the togetherness of all there is. A telling characteristic of the great problems which haunt the world (our relation to nature, world population issues, the call for justice) is that these problems cannot be isolated from one another. For that reason, we really do need an outlook on reality which allows us to see the interconnectedness of our different concerns. The great danger threatening the world is to try to solve problems in isolation -- which according to the basic inspiration of process thought is in principle impossible.

Turning to the third characteristic suggested by W. Stegmaier to allow us to talk about "a classic," we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Whitehead is sometimes very attractive by the breadth of his culture, by the amazing way he finds a cogent and inspiring expression for some deep insights. On the other hand, a book such as Process and Reality is, at first sight, extremely arduous and has discouraged many from further engagement in process thought. One sometimes feels like a squirrel, who likes the acorn but cannot get through the shell. One reason that process thought is still a minority movement may also be that its conceptuality is at first sight difficult to cope with. Maybe we should reconsider the appropriateness of certain Whiteheadian concepts and principles, such as the role of eternal objects and of the ontological principle within the system. Maybe we need to place more stress on the unity of the whole than on the discreetness of the parts. Maybe the whole has some priority over against the parts (which would imply that Creativity is somehow more basic and more active than the actual entities themselves). I think, however, that we should not concentrate on technical issues alone and develop a kind of Whiteheadian scholasticism.

I suggest that we have to reconsider the relative importance we give to the earlier works of Whitehead (the so called pre-systematic works), to the more technical "trilogy" (SR, RM, PR) and to the post-systematic works (such as AI and MT). We should distinguish between Whitehead-the-system-builder and Whitehead the philosopher-of-culture. What is needed today far more than a metaphysical system is a style of philosophizing in the process vein, which is at the same time faithful to Whitehead’s basic inspiration and still creative enough to face new challenges. It should be speculative and daring, and at the same time open to every element of our experience.

III

It follows from what has preceded that we may have reasons to be happy with process thought. It does not obliterate, however, other interests in phenomenology and linguistic analysis. I only wish that process thought could be more widely accepted as a constructive way of thinking in this anti-metaphysical time of de-construction (Martin Heidegger, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida).

The special contribution of Leuven to ongoing Whiteheadian scholarship seems to me to be the drawing of a clearer distinction between the "philosophical absolute" and the "religious absolute." André Cloots has devoted a doctoral dissertation to the theme of creativity in Whitehead and Hartshorne. What comes out of his research is that Whitehead’s concept of God is far closer to the traditional than Hartshorne’s; on the other hand, Hartshorne seems to be in a better position to counter Heidegger’s criticism that in traditional Western onto-theology God is in fact reduced to a being amongst beings, although the Highest. In Hartshorne’s system however, God and Creativity have a tendency to coincide. It has seemed that a clearer distinction between Creativity and God is both required and possible, an argument that Cloots and I developed in our joint article (CGPTR).

An issue which surfaces again and again in our Louvain-discussions is the relationship between Whitehead and classical philosophy. Guest lecturers such as Ernest Wolf-Gazo and George Lucas devoted much attention to this problem. The dialogue between Whitehead and Kant is important in that respect. It seems to me that Whitehead cannot be reduced to a pre-Kantian thinker, although he himself has suggested that the philosophy of organism is an extension of certain pre-Kantian modes of thought. Whitehead says also, in Religion in the Making, that his own philosophy is an extension of the procedure that Kant applied in his Critique of Practical Reason: "This line of thought extends Kant’s argument. He saw the necessity for God in the moral order" (RM 104). Kant looks for the conditions of possibility of morality itself. Whitehead looks for that without which an ordered world would not be possible. "There is an actual world because there is an order in nature" (RM 104), and not the other way around. This is not an argument from design (in that case, it is not possible to find more than that what is given in nature itself); it is a true transcendental argument, looking for the conditions of possibility of those features that are truly exhibited by the world in which we live, and without which that world would not be conceivable. These are the so-called "formative elements," which truly belong to the metaphysical scheme.

A last question which arises is the very possibility of the whole metaphysical enterprise. Whitehead himself talks about "the distrust of metaphysical philosophy" as one of the signs of the time. This distrust has anything but decreased. Here the issue of "post-modernity" arises. I do not think that it can be claimed that Whitehead is a post-modern author (in the European sense of the word), but it seems to me that his conception of philosophy is far more subtle than the kind of metaphysics which is rejected by our contemporaries. Whitehead defines speculative philosophy as "the endeavor to frame a logical, coherent, applicable and adequate system of thought in terms of which every item of our experience can be conceived" (PR 3/4). Whitehead was fully aware of the constructive (i.e. "to frame") and tentative character of the whole philosophical enterprise, and of the pitfalls of language. That brings him far closer to the philosophic mood of our time than any rigid Whiteheadian scholasticism would allow.

Let me conclude with a somewhat re-written quotation from Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effects:

References

AZP13 -- W. Stegmaier. "Klassiker Whitehead? Zu neuen Sammelbände über Whiteheads Philosophic der Innovation." Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 13/2 (1988).

CGPTR -- André Cloots and Jan Van der Veken. "Can the God of Process Thought be ‘Redeemed’?" Ed. S. Sia. Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God: Philosophical and Theological Responses. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.

CNT -- John B. Cobb, Jr. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Westminister, 1965.

DR -- De dynamiek van de religie. Religion in the Making. Trans./comment. by J. Van der Veken. Kapellen-Kampen: DNB/Uitgeverij Pelckmans-Uitgeverij Kok Agora, 1988.

EG -- John A.T. Robinson. Exploration into God. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.

GC -- God and Change. Ed. J. Van der Veken. Leuven: Center of Metaphysics and Philosophy of God, 1987.

GW -- God en wereld. Basisteksten uit de proces-theologie (an anthology of important texts on process thought). Select./trans./comment. by J. Van der Veken. Gravenhage: Meinema, 1989.

LS7 -- Louvain Studies 7/2 (Fall 1978): 75-114.

PD -- J. Van der Veken. Proces-denken. Een oriëntatie. Leuven: Centrum voor Metafysica en Wijsgerige Godsleer, 1985.

RG -- Schubert M. Ogden. The Reality of God and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

TF42 -- 2ijdschriftvoorFilosofie 42/1 (March 1980): 3-112. WP25 -- Wijsgerig perspectief op maatschappij en wetenschap 25/4 (1984-1985): 109.

WR -- Whitehead en de religie. Kon-teksten bil ‘Religion in the Making’. Ed. A. Cloots. Leuven: Center of Metaphysics and Philosophy of God-Peeters, 1990.

Notes

1. This extended version of the paper was also presented at the meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Buffalo, New York, March 3-4, 1990.

Since the theme of this symposium is the meaning of process thought for us, my paper will discuss the use that I have made of this mode of thinking to articulate and develop my views, especially in the philosophy of religion. In addition to focusing on specific areas in that discipline which have been of particular interest to me, this paper will also trace certain developments which led me to process thought.

As the title of the essay suggests, I regard process thought as a "conceptual framework." Hence, in attempting to address the theme of the symposium, my objective will be to explain the epistemological standpoint (as well as the cultural background) underlying my interest in process thought, a standpoint which makes me regard it as a conceptual framework.

I

Let me first of all elaborate on this epistemological standpoint by dealing with the question of whether there can be development or innovation in religious beliefs and in their transmission. This is because I view that question as to some extent an epistemological issue.¹ That is to say, much depends on one’s understanding of the relationship between human knowledge and revelation. Some people, for instance, regard religious beliefs as propositional truths revealed by God and merely received by humans. Being faithful to God’s revelations means accepting them in their entirety without any alteration whatsoever. In this case the transmission of beliefs involves safeguarding what has been handed down from the past. Orthodoxy is being able not only to repeat the same teachings but also to show their relevance to the new context.² Other individuals, on the other hand, interpret religious beliefs as merely expressions of the human community’s search for some kind of meaning, an accumulated source of information built up over the years as the community reflected on its life and activities. The development and the abandonment of certain beliefs are integral to this view of the status of religious beliefs.³ Such an interpretation is in stark contrast to the first one inasmuch as it has a different epistemological basis.

The position that I take lies midway between the two mentioned above. It acknowledges a human contribution in the formulation and transmission of religious beliefs, while accepting the possibility of divine revelation.⁴ Because God’s communication is being received by humans, there will always be an element in the whole process of understanding God’s revelation that is open to change and development. Being faithful to God’s word involves, according to this view, an acceptance of innovation in, as well as the rejection of, certain forms of expressing God’s revelation. The transmission of religious beliefs is part of a process of reflecting on what has been revealed, and a continuous search for more adequate ways of articulating that same revelation. This is because in formulating these doctrines there is the likelihood that certain elements do not (or may no longer) do justice to the original insights or experience. From this perspective then, orthodoxy could entail a more critical look at tradition, since what has been passed on may in fact be a perversion of the original message.

Just as there are different ways of expressing what someone has conveyed to us or of communicating a personal experience, so there are various ways of making Gods revelation known to others. Hence, the use of symbols, images, music and other non-verbal forms. But God’s revelation articulated in intellectual or conceptual forms usually results in a religious doctrine. Doctrine, therefore, is a further stage in the process of grasping God’s revelation and hence, of religious beliefs. Because doctrine is an intellectual expression, it tends to be more systematized. It is making more explicit what one held implicitly or what one has experienced.⁵ Ideally, doctrine should express adequately and faithfully what one grasps at the preconceptual stage. If it does, then one’s understanding of God’s revelation becomes richer and possibly more profound. But sometimes the process of conceptualization does not do justice to what one holds at the preconceptual level. Hence, the need to re-think and reinterpret the doctrine. This is why the attempt to express conceptually what we have received from or experienced about God is an on-going one.⁶

If the formation of doctrines is indeed a process, then one could identify certain stages. It seems useful to think of it as involving the stages of rejection, recognition, adjustment or adaptation, and acceptance. In this way it is possible to liken the efforts of developing our religious beliefs today to the work done by the early Christians who were faced with the task of systematizing their beliefs about God.⁷

One stage before arriving at a satisfactory formulation of doctrines is the rejection of alternatives. To some extent, it may be a matter of being more clear as to what something is not than what something is. In the case of the first Christians, they had the important challenge not only of formulating Christian doctrine which was faithful to what had been experienced by the believing community, but also of weeding out doctrines which could not be considered part of the Christian experience. For example, they rejected the customary belief in "gods" since ‘god’ was a severely debased coinage used to refer to popular religious cults of the day. When these Christians spoke of their God, they did not want their concept of God to be associated with the gods of popular religion.⁸

Another stage is that of recognizing or becoming aware of the value of a particular conceptualization. Here there is partial acceptance, and some similarities are noted. This stage in the process of understanding God’s revelation reveals the reasons why the early Church opted in favor of a philosophical framework in its attempts to conceptualize its faith-experience. The concept of God of the early Church was very much shaped by the philosophical schools of the day, especially Platonism and Stoicism. The first Christians belonged to the Graeco-Roman world and were concerned to speak to it. They wanted to convey the Christian message to their neighbors. Greek philosophy was an excellent medium. Moreover, they wanted to show the reasonableness of Christianity and the ability of Christian teachings to withstand a thorough examination by philosophy. Philosophy was then understood as a search for truth, critical of the mythical interpretation of reality. There was a parallel, therefore, between the philosophers’ task and their own. Both groups wanted to differentiate their beliefs about God from those of popular religions, which they regarded as superstitious. The early Christians furthermore found that philosophical categories helped them understand Christian revelation even more deeply than had been possible with biblical images. Philosophy met the need to achieve greater clarification of terms and ideas.

But one does not simply take over a favored formulation. There is need for adjustment or adaptation. One has to reshape what one has recognized as helpful. Thus, there is adaptation prior to adoption, of transformation before acceptance.⁹ Despite aligning itself with philosophy (thereby rejecting popular religion), the early Church did not completely identify its God with the God of the philosophers. The philosophers’ God, in spite of its acceptability as the ground of all being, did not have any religious significance. This God was absolute perfection and the culmination of one’s intellectual pursuit, but one could not pray to nor establish a personal relationship with such a God. Thus, some transformation was called for. Whether this stage was satisfactorily crossed or not is, of course, debatable. One suspects that the present demand for more relevant and adequate doctrines of God harks back to this period in Christian history.

The stage of acceptance of a particular formulation is really a further development. But it should not be regarded as a final stage if by that is meant no improvement can be expected. As time goes by, certain expressions or formulations become irrelevant or even misleading. Thus, the search for newer formulations is in effect an attempt to recover what has been obscured. The dissatisfaction felt by some with the doctrinal formulations regarding God worked out by the early Church has led to calls for more appropriate and contemporary expressions of the same Christian experience of God.

It will be observed then that the standpoint I take regards religious beliefs, including what we believe God to be, as likely to develop. This is because they are seen as the results of the continued efforts by human beings to find more relevant intellectual expressions of God’s revelation to them. There is, therefore, the serious challenge to meet the demands for more contemporary doctrinal formulations. ¹⁰ At the same time, however, reference was made on a number of occasions to doctrines doing or not doing justice to God’s revelation. The position sketched above thus respects the autonomy of revelation irrespective of whether this is understood as propositional truths or personal and communal experiences. Furthermore, revelation constitutes the more fundamental criterion for accepting or discarding different formulations or expressions. How it is so is, of course, a complex matter, especially given the difficulty of defining what revelation itself is.

But there are guidelines which can be helpful in our attempts to find the limits of doctrinal innovation. This is because the search for a satisfactory formulation of religious doctrines, while very much a personal matter, occurs within a specific context.¹¹ That context is the religious community that we belong to. Insofar as that community has a history, we can and should constantly consult it. This is why scriptures occupy an important place in every religious community: they represent early and fundamental expressions of that community’s faith-experience.¹² In fact, many religious believers regard scriptures as the embodiment of God’s disclosure to them or to their founder. Moreover, the community’s life and practice over the years have led to certain traditions. These represent that community’s witness to the revelation which it has received. Thus, in formulating religious doctrines we must always consider whether that community’s witness is being continued.

II

In the preceding section my attempt to explain the epistemological viewpoint which leads me to regard process thought as a conceptual framework centered on the question of whether there can be development in religious beliefs. I have argued that the answer to that question depends on one’s epistemological standpoint. Accordingly, I have outlined a position which views development as integral to a particular way of interpreting the status of religious beliefs, and have illustrated it with the way we image God. It is this epistemological standpoint which led me in search of more adequate conceptual frameworks to understand my experience as a Filipino Christian.

Let me now say something about that search. One of the difficulties encountered by many young Filipinos who had been trained in Western classical philosophy (which until recently was practically the only kind of philosophical training that was available in the Philippines) was the inadequacy of such a mode of thinking to articulate fully our experience as an Asian people. For despite our Western-type formal education, we continued to feel, think and behave in a typically non-Western way. At the same time, however, our exposure for several centuries to Western culture (particularly Spain and the USA) made us "unAsian" in a number of ways. There is some truth in the claim that Filipino culture is much closer to Spanish (and American) culture, than it is to Japanese, Chinese or Indian cultures. With Filipino nationalistic spirit growing among the students and professors of the 1960s, the issue of finding our identity as an Asian people deeply influenced by some Western ways of life became very important. Some Filipino philosophers and theologians, along with historians, artists and many others, turned to the development of what was considered "Filipino experience." In other words, we wanted to be able to articulate that experience in a way that did justice to it. For some of these Filipino philosophers and theologians, the classical mold somehow did not fit their experience. Hence, the search for alternative ones.

But in a way that search brought up more problems than solutions. Does one turn to native modes of thinking or to other Western conceptualities (i.e., other than the classical one)? The first option had the advantage of integrating more realistically concrete experience and intellectual expression, unhindered by foreign categories. That is certainly what many chose to adopt, resulting in the development of Filipino philosophy and theology. Some very good examples here are the writings of Vitaliano Gorospe (FVR) and Jose M. de Mesa (ISC). But a disadvantage here is the difficulty of establishing dialogue with non-Filipinos, who understandably would not be familiar with the intricacies of Filipino culture. Another option was to look for another Western conceptuality which, despite being removed from our native modes of thinking, would at least be more successful than the classical one that we had been educated in. But which one? Existentialism? Pragmatism? Linguistic analysis? Leonardo Mercado’s pioneering work (EFP) and Dionisio Miranda’s book (P), both of which employ linguistic analysis, readily come to mind. Such an option, however, would be immediately open to the criticism that one was trying "to look at Filipino experience through Western spectacles." But that weakness could be compensated for by the possibility of dialoguing with non-Filipinos. There was also that sneaking suspicion that we would not be taken seriously by our Western counterparts unless we could show that we were also knowledgeable in Western modes of thought. Hence, some of us continued our education in Western universities but kept alive our hope of being able to contribute to the efforts of articulating our Filipino identity.¹³ To what extent either group has been successful remains to be seen since, unfortunately, political and economic considerations have overshadowed the more cultural ones. What is clear is that more work needs to be done -- and, in my opinion, by both groups.

III

That search for more adequate ways of understanding our experiences led to my involvement with process thought. As a doctoral student in Ireland, I came across the work of Charles Hartshorne while I was exploring suitable research topics. I had become interested in the philosophy of religion, particularly in ways of thinking about God. My initial reaction to Hartshorne’s ideas was one of excitement, since my classical theistic background enabled me to understand what he was criticizing (and to identify with some of his criticisms). But what was more intriguing was that Hartshorne’s philosophy offered a different way of understanding one’s experience. Was it a more suitable way of expressing what Filipinos experience God to be? The more I read his writings the more I could see the gap between experience and conceptuality (as described earlier on), and between Asia and the West, narrowing.

My preliminary research into Hartshorne’s concept of God resulted in an article published in The Clergy Review which was a response to a criticism of him by Brian Davies, a British Thomist scholar.¹⁴ It appeared to me that Hartshorne’s critics failed to see that his claims about God had to be seen within the context of his metaphysics. As I read further into Hartshorne’s philosophy, I became convinced that many of his critics in Britain and elsewhere needed to see the interconnectedness of his ideas. In other words, there was an overall picture behind the details, many of which could only be appreciated if one took the trouble of reading several of Hartshorne’s writings.

It was this concern to present Hartshorne’s concept of God systematically that led to the publication of my first book, God in Process Thought (GPT). As John Cobb correctly noted in his review of the book, my aim in that book was to correct the many misinterpretations of Hartshorne that I had come across in my research, rather than to provide a critical discussion (MTh. 3/1). I had decided not to include my own criticisms of him (which have since been published in separate articles). It seemed to me that too many writers became critical too quickly without giving themselves time to first understand someone else’s claims. Besides, at that time I was already planning another book which would contain critical essays on Hartshorne’s concept of God by philosophers and theologians from diverse backgrounds and different countries.

The response I received from those invited to participate in the planned volume on Hartshorne’s concept of God was most encouraging. This collection of essays, Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God: Philosophical and Theological Responses contains articles written from the perspectives of black theology (Theodore Walker), feminist theology (Sheila Greeve Davaney), Indian thought (Arabinda Basu), Thomism (W. Norris Clarke), Buddhism (John Ishihara) and Judaism (William E. Kaufman). Other essays in the collection compare and contrast Hartshorne’s theism with Latin American liberation theology (Peter C. Phan), with phenomenology and Buddhism (Hiroshi Endo), and with European philosophy (André Cloots and Jan Van der Veken). One essay (by Randall Morris) focuses on Hartshorne’s political thought, another (by Piotr Gutowski) on his conception of theology, and a third essay (by David Pailin) on his contributions to philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. One article (by Martin McNamara) examines some of the biblical evidence for process thought, while another (by Joseph Bracken) deals with Hartshorne’s interpretation of the God-world relationship and assesses that relationship with particular reference to the doctrine of the Trinity. Charles Hartshorne generously accepted the invitation to respond to these essays. Unfortunately, a Muslim representative was unable to finish his contribution in time for publication in this collection. The diversity of countries, perspectives, and cultures represented by the fourteen contributors showed the tremendous interest in Hartshorne’s neoclassical concept of God.

While I have generally been in agreement with Hartshorne’s philosophy of religion, I have had certain reservations about parts of it. In an article, "Hartshorne on Describing God" (MTh 3/2), I argued that while we can appreciate Hartshorne’s reasons for wanting to talk about God in a positive and literal manner, there are certain problematic areas in Hartshorne’s own God-talk. In another article, "Suffering and Creativity" (URAM12), I tried to evaluate Hartshorne’s explanation of the existence of evil -- and in particular, of suffering. Another area where I have had some difficulties with Hartshorne’s philosophy is his interpretation of human immortality in terms of "being remembered by God." In a forthcoming paper I try to show that Hartshorne’s version of immortality does not satisfy the search for the ultimate meaning of human life. Moreover, I argue that despite Hartshorne’s own claims, his metaphysics can be shown to be open to the possibility of postmortem immortality.¹⁵

While reading Hartshorne’s writings, I also became acquainted with the works of other process thinkers like Whitehead, Cobb, Ogden, Ford, Griffin and Pittenger. The more I read them, the more their ideas stimulated me. Furthermore, process thought has probably become the main conceptuality that is enabling me to develop my views. In a forthcoming book on suffering, I definitely turn to this mode of thought, while also drawing from literature, liberation theology and Asian thought.¹⁶ The initial interest in looking for more suitable conceptualities to express our Filipino experience remains and continues to challenge me. In that context the question for me is whether process thought would be of value in articulating our "Filipino identity." In this task the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro serves as a model for some of us (for the reason that I have already given) since, in reflecting on Japanese culture, he turned to Western conceptualities to enable a dialogue between the two to take place. Whether process thought would serve as a more suitable conceptuality for Filipino Christians remains to be seen.

References

CF -- M. Wiles. The Christian Fathers. London: SCM Press, 1977.

CHCG -- Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God: Philosophical and Theological Responses. Ed. S. Sia. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.

EFP -- Leonardo N. Mercado. Elements of Filipino Philosophy. Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University Publications, 1974.

FVR -- Vitaliano R. Gorospe. Filipino Values Revisited. Manila: National Bookstore, 1988.

GPT -- Santiago Sia. God in Process Thought: a Study in Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985.

HFP -- Teodoro Agoncillo and Milagros Guerrero. History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1970.

IC -- J. Ratzinger. "The God of Faith and the God of the Fathers." Introduction to Christianity. London: Burns & Oates, 1968.

ISC -- Jose M. de Mesa. In Solidarity with the Culture: Studies in Theological Re-rooting. Quezon City: Maryhill School of Theology, 1987.

MTh 3/1 -- John Cobb. "Review of GPT." Modern Theology, 3/1 (1986).

MTh 3/2 -- Santiago Sia. "Charles Hartshorne on Describing God." Modern Theology, 3/2 (1987).

P -- Dionisio M. Miranda. Pagkamakatao: Reflections on the Theological Virtues in the Philippine Context. Manila: Divine Word Publications, 1987.

PT -- Process Theology and the Christian Doctrine of God. Ed. S. Sia. Petersham: St. Bede’s Publications, 1986.

URAM12 -- Santiago Sia. "Suffering and Creativity: a Contribution to Hartshorne’s Concept of Sole Reality URAM 1:115-129." Ultimate Reality and Meaning 12/3 (September, 1989).

WSD -- William Reiser. What are They Saying about Dogma? NY: Paulist Press, 1978.

Notes

1. In this section I merely want to show how there can be change and development in religious doctrines, since I see the issue as being mainly an epistemological one. William Reiser states that the problem of doctrinal development is not primarily an epistemological but an ontological one (WSD 61). It seems to me, however, that such a sharp distinction is unrealistic, since one’s epistemological perspective determines one’s ontology.

This section of the essay had originally been prepared for presentation at the 2nd Assembly of the World’s Religions. I am grateful to IRF for permission to incorporate it here.

2. This attitude is often described as fundamentalist. It can be found in both ordinary and sophisticated believers.

3. This view is usually associated with atheists and humanists, but some Christian theologians -- e.g., Don Cupitt -- appear to espouse it.

4. One of the controversial areas here is what revelation actually means. Does God’s revelation consist of propositional truths or is it a personal religious experience by the believer? While I am more inclined to favor the second view, the discussion in the text takes both into account.

5. It will be obvious that the approach I am taking here is similar to that which has been described by Reiser as "content versus expression" (WSD 20f). One of his criticisms of such an approach is that it seems to assume a Platonic theory of knowledge. However, as I hope the text will show, this is not necessarily so.

6. For a more detailed defense of this point, see MTh 3/2.

7. It may also be possible to understand in this way what many young people and believers from different cultural backgrounds are experiencing when confronted with particular forms or expressions of religious beliefs with which they cannot identify. It is perhaps important to note that rejection of certain doctrinal beliefs does not necessarily mean abandonment of religiosity, but a quest for a different way of expressing it.

8. My discussion of the use of philosophy by the first Christians draws heavily on IC and CF.

9. "Adaptation" is sometimes taken to mean that particular teachings are merely to be adapted to relevant cultural settings; for instance, reinterpreting Western thought from an Asian perspective. While there is room for talking about such a step, one should not ignore the specific contribution made by traditional cultures to the whole process of formulating Christian doctrines.

10. The concept of "contemporariness" is an elusive one. Nevertheless, in this respect we ought to pay particular attention to present-day cultural and social issues when we formulate religious doctrines today (such as the concerns being brought to our attention by liberation theologians and Third-World theologians). Nor should we overlook the key role played by inter-religious dialogue.

11. Although I have identified the context to be the religious community, it can also be said that the knowing process itself is contextualized.

12. Biblical hermeneutics has rightly alerted us to the problems involved in biblical interpretation. In turning to the Bible for doctrine, therefore, we should have due regard for the findings of biblical scholarship.

13. In Philippine history (see HEP) two of our national heroes stand out as illustrations of these two options: Jose Rizal was an outstanding thinker who had been trained in the West, while Emilio Jacinto, who stayed in the Philippines, was the brain behind the Katipunan movement. In my opinion, both were important in the development of Filipino consciousness.

14. Another British Thomist, Illtyd Trethowan, replied to my article. The debate which originally appeared in The Clergy Review has been reprinted in PT. To the three essays was added Hartshorne’s response to the debate. Essays by Cobb, Van der Veken, Bracken and O’Donnell were also included.

15. This paper is being prepared for the "Sixth Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Human Ideas on Ultimate Reality and Meaning," to be held in Toronto, Canada, on August 21-24, 1991.

16. This work, which has been co-written with Marian F. Sia, deals with the question: what kind of God can we continue to believe in despite the reality of so much suffering? It examines the theoretical issues (regarding God) which are implicit in our practical responses to suffering.

Charles Hartshorne was born in June 1897. In a lifetime which spans the best part of a century, he has been a prolific writer on topics ranging from neoclassical theism, the ontological argument for the existence of God, and philosophical psychology, to aesthetics, pacifism, and ornithology. It is with the first two areas that he has mostly been associated. Many would excuse a philosopher if he made a decision to take things a little easier once he had reached ninety-two. And yet, Charles Hartshorne seems to have little interest in such retirement. There is very little evidence that he has lost any of his rather distinctive zest for writing and for philosophical debate.

From reading Hartshorne’s writings one may get the impression that he is often impatient and dismissive towards opposing viewpoints, which at times borders on a self-confidence that is difficult to accept. However, there is often a difference between the spoken word and the written word. This is certainly true as regards Hartshorne. He is a very kind and welcoming person. His dismissal of conflicting views comes from a blend of a wide, open-minded reading of the history of philosophy, together with a carefully reasoned analysis. Such a blend is combined with a wonderful sense of humor and unique life-experience which brought Hartshorne into contact with such great minds as E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, C. I. Lewis, A. N. Whitehead, R. Carnap, and K. Popper.

The interview which follows is the result of our meeting with Dr. Hartshorne and his lovely wife, Dorothy, which took place over a two-day period (May 20-21, 1989) at their home in Austin. Texas. The topics discussed here reflect our respective interests: metaphilosophy (P. Gutowski), and the issue of person and immortality (J. Kennedy). There are, however, many other issues which emerged naturally in the course of our discussion with Dr. Hartshorne, which cannot be easily classified under these two topics. Among these are perception, the question of time, existence and actuality, personal identity, and the nature of God.

The text which we present is an abbreviated version of our discussion with Dr. Hartshorne, and it does not reflect the exact, original order of our questions and Hartshorne’s answers. It does not capture the warmth and hospitality of Charles and Dorothy Hartshorne -- two wonderful people, not just husband and wife but real companions who support each other. We have not included their sharing of their experiences of how they first met over sixty years ago, and their many experiences from travelling together in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia. It was clear to us that here were two people who were still very much in love, who have been enriched by each other’s presence, and who have made a real impact on our world. We have been rather privileged to have been welcomed into their home.

Metaphilosophy

PG: How do you see the relation between science and metaphysics?

CH: Metaphysics claims necessary truth. Peirce says that metaphysics is not factual: it is an analysis of concepts. It is not a study of contingent, empirical facts. It is the analysis of concepts, but it gives us knowledge. Peirce says that just analyzing concepts can give us knowledge, and I’m as much a Peircean as a Whiteheadian. It’s hard to be certain that I was not as much influenced by him as by Whitehead.

The physicist might be factually mistaken, but if his view even makes sense it can’t contradict a metaphysical truth, because nothing that could be true can contradict the necessary. So, if the physical theory is even possibly true then my metaphysics cannot disagree with it. And there is another thing: I think it’s presuming on human weakness to suppose that the metaphysician will just operate and forget about science. Mortimer Adler talks that way. But we know historically, that time after time, the state of science influenced a metaphysician even when he thought it should not have or did not. I think it’s very clear that Aristotle’s metaphysics was strongly influenced by what he thought was scientific fact. So, I cannot just belittle what the scientist says, because I could be making a mistake. It is also true that he could be making a mistake. Where there’s disagreement, there is a mistake somewhere. Because of that, I do not believe in theologians like Karl Barth saying, You do not have to worry about what the philosophers are saying -- I think we had all better worry, at least a little, about what any careful, serious, sincere person says. PG: What about common sense and metaphysics? Is common sense a source of metaphysical notions? Can it confirm or falsify philosophical theories? CH: Well, Peirce’s critical commonsensism is about right. Common sense is not exact, and every philosopher should know that. For instance, a fellow who says there is no order in nature -- nothing like laws of nature -- that’s not good common sense, because every living animal wants to make expectations about the future on the grounds that there are legitimate expectations about it. But is the order absolute? Now that’s something else. Common sense cannot guarantee that, because it does not have this kind of exactitude. PC: So would you regard common-sense knowledge as valid for philosophy? CH: If you do not expect it to be too precise. You see, I have never taken seriously Berkeley’s kind of idealism, that nature is only ideas in our minds and in God’s mind. I went around for just a little while challenging people to refute it. It was kind of a game, but I do not think lever believed it, and I have never taken anti-realism very seriously. Richard Rorty talks this way sometimes -- we know what we say about nature. Certainly, if we don’t know that, we should shut up.

PG: Do you think that the history of philosophy can help in metaphysics?

CH: Certainly! My own method is profoundly historical. That is where I agree with Richard McKeon, although he carries it to extremes. Avoid extremes. In every case of a dichotomy there is a trichotomy. Peirce taught me that too. I do not believe here in any exception. I am deeply historical. This is the reason why I value Popper so much more than Quine. Quine has very little history, whereas Popper has a good deal. Peirce stated it almost perfectly when he said that one-sided, extreme positions furnish the thin soil which is most easily turned up to reveal absurdities. That’s exactly what I think. Extremes show you how to go wrong -- they show you how not to do it.

PG: But if you want to evaluate what was wrong in a given historical position, you have to have some criteria which are not historical.

CH: Take this table;¹ that is not historical, but it takes into account the possible historical positions with regard to necessity and contingency. That’s my way of going at the history of philosophy, and I had that principle at almost the beginning of my career. You see, I was trained by two logicians, Whitehead being a third, and Peirce a fourth. My whole career has been based on four logicians in a way. You could add Aristotle as a fifth and Plato as a sixth, because I think that for his day Plato was a logician. All of these are my heroes, and you can include Leibniz in that. They were all logicians.

PG: Do you think metaphysics has any clear structure?

CH: Well, there is no linear order -- that’s part of the difficulty. Hegel was right about that. There is no absolute beginning or ending, but if you carry that to an extreme you’ll have Hegel saying at the end of a long story, when you ask for evidence -- "well, you’ll have to go back and read it over again." That’s hopeless. That’s a council of despair. Some of these things must have a little independence.

JK: What is it in human beings that has allowed us to develop metaphysics?

CH: Human beings, unlike the other animals, look ahead in a definite way and, because they have a language, they can generalize beyond any particular limit. They can ask not only what will happen tomorrow, but what will happen in a thousand years. They can ask what will happen in a million years. They can ask if there is anything which will never happen, or anything which will always happen. There is nothing like that in the other animals so far as we can suppose. But it is in us and there is no reason to think that we can go back and start to live just like the others. Our species is like the other higher animals, apes and whales especially, except for this linguistic capacity and the ability to use symbols to a degree vastly beyond the capacity of other planetary animals.

JK: That linguistic and symbolic ability -- is that the main thing that distinguishes humans from animals?

CH: Our symbolic power -- that’s it. It is not the ability to use tools. Quite a few other animals -- for example, birds -- can do that to a slight extent.

JK: What about our ability to reason?

CH: Well, that goes with language, I suppose. If people do not have it at all we think they are hopeless idiots, or that they’re crazy. I guess, I do not know that reasoning is all that different from using language. It seems to me pretty obvious that any vigorously thinking animal is going to come upon the theistic question. Any powerful language will make that possible. Take the idea of the cosmos as a whole having a mind. Well, that’s an obviously simple thing. If you’ve got a language, why wouldn’t you come to that? Animals have minds or souls -- whatever you may call it. Trees probably do not. What about the cosmos? That’s not a big step. Because all you have to be able to do is to say "everything."

PG: You regard yourself as a moderate thinker. . .

CH: I believe I am by far the most consistent moderationalist that’s ever been in philosophy, or pretty nearly. It tends to get you into eclecticism. Not so many years ago, when I finally got around to reading Victor Cousin, the French eclectic philosopher, I found myself very sympathetic to him. He said a lot of good things. He was not far wrong -- he was more right than lots of non-eclectic philosophers, just because he tried to learn from everybody. In that sense, I think we all ought to be eclectic, and I’ve learned from just about everybody. Take Epicurus: he is a hero for me because, where Democritus talked as though everything was necessary, Epicurus argued for chance and necessity -- not just chance and not just necessity, but both. Even the atoms wriggle a little bit. Do you know that Charles Peirce read that? He was a physicist, a mathematician, and a logician. Except for one or two courses, he was largely self-taught in philosophy. He learned languages and he read Greek philosophy. He came across Epicurus when he was in his thirties. Apparently he said to himself, "Now how does the problem of chance and necessity look in the light of the physics I know?" The more he thought about it, the more he liked the Epicurean standpoint. For example, the laws of gases fitted. They do not tell you what this or that molecule will do. They give you a statistic or two but certainly not the whole picture. It is always a question of chance. I do not think determinism was ever good metaphysics. It was always a mistake. For the natural sciences it worked pretty well for centuries, but it wrecked metaphysics and it more or less ruined theology.

PG: Summarizing Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, you say that in the roots of metaphysics there is ultimately some kind of intuition and faith. But if this is so, how can I know that my own faith or my own insight is correct?

CH: You do not have to know it, you just do the best you can. You do not know automatically. The best logicians and mathematicians talk about intuition. They practically all use the term ‘counter-intuitive’ but they do not trust it absolutely. They want a good reason. They do not trust it because we’re not God, so we Cannot be absolutely certain. Popper is very strong on that. Popper and Peirce are very close and that’s why Popper thinks Peirce is one of the great philosophers. He’s never quite admitted that about White-head, but he does admit it about Peirce, who was a thorough-going fallibilist, the first most thoroughgoing that there’s ever been -- much more so than Descartes.

Take the theistic proofs. I’ve developed six of them in my book Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. I worked on the set of proofs for twenty years, and I finally got it about right. I still think it’s much better than the traditional ways. You do not pretend to have absolute deductive necessity from premises that everybody has to admit. You can get deductive in an argument for God but can you guarantee that everybody must accept the premises? There is always an intuitive aspect there. We can’t be absolutely certain. I think there are a lot of things that we might as well take as certain unless there is something which turns up to really make them doubtful. But we should not have foolish doubts. Peirce says that knowledge and faith go together. Where there is knowledge there’s also faith, and Peirce also says in a number of places that extreme pessimism is wrong in principle. To be alive is to have, at least, a glimmering of optimism. You’d have to be virtually dead if you have no hope whatever. Schweitzer’s view was a bit like that. The man that denies the value of life, but goes on living contradicts himself. It may not be a verbal contradiction, but it is a contradiction and one of the worst kinds. Obviously the opposite extreme -- that everything is all for the best and that we have nothing possible to worry about -- that’s wrong too.

PC: Would you agree that practice can confirm or falsify philosophical theories?

CH: It does not constitute truth. It constitutes meaning, and James kept sliding over that distinction. Peirce never forgot it. James missed a big point. He was so proud of his empiricism -- that’s exactly what makes it impossible for him to have good philosophical theology. James wanted to say that if it works nicely, if it’s encouraging, that almost shows that it must be true. Well, that’s terribly vague and unhelpful. There are a lot of comforting illusions, but it’s dangerous to live by them or to cherish them. It’s better to try and face reality. James never really worked that out. He was always afraid that you might say it’s all merely wishful thinking. But wishful thinking has practically no relevance to metaphysics. It is not that it would be nice to believe in God; it’s that life does not make any sense without God. Every moment of your life you are affirming that it makes sense. The other animals may not think life makes sense, but they behave just as though they were thinking that it did. But we cannot do that; we cannot live just as the non-human animals. I believe that you have to have a philosophy of life, of human life. You can hardly expect to get that from science. You can get it from religion. It may not give you a complete philosophy of life but it gives you some beliefs about it.

PG: Why then do we have atheists?

CH: Partly because the theologians have done such a bad job -- that’s why I’m not very kind to them. They practically made atheism utterly inevitable, by defining God in rotten ways. Many of them define God as the cosmic tyrant, determining everything, not giving freedom to anything. Of course, that made atheism inevitable.

PC: Can we be certain about the existence of God?

CH: We can have a reasonable conviction -- that’s the most I claim. I think it is reasonable and I think it’s become considerably more reasonable. Suppose a philosopher is a strict determinist -- that wrecks him immediately. How could he prove God? Then God has to be "omnipotent." Either God does nothing, or God does everything and we do nothing. How can theism be a religious idea if we do not do anything? I’ve looked at Thomas Aquinas over and over again, and he’s either completely ambiguous or he is saying what I want him to say. I cannot see any other position. He’s either talking nonsense or he’s saying what I’m saying. But if he’s saying what I’m saying, then he’s not a Thomist! Take Kant; he was stuck in the Middle Ages. There is nothing new about his idea of God, except that he cannot prove it. It’s the same old idea -- no limit put to omnipotence. He talks about our noumenal freedom. Now, how do you fit that together with the power of God? In fact, the whole Middle Ages hardly faced the question of human freedom. That is where I go back to Epicurus. And it is not just human freedom. Epicurus objects to the fact that the poor little atom is not given any freedom. Epicurus struck the bull’s eye. He was not approximately right, he was just right! Every active singular has a little bit of freedom. The Greeks did not know what the active singulars were, except at most in animals.

PG: There are, however, process thinkers who, despite their acquaintance with what you call a correct definition of God, prefer humanistic or atheistic positions. They would argue that God is redundant in process thought -- everything which God explains is already explained without God. I am thinking here of Donald Sherburne.

CH: But Sherburne likes Tillich, so he’s got something very close to a theology unless Tillich was a fraud. I’m not sure. I think that if the theist is an intelligent one and has not been tricked by some stupid theological foolishness -- the main difference between the theist and the atheist is that one of them understands himself and the other does not. If it is true that to live well is to live as if there is a God, how clear are the atheists about that? Over and over again, you will find atheists talking about having an ethics without referring to God. Yes, I will grant that, but are they really thinking carefully about the fact that they are mortal and that our species is mortal? If they really thought that through, how does it add up to anything? How is there any treasury of achievement? That’s a Buddhist phrase, by the way.

PG: When we look at the history of metaphysics, it seems to me that there are many different and internally consistent systems.

CH: Now, when you say there are a lot of systems that are consistent, I guess you imply that they are definite. I say, give me two, that’s all I want. In fact, I’m not even sure of one.

PG: What do you mean by definite?

CH: Definite enough to have any importance. It’s partly the pragmatic test -- if there be any way it could be rationally used in action. Definite enough so it’s worth arguing about. I think that what Spinoza meant by mode is sufficiently indefinite that it’s hardly worth arguing about. It’s unclear what he could mean. He said it’s the way the angles are in a triangle, or it’s like the drops of water in the sea. That cannot possibly be right -- that does not help you a bit.

PG: As I understand Spinoza, this bed, for example, is a modus of the matter, one of the substance’s attributes.

CH: Yes, a modification. But how can an absolutely eternal and fully determined thing change? How can there be an absolutely necessary change? I do not think that makes any sense. Change as such can be necessary, but not a particular change. How can a particular change be necessary? A thing has to become something it is not -- how can that be necessity? It looks like a contradiction. Change has to be a creation, and Whitehead spells that out. I believe in causality, but not in the strict deterministic sense. Causality is responding to a multiplicity of influences. What turns this multiplicity of factors into a single new factor? You see, my experience now is just as much one thing as all the previous experience that I remember -- all that complexity has produced a new mode, a unity. "The many become one and are increased by one." I regard this as a deduction of change as such -- of contingency as such.

PG: I am still not sure about Spinoza. It seems to me that his system can be made consistent.

CH: By becoming unclear?

PG: No, it may be inadequate, but it may be perfectly consistent and clear. The fable, "Little Red Riding Hood" may not correspond to reality or to experience, but it is clear and consistent. And this is what I mean -- that there may be many different metaphysical systems which are internally consistent, although they are inadequate.

CH: I do not believe it. I just do not believe it. I’ve read McKeon -- he tries to make sense out of everything in Spinoza. And I find it the most opaque stuff I’ve read. It’s no clearer than Spinoza. You can have verbal consistency if you leave some of your words so unexplicated that nobody knows what they mean. You can always escape contradiction, but you have to be still saying something positive. Take the question of materialism. Is materialism consistent? I would mean by materialism the view that there are some parts of nature where there is nothing psychical, nothing mental, nothing spiritual at all. I say there is no non-question-begging criterion for the total absence of mind anywhere. Even God could not know this, be-cause in my view the only way God knows is by prehending. But to prehend the concrete is to feel the feelings of others -- I am convinced that’s what experiencing is.

PG: Who do you have in mind when you criticize materialism? Which type of materialism is it?

CH: Emergent materialism. First you have mere matter, no mind at all. Then you have mind. Well, I say nobody knows what mere matter would be -- that’s a negation. No statement is complete which is purely negative. That’s why I think it’s nonsense to say there might have been nothing.

PG: I would like to ask you now about the problem of time in relation to the concept of God.

CH: That’s a hard problem.

PC: Whitehead speculated about God as a timeless singular actual occasion. . .

CH: He did not say timeless. I’d be surprised if you can find that phrase. And he also says that the Consequent Nature is in flux. I haven’t been able to understand that as clear in his writing.

PG: Well, if God is everlasting concrescence, and concrescence is not in time. . .

CH: Each of my actual entities is timeless in that sense.

PG: And if God is one single actual entity, then God is timeless.

CH: Sure, but I consider that a sheer mistake in Whitehead. I cannot pretend to agree with that, and neither does John Cobb. I cannot see how that can be right. My former student Jorge Nobo thinks he’s proved the opposite, but when I examine his language carefully it seems that he and I are saying pretty close to the same thing in slightly different ways.

PG: The idea of timelessness seems to be at least logically possible?

CH: No. I would say it is an empty abstraction -- it could not possibly be concrete. I do not think it is logically possible at all. I think that a lot of logicians would agree with me. I think concrete means change, and one step from the most general ideas towards the concrete, immediately, gives you contingency. That is the only concreteness we know and I do not see anything in the world to imply any other. Everything changes that we know to be concrete. Think how many things the Greeks thought were timeless, except they moved a little bit. They moved in a perfect circle. That’s the most minimal kind of change that you can imagine. Well, that was said in total ignorance, but think how influential it was -- even the hills were supposed to be everlasting! We ought to be jarred out of this casual way of talking about the eternal. It’s a tremendous jump from any reality we know, and there’s no basis for it that I can see.

PG: But when we think about God, we are aware that God can be different from the things we know by our experiences.

CH: Absolutely true. Think of the difference between ordinary change, and change which does not mean loss at all of the past. That’s an enormous difference. Human memory is only faintly and remotely and fragmentarily like that. It’s an enormous jump. There are so many different ways of arguing the thing. All our concepts, I think, are temporal -- Kant said that. The only way we can apply the concepts is through the structure of time. I think he was absolutely right. Timelessness is not such a glorious thing -- why make such a fuss about it? What do you get by it? I do not see that you gain anything. And do not forget why we do this. Plato as usual gave the argument before the others. I think eventually he knew better. Plato said, in The Republic, and not later, that God is perfect and therefore cannot change. This assumes a definite idea of perfection. You can define perfection in certain ways, for example, all value possibilities, all actualized. Hut you have Leibniz’s incompossibles. Are they all actualized in God? They cannot be. That is just one of the many antimonies you get into. Well, then would you say that it’s fine to have antimonies because that shows that you are thinking about God, and God has to be inconceivable? But there’s so much that is inconceivable without that. How can I conceive a wholly cosmic epoch? How can one cosmic epoch be succeeded by another with different laws? If the laws change we could hardly have ever known how. To relate God’s temporality to the worldly temporality -- now, that’s a hard problem. I posit a divine temporality, but how you relate that to worldly temporality, I’m not sure I know.

PG: In your writings you often refer to pantheism.

CH: Yes, I use the phrase classical pantheism and I mean Spinoza and the Stoics. I mean determinism, theological determinism. Now that is a lot different from indeterministic panentheism, where everything is in God but everything is not determined by God. And God is not identical with the world. Plato’s analogy does not say that God is the world. I’m not my body and in my dreamless sleep I am not there. There is no "I" in me in dreamless sleep, so far as I know, unless we go on dreaming. There’s just a body.

PG: What do you mean by dual transcendence?

CH: Do you know that my idea of dual transcendence is not only strongly implied by the Socinians, who knew what they were doing, but by another Italian, a Venetian named Postello? He lived around the time of Socinus and he applied the polarities to God.

It’s just as important that God is finite as that God is infinite, and God transcends us just as definitely in the way of being finite. There’s a sense in which I am infinite, and there’s a sense of my being finite. There’s a sense in which God is infinite and a sense in which God is finite, but the two senses as they apply to God are radically different.

JK: In the context of the finite-infinite, you refer to Brightman quite a lot.

CU: Finite-infinite God. It makes me furious when people say that Brightman believed in a finite God. He believed in a finite-infinite God and he meant the infinity as much as he meant the finitude and without contradiction.

PG: Here we have a problem of how to relate two aspects.

CH: There’s an answer. The finite is the concrete, the concrete includes the abstract. That’s Aristotle, except when he talked about God.

PG: In the response to Richard Martin’s article in Existence and Actuality you said that the distinction between existence and actuality is the most fundamental in your philosophy, and that you hope to be remembered for it.

CH: David Tracy said that it was my great break-through and he is right, but this is part of my general habit of looking beyond dichotomies. They are never adequate -- one side is hopelessly vague every time.

PG: Could you explain this distinction a little bit?

CH: It’s perfectly clear. ‘Actual’ contrasts with possible; ‘exists’ does not. I exist but I have a lot of unactualized possibilities. It is events which are actualities, not persons. And a person is a string of events. The events are the full actuality. What does it mean to say that I exist today? It means that whatever made me Charles Hartshorne up to now made me that person up to yesterday. It’s still expressed in actualities. These are what Whitehead calls ‘actual entities.’ I got the key there from Whitehead’s actual entities, but he never distinguished it sharply from existence. Actual entities do not exist, and experiences do not exist. That’s contrary to good English.

PG: So what exists?

CH: Persons. Societies of actual entities are what exists, and species of societies exist. Species of animals exist, provided there are animals having actual experiences -- not existing experiences, but actual experiences. It’s clear. Show me any lack of clarity in that and I’ll give you $50!

PG: We cannot say, then, that micro-beings, that is, actual occasions, exist. They are actual. Existence can only be ascribed to societies of actual entities?

CH: Yes, but societies can be macroscopic or microscopic. Societies are sequential. They are the societies of actualities, and they are what exists. You see, you do not ask: "Does the experience you are having now exist?" Nobody would ask that. It would be a very unnatural use of language and I think that’s one of the ways in which language is wise. There is a lot of wisdom in language. One of my favorite examples of that is: you can say "I love me," but you cannot say "I love I" -- that’s ghastly English and it’s bad philosophy. I could not love myself if it was just my present experience. What I’m loving of myself is my past experience, and my sense of future experiences. If that is not clear, show me something clearer. I bet you cannot do it!

PG: One of the very fundamental metaphysical problems is the problem of universals. There are some important differences between Whitehead and you on this matter. Could you explain them?

CG: It’s wrong to think, and Whitehead comes far too close to it, that things have quality by having universals, eternal objects ingressing in their experience. I think that’s a very dubious way of talking. You see, the nominalistic alternative is to talk about similarity. Now the idea of similarity is a very special idea. What do I mean by yellow? I mean the color of dandelions and so on. A lot of things are similar in their color, and what that similarity is about, I call that, "yellow." But it does not mean that yellow is any definite entity. And if you deny that, then you’ve got to face the fact that there are similarities among universals. They too have similarities and dissimilarities. The universal, "yellow," has a lot of similarity to the universal "orange" which it does not have to the universal "red." So, you’ve got to take similarity as very fundamental -- and it’s more fundamental in a way than this notion of ingression.

The Person and Immortality

PG: There is something intriguing in your view of time in relation to memory and perception. In our experience, the present is very distinct from the past and the future, and perception is distinct from memory. In your view, however, perception seems to be only a special case of memory.

CH: I sometimes define perception as impersonal memory. Is that what you mean?

PG: Yes. Could you explain it?

CH: Actually the present we know is always the very near past, and here again there are antecedents. As I remember, Paul Natorp in his book on psychology said that introspection is really awareness of the immediate past. Ryle says that introspection is really memory -- it’s a special use of memory. I think that Whitehead is saying that as well. I know myself intuitively because I intuit my past experiences. But the actuality that does that knowing does not prehend itself. Prehension is never an identity relation. It’s always a one-way relation and one of my puzzles is, what do I do with clairvoyance? In some cases it’s very hard to argue away. They look impressive, as though somebody intuits a concrete and even an accidental future thing. I’m not sure what to say about that, except that I’m not going to change my system until a lot of experts have accepted clairvoyance. But I admit that I think it’s a puzzle; and one fairly good philosopher of science is convinced that clairvoyance does occur, and it would mean that there is a kind of reverse memory of what’s going to happen.

PG: Could you clarify in what sense you use the term ‘experience’? You seem to use it not only in an epistemological, but also in an ontological sense -- it is not only that we have experiences but the world consists of experiences.

CH: Well that’s not the initial thing. That’s a conclusion. But each moment you or I have an experience, in that, perhaps we’re having visual perception, perhaps it’s hearing something, or maybe we’re feeling a sore foot or a slight headache or toothache -- all sorts of things, and in addition we’re remembering our past and so on -- but in each moment there is just one experience. Now I think it was Hobbes who seemed to think that there’s no unitary present experience. Carnap thought that was odd, and I agree with him. There is a whole experience, but it isn’t just cognizing. That’s a hopeless mistake, and Husserl comes much too close to that; he separates off all feeling as being somewhat irrelevant. Nonsense. If I do not know something when I have a toothache, then I’m a pretty stupid person. I know there is something wrong with me. That’s knowledge, not just feeling; and feeling, not just knowledge.

JK: Would you interchange the words ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ and say that they are similar?

CH: Feeling is a minimal function of experience. I would say memory is another, but it could be very minimal -- extremely minimal. It could be memory that was hopelessly ineffective except for the past millisecond. That’s in principle conceivable. Human memory can go back many years. It cannot go back centuries, and we do not have any animals that can go that far back. There’s no reason why God’s memory cannot go back infinitely far. Now, that’s a real difference. And if you want things that we cannot fully understand -- that is an example. God can supposedly know an infinite number of items, definitely; we cannot.

JK: Do you think that a lot of people find it difficult to accept what you say about feeling?

CH: What did Morris Cohen, an important teacher and a brilliant man, say? What’s the use in thinking that our furniture or our clothing feels? Nobody ever said that! Cohen was not a stupid thinker, but he was being stupid at that moment, and he did not know it. Nobody ever said that clothing feels -- except maybe F. C. S. Schiller. The biggest encyclopedia of philosophy in English is edited by Paul Edwards. He is one of the most biased men. He wrote the essay on panpsychism, and he mentions all the right names, including mine, but the only person he deals with in any extensive way is F. C. S. Schiller. Who cares about Schiller? He was a pragmatist and I do not think any pragmatist bothers about him now. He’s practically a forgotten guy. Edwards names but dismisses Leibniz, Peirce, Whitehead, Bergson, and me. He’s got all the right names, but the only one he talks about is the one that does not matter a bit. It was Schiller who tried to persuade himself that all sorts of things have something a little bit like mind. And Edwards defines panpsychism to mean that. Everything has mind: the table has a mind, the blanket has a mind. If you leave it that way and show how absurd it is, you’ve defined it as absurd, and so it is.

JK: Is there any difference between your view and Whitehead’s when it comes to the mind-body relation?

CH: His whole theory of mind-body relations I accept. I spell it out more explicitly than he sometimes does. And he has a funny little remark about the cells that I do not fully understand, though I’ve thought about it carefully. But I’m practically a pure Whiteheadian on the mind-body relation, which is the basic epistemological problem. Whitehead is clear that what I do most directly experience when I experience that bed is not the bed, but it’s something back in my body. He accepts the physiological evidence for this.

PG: Do you have to go to physiology when you talk about perception? Phenomenologists have contributed a good deal of excellent analyses of perception cognition without it.

CU: I cannot get any great thrill out of all that stuff. We know we have a body. I doubt if we are going to be any wiser because we try to forget that. You know what Peirce said? A philosopher should not pretend to doubt what he believes in his heart. And especially not if all our practical thinking assumes it.

PG: But when I see the bed I do not think about my neurons. Practically speaking, I see the bed directly.

CH: It’s not necessary to be a philosopher to be practical, in certain basic animal and human ways -- and that is why the world got on for a long time without much of what we now think of as philosophy. We did not have to have it. But now that we have so much science and so many conflicting hypotheses and so many conflicting religions, we’ve got to be much more sophisticated. We’ve got to try to decide now what are the beliefs that we only pretend to give up but cannot really give up. I’m a complete pragmatist in that sense. I’ve no interest in any idea that has no relevance to any conceivable practical value. William James put the challenge very clearly: "God is, in every sense, immutable." What does that do for me in any possible practical way? God has all possible value whether I exist or not. How does that have any bearing on how I act? I have to forget it to act -- in fact, I think I have to deny it. I think that James and Peirce were just simply right in this.

JK: When you refer to body, do you refer to identity, to self-identity?

CH: No. You mean the personally ordered society, the history of which involves these gaps in which there is dreamless sleep? You know the funny thing is that people talk as though life is a continuous stream of consciousness. They’ve forgotten that it is broken in one’s sleep. They’ve forgotten that and that’s not a detail either. I am myself and I was myself yesterday; but in deep dreamless sleep, in what sense am I myself? One’s sense of identity is partly a matter of having virtually or nearly the same body, and partly a matter of memory, and also partly a matter of having a reasonably stable environment too.

PG: But in what sense do you speak of the "sameness" of the body?

CH: I do not see that there is any great mystery about that. You see, to say that a thing changes in some respects does not mean that it changes in every respect. You know, perhaps my triadic distinction is between two extremes and a mean between them. There is the Leibnizian extreme that even before I was born I was a fellow who was going to die at a certain time, at a certain age, in a certain way -- and in between there was a law of succession determining everything that was going to happen. That’s an extreme view of self-identity and it makes change and time an utter riddle. And a French scholar of Leibniz said he ought to have said that time was unreal. But he did not dare say that. But Leibniz was utterly handicapped because he had to think about God’s knowledge as timeless. So it fitted nicely, that timelessly I am whatever I ever was or ever can be. That is one extreme, and David Hume is the other extreme. There’s at most a similarity -- there’s no identity at all. That means that my past might have been somebody else’s past; or as Bertrand Russell says, five minutes ago the world might have begun, for all I know. If we’re going to tolerate that kind of stuff, we’ll never know where we are or anything much. Really all the known factual truths we have are about the past. In fact, it’s only thanks to the past that we have much to talk about. So those are the extremes. We have a middle way. Aristotle virtually had it. You know that one of the first books on contemporary European philosophy with a section on Whitehead was written by Bochenski. Bochenski is a great man and it was a good book. I remember saying to Bochenski that reality consists of events. He replied that Aristotle said that, even though he did not say it as clearly as that. I’m very fascinated by the fact that he had that much insight. In terms of the big contrast between Leibniz and Hume, Aristotle is in the middle and that’s the only reasonable place to be. Whitehead is also there, and so is Paul Weiss who quarrels with me on this issue. They are all there in the middle and we’re quarrelling about fine points.

JK: But you would be critical of somebody who would see the soul in any kind of substantial way?

CH: The functions that were ascribed to substance, some of them -- not all of them -- have to be performed by something. Whitehead speaks of ‘societies’, especially personally ordered societies. And I accept Whitehead completely on that.

PG: You usually criticize the concept of substance, but the Aristotelian concept of substance was a middle way. Aristotle thought about substance as being relatively, rather than totally, self-identical.

CU: On some issues I was not fair to him. I’ve changed my mind. That is because I forgot one of my own main points. I see that I should have been looking for the moderate view of substance, and he had it. One of the few things I regret about Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, for example, is that I was so scornful about Aristotle’s theory of substance. That was a mistake, and I should not have said that. It was, at best, a good theory for its time. The worst thing about it was that it was weak on the inter-relations of substances. No substance can be predicated of another substance. That’s not so. You cannot describe anybody well without mentioning the friends and enemies of that person. The way Aristotle talks, that should not be the case -- a single substance logically ought to be able to be itself in a vacuum. Now he does not believe that but it’s not worked out in a reasonable way. He does have a right view of temporality -- that the past is a precondition of what’s already there now, and what happens tomorrow is not a precondition of what is there now. Whatever my descendants may do, I am what I am; but if you say I am what I am whatever my ancestors did -- that does not make much sense. But Aristotle did not overstate what is meant by self-identity. He knew that it did not mean absolute identity. It meant identity in essentials but not in the accidents. There he is in the middle ground compared to the genuine extremes.

JK: So you would agree that your concept of person is parallel to the Aristotelian idea of substance?

CH: Sure, if he had not said this thing that a subject cannot be predicated. A subject can be part of the predicate of another subject. To be a friend or an enemy of somebody -- that’s an important characteristic of a person. Aristotle did not have a proper theory of internal and external relations. The problem is hardly discussed. I think you can find it in Plato though, but I doubt if Aristotle was ever clear. Yet Aristotle was clear on one point: he said that if an animal walks around a pillar, the animal is related to the pillar, but the pillar is not related to the animal. That is because the animal perceives the pillar, and the pillar does not perceive the animal. That makes a good deal of sense. It’s just a fragment. It seems that he never works that into a system.

JK: Are we just the sum of our relations?

CH: No. The final concrete terms are what Whitehead calls actualities. They’re not just a bundle of relations. An experience is not a bundle -- it’s a complex prehension, an exceedingly complex prehensive experience. Of course you can have adjectives like "happy." A person can be happy and there are any number of degrees and kinds of happiness, and to some extent you can detach those from what the person is happy about; similarly with painful, unpleasant experiences. If you take an actual entity as a noun, then you have the old subject-predicate thing: an actual entity is the subject, and "happy" or "dismal" is the predicate. But suppose you want to say that the subject knows. The question is: "Knows what?" or "Does some action about what?" You’ve got to bring in the other side. Without relations, nothing is. There could not be any adjectives without nouns and propositions without terms and relations. And a complete theory of subject, predicate, noun and verb is hardly worked out yet. You have to have a calculus of individuals in order to make a formal logic, and I’ve not gone into that very thoroughly.

PG: For an existential Thomist, the sphere of existence is the most important metaphysical dimension. Now, if we do not think in this context, in the perspective of existence, but only in the perspective of nature, then it may seem that relations are essential; but if we include the aspect of existence as the most important, then we may say, for example, "I am married to a certain person," but when this person dies it does not destroy my being. I still exist, so this relation is not essential to my being as a person. I may change my nationality, I may change my relations.

CH: I think that the Aristotelian notion of accidents covers that. You see, Whitehead says that the self-identity of a society is not an absolute thing. It is relative, it has degrees. Was I myself as a newborn baby? I would say that I was not. There was no ego there in the sense that there is now, and certainly there was not in the fetus. That’s a very loose and weak kind of identity. Certainly chemical things were foetally determined about me -- ultra microscopic things -- that’s all. So to call that a person -- that’s what makes me so furious about these pro-life people. You have to be very careful in going back with the idea of person. You see, once a person is a few years old, you can always identify that person as one who had those previous experiences. You have to get this gradual society going a little bit -- then you can say that what continues can be called a "society," but then the further along you go the less can be added. It is already fairly largely determined.

JK: How then would you define a person?

CH: As Whitehead would: that a "person" is "a personally ordered society of actualities," and every person is incarnate in a body, including God as a person. The universe is the divine body. Whitehead made a bad mistake in rejecting Plato at this point. The whole idea of a "self" is a tricky one. The first person pronoun can be used in obviously very different ways. I was born in Kitanning. What does the "I" mean -- my kind of consciousness as a philosopher? No, that did not even exist in Kitanning. So you have to be very careful. Suppose you say, "I just had a new idea;" the "haver" of that idea is not the fellow who lived twenty-seven years ago. He never had that idea and never will have that. It’s the slightly new "haver" of ideas in the sense that I’m a new subject of a new self, even though I would say it’s still the same mind or person.

PG: Would you say that human self-identity is real?

CH: I have not denied that it is real, but it is partial identity. Leibniz defined complete identity and defined it rightly. It means that all the properties are the same. But that’s a very trivial kind of identity. It’s not useful. It has nothing to do with personal identity. But you see, day after day, I have the same childhood -- nobody else’s -- and I’m the only one who has it. So that’s real identity -- it does not change. It does not acquire any new properties. I acquire new properties in relation to it; it does not acquire new properties in relation to me. You see, I radically deny that the past changes at all. Of course, as soon as it is past there is a new present. The past is indestructible; that’s what is meant by the immortality of the past. It applies not just to me but to animals, and to everything. Bergson said it. Bergson said that duration is creation or nothing. It’s not destruction -- just creation.

JK: Mention of the immortality of the past brings me to ask you about immortality and death.

CH: Max Scheler had a few brilliant insights. I do not think he was a great philosopher, but he had some great flashes of insight. We ought, he said, to know intuitively that we’re going to die even if we’d never seen a corpse, never heard of death or anything, by the fact that when we’re young we have an open future and we can do this and that and the other thing. When we decide not to do this -- that’s a limitation that we’ve now accepted. Well then, we make another decision, not to do something -- we might have done it but we’re not going to. We get ourselves more and more bound in with the things we’re not going to do, and it’s too late to do them. From all this we ought to know that we’re going to die, he says. I think it’s a wonderful insight: it makes sense to regard our lives as temporarily finite, as well as spatially finite, and Peirce saw that and he saw immortality as an attempt to make us infinite in time, although we’re finite in space. He said, "Give me any argument to show that we’re not finite in time, and I’ll show you a similar argument that we must be infinite in space." I do not believe, and I do not think that scientists ought to believe, that the world is infinite. Einstein said, and he was probably right, that we could never prove that it was infinite empirically. But we might prove that it was finite. I do not see any use for an infinite space; but an infinite time, that’s different. Even Kant made the distinction, and I’m pleased to note that G.E. Moore is on my side. G.E. Moore says we do not need any infinite space, but we need a beginningless past-time and an endless potential future time.

JK: Could you say something about your views on immortality and the possibility of life after death?

CH: I’ve just been quoting Peirce on that.

JK: You mentioned in a recent letter to me that Peirce has been influential in this regard. I’ve read quite a good deal of your work and you very rarely refer to Peirce in this context.

CH: Well, I only discovered recently what Peirce says. His view was that it is nobler not to believe in [what’s conventionally meant by] immortality, because it forces us to look beyond ourselves for our ultimate aim. That seems to me to be exactly right. And the ancient Jews conformed to that. I’m astonished and shocked how seldom Christians remind themselves that the people who first had the kind of belief in God that we more or less have did not believe in personal immortality. Christians forget that, just as much as they can. In a poem written in 1912 (when I was 14), I presuppose a conventional idea of heaven, but after encountering Whitehead on objective immortality I felt that nothing more was needed.

JK: You refer to your mother at one point -- that she believed in personal immortality.

CH: She never talked about it, and I do not think she would have been shocked by Whitehead’s ‘objective immortality’ in the mind of God. It might have caused a little bit of a stir in her mind, but I do not think she’d have been very much upset.

JK: What about your father’s belief?

CH: He was very reserved about it, and I do not know that it would have shocked him terribly. Reinhold Niebuhr told me he would not say that a Christian could not accept objective immortality.

JK: You seem to argue very strongly that it’s the idea of an infinite future in terms of immortality that you would criticize. Is there room for the possibility that for some period of time there could be personal immortality?

CH: Non-infinite survival would provide what you suggest here, but I see no very strong reason to accept it. I think it is essentially an inability to take seriously the formula, "Love God with all our being." You see there are two questions: "Do we survive death?" and "Do we have further experiences?" It’s an entirely different question, an enormously different question. Does this new phase of my career or your career after death, go on infinitely, forever, or not? Now the gap between the finite and the infinite is an infinite gap. People forget that you’d have to know that this survival is somehow so strong that it could go on forever. You’d have to know that God is determined to see to it that it goes on forever. Otherwise, you would not know a thing -- you’d just know that you would survive for a while. I first got that idea from reading Peirce. I’m proud of Bergson (I’m a Bergsonian to quite an extent); Bergson said that he was inclined to believe in immortality, but then later he said that he was not talking about an infinite survival. I thought much more highly of him for that. It’s hard enough, maybe, to believe that God can be deathless, but to grab it for ourselves I think is typical human egotism.

JK: When I read what you said about personal immortality, while I’m inclined to agree with a lot of it -- for example, your rejection of egoism -- I still have some difficulties with it. My hope for my father’s immortality would not be from any egoistic motive but because I would like him to retain his identity in God’s eyes, that he would be remembered precisely as an individual by God, as distinct from any impersonal sense.

CH: But that is how God remembers him, because that’s what he was; he is remembered as what he was.

JK: In that sense is there personal immortality?

CH: Sure. What’s more personal than all the experiences your father ever had and all the experiences the cells of his body ever had?

JK: But he has no future?

CU: You see this is "everlastingness." We forget that there are two kinds of change. There’s a change which involves loss, and maybe there’s a change which involves no loss but only increase. Even the angels do not have that, do they? You have to remember that God’s memory surpasses anything that we have as memory, infinitely. In fact, if Whitehead is right -- he did not quite spell it out -- he seems to believe in an infinite past. And when I asked him about it he seemed to confirm that, and I do not see how his categories would allow him not to. So God is aware of an infinity of past actual entities. Now, compare that to human memory; that’s a fantastic difference. It’s really an infinite difference.

JK: In Christian terms we speak of God as forgiving, and the notion of redemption. Do you feel that the value of the past can change? Even though the past may not change, its value may change for the present?

CH: Obviously the present gets new things out of it [the past], but that value is not back there in the past. The past was when it was, and it can never be or have been anything other than it was. But, you see, human memory does not measure that. I think that apart from God we do not know what truth is, and that is another reason why I believe in God.

JK: Would you argue, then, that God remembers all our experiences, whether good or bad, positive or negative?

CH: You cannot separate the positive from the negative. That’s one reason why God has to be a suffering God. You see I’m going back to one of the early heresies, patripassionism. When I looked it up I saw that they mixed it up with some other things that I do not believe, and that’s true of every heresy I’ve ever looked into. For example, it’s true in Japan. There are a whole lot of heretical forms of Buddhism, quasi-Buddhism in Japan and quasi-Shinto, and each one has a nice idea but it has some other ideas which are not so nice. But to go back to suffering. How can you know what feeling is without yourself feeling? How can you know what pain is if you never feel pain? I do not think that means anything. You might think there’s something that causes creatures to run away from things or something. We would not really know what it’s like to feel pain.

PG: So remembering is the main function of God, the main reason we need God?

CH: I’m glad you put it that way. People ask what does God do in the world; that’s as though the only important thing God can do is done in, or to, the world. Equally important is what God does with the world, not to it. This enables the world to do things to God, and this echoes back to the creatures. God enjoys the beauty of the world; the creatures in their own way enjoy God’s vision of the beauty of the world -- it goes back and forth. Now, how a non-theistic view can be better than that, I just cannot imagine. Some may say it is only wishful thinking. Well, I say if the wishful thinking amounts to wishing that life made some sense, it seems to me that’s very different from wishful thinking. It’s wishful thinking if the mother of a child who has done something felonious goes on thinking that it is a wholly nice child. That kind of thinking maybe is not a very good thing; but, you see, life still makes sense whether she’s right or wrong. Kant said we cannot prove that God exists, but we can show that ethics does not make much sense without God -- therefore he believed in God. I do not reject that. My only quarrel with that is, if it were the only reason, that, I think, would be very suspicious. The absence of other reasons would be really a reason against it. If there’s only one argument for God, and even it scarcely seems conclusive, that’s a pretty weak case. Kant thought that a thoroughly thoughtful ethical person who disbelieved in God was a fool, because he was believing in something that was not really believable or worthwhile. But he was trapped in the view that we have to get a reward in heaven. We do not have to get a reward in heaven for our lives to make sense. Kant thought that the summum bonum must be the perfect marriage of virtue and happiness. That’s in God: He has the summum bonum; we do not have to have it. We contribute to it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s enough, even though some people may say it isn’t. What I would say to that is that when you say you love God with all your being, do you or do you not mean what you say? I mean what I say. Some do not. It’s clear that they do not: their attitude is, I must have my reward. The rational attitude in ethics is not to ask what is in your own self-interest. As Quine says, it’s just as rational to be interested in somebody else’s future. The one great thing about the Buddhists is they got away from self-interest as the principle. And the Christians ought to, if they believe what they say when they speak of loving your neighbor as yourself. What has that to do with self-interest? You’re not supposed to love your neighbor only because he or she is useful to you. That’s abominable.

JK: One belief that you seem to be very clear about is that God needs a world.

CH: Some world or other, yes. Of course, there are lots of people who have said that. I’m by far not the only one.

JK: Would that, in terms of the future, mean that there is always going to be some world for God?

CH: Yes. You’re aware of Whitehead’s phrase, ‘cosmic epochs’? He believes in a beginningless and endless succession of cosmic epochs. That too has a precedent. I think it was Tertullian who said that God has created an infinity of worlds one after the other, but he destroys each one before he makes the new one. Well, in terms of modern physics, that’s like asking, "What was before the Big Bang?" Now, whatever it was, we probably cannot know it, and the laws would have been partly different, so it is inaccessible to us; but God has an awareness of all those others. This is an enormously imaginative thing. That’s the way this man’s mind works. Take his phrase, "In the slow sunrise of a thousand years." A certain idea that was there all along finally becomes important. The Buddhists were like that. Talk to a Buddhist about the whole world beginning four thousand years ago -- that would seem utterly childish to a Buddhist, as it does to Whitehead.

PG: In terms of the whole universe, you seem to ascribe mind to it?

CH: But not to the sun and the stars, not to the galaxies.

PG: And mind would be ascribed also to the metaphysical units like actual occasions or the units of creative synthesis?

CH: No one of my occasions has a mind of its own; that’s a wrong way of talking. I would not even apply the word "soul" there really. I have a soul. That’s probably a better way to talk, but each of my occasions has its own feelings.

PG: You do not mind if somebody refers to you as being an idealist: In what sense do you use the term "idealism"?

CH: Peirce used it a good deal as I do. Whitehead did not. Peirce called himself an idealist over and over again. He put it the following beautiful way: "Mind is the sole self-intelligible thing, and therefore it is entitled to be considered the fountain of existence." I think that’s a marvelous sentence, and only Peirce could have said it. And it has a double meaning -- self-intelligible -- it’s explained in terms of itself and it understands itself. How can matter do that? You say matter can do that too. Well, maybe matter as being able to do that is what I mean by mind. But it prehends, feels others’ feelings. At least there’s no matter that is not able if not as a whole, then in its constituents, to do that according to my view.

PG: So Leibniz in that sense would also be an idealist?

CH: Sure, and I guess he would have said so. Plato was an idealist not just because he believed in the ‘Ideas’. That’s a very silly view of Plato. Burnett put it rightly and I only repeat it. Plato’s great discovery was not the ‘Forms’ but the ‘Soul’. The whole Republic is about the ‘Soul’. Timaeus is about the ‘Soul’, and the Phaedrus is about ‘Soul’. That is what drives the world, not the ‘Forms’.

JK: Not every process writer would agree with you in terms of how you see the relationship between God and psychicalism.

CH: Schubert Ogden has one bone to pick with me and it’s so subtle. He thinks that theology should not be burdened with psychicalism -- that’s an extra baggage they do not have to carry, and he does not like my saying that God is ‘supreme consciousness.’ He says that’s another metaphor like Tillich’s word ‘symbolic.’ It applies to God only symbolically. I think that theology got along with a mind-matter dualism for two thousand years but it always was an awkward thing. That’s what Berkeley tried to remedy; it’s what Peirce tried to remedy. I think it’s about time that we ought to be sophisticated enough to face the fact that if we can use mind or knowledge or love -- any of these psychological predicates to apply to God, to make the whole jump from us to God -- we ought to be able to make the downward jump from us to atoms or particles and not come to zero. Because when you come to zero what have you got left of God? All of the creatures must be images of God in some attenuated sense, and the scholastics said that, especially in the Reformation period. If there’s no mind I do not see how there’s God. A lot of physicists believe that mind is everywhere. Sewell Wright was a thoroughly convinced psychicalist. He did not think that a bed has feelings or feels. It’s the molecules and the cells that feel, But Fechner had just the wrong kind of psychicalism. Fechner knew there were two kinds: there’s the monadological and the synecological kind. The synecological kind thinks it’s the big things that have mind. The earth has a mind, the other planets, I suppose -- I would not think the moon. And the universe has a mind. Well, the universe is a very different thing than the moon, an extremely different thing. The moon does not have it’s own laws; the cosmos has its own laws. That’s a mighty difference. That’s a big jump. Plato knew it. When you’re talking about the universe, you’re talking about a principle, not just a big detail.

General Issues

PG: You said in some of your writings that necessity may be established only by intellectual experiment. Are you somewhat influenced by Husserl’s concept of imaginative variation?

CH: Yes, that’s one of the true things that Husserl said. He had a lot of foolish things, but that was one of the true things. Whitehead says the same thing independently. We must think of experience -- drunk experience, sober experience -- we must go through all the possibilities.

PG: What do you see as the value of current philosophical orientations, e.g., deconstructionism?

CH: Well, they take a quarter of the truth and try to make it a whole truth. There’s some truth in what they say. Language is very tricky and so on. There’s a new book about Derrida. I’m tempted to buy it and look into it a little more carefully. They admit themselves, or so I’m told, that deconstructionism must also be deconstructed, an "ism" that cannot be taken very seriously or very literally. It’s as though we were completely trapped behind language -- as though by having language we’re cut off from the world. They’re dealing with other (non-human) animals (and with inanimate objects) and they’re dealing with us, so they’re better off without language. They do not know they do not have a world, we cannot know that we have a world -- but they have a world just the same and we have it too. It seems to me so obvious that some things are literally true about nature -- for example, that there are all those other animals. What’s untrue about that? Why worry about whether it’s true or not?

PG: What about neo-pragmatism and these types of thinkers? You mentioned Richard Rorty.

CH: I do not know what his philosophy amounts to. He keeps insinuating various things. Thus he believes that there is no genuine freedom -- he’s a determinist. There was a time when great minds believed that -- they do not do it now. Does Popper believe it? No. Did Peirce believe it? No. Did Whitehead believe it, did Bergson? Who believes it? Rorty! Good luck to him!

JK: You mentioned that you would regard Niebuhr as the best theologian in America.

CH: I would say that Jonathan Edwards, Tillich, and Niebuhr are the three best theologians this country ever had. And I would put Tillich third, I think, even though he knew more philosophy than the others. I think that Edwards was a genius, and I think that Tillich was a great man. Niebuhr said that he was not confident that it was wrong to accept Whitehead’s ‘objective immortality’ as the real thing, but he said that he preferred to leave it a mystery. Well, I do not want to quarrel with that,

JK: Would you regard your writings as being close to Christianity or closer to Judaism, or, in fact, closer to Buddhism?

CH: I would say that the parables of Jesus, and the way he said that the two "great" commandments summed up everything, are what I believe -- but if you say you’re a Christian, then people think that you have to believe in heaven and maybe in hell too, and who knows what. And the Book of Revelation -- I, and my father and D.H. Lawrence and Charles Peirce and A.N. Whitehead (very different people), all agree -- the Book of Revelation has no place in the Bible -- It’s a mess. It’s rotten. It’s not Christian at all, and it’s not good for anything. That book should not have been there. It’s amazing -- my father was so pleased when he found two great philosophers who agreed with him and D.H. Lawrence. He knew about Lawrence, but did not know about Peirce or Whitehead -- he was tickled to death. So that’s the trouble about saying that you’re a Christian. And there’s another thing -- there’s anti-semitism. I’m inclined to say the following: if you’re so sure that the Christians were right on all the religious issues and the Jews were wrong, then you’re awfully close to anti-semitism and I would not trust you. There’s a very good chance that they were right part of the time against the Christians -- a very good chance. Everything I know about human nature supports this.

JK: Probably one of the key differences between Judaism and Christianity concerns the meaning of the resurrection.

CH: Yes. That’s where my father is stuck -- and he acted a little bit anti-semitically, too. He thought there must have been something miraculous. He was willing to doubt lots of miracles, but somehow if there was nothing miraculous, how did the thing ever get going? The man was dead, crucified. Why did it not just end? I do not know, but then I do not know why Buddhists succeeded. To me that’s extraordinary. I cannot explain it, so that kind of evidence is not enough for me. Dr. Samuel Johnson -- that was his argument, and I know a learned scholar in Chinese and Japanese and that’s her argument. She’s a historian. I would have to be a better historian, and take a lot of time before I could trust this, if I ever could.

JK: At one stage you say that when we speak about Jesus we’re speaking about matters of history, and that’s a separate issue from matters of philosophy.

CH: Of course I agree that a religion has to be partly historical. It’s partly about human beings, and that’s not a metaphysical issue unless you generalize it terrifically. You’ve got other possible planets with possible inhabitants and some Christians do not like that idea. But I know some humanists -- and this just makes me laugh -- who were so humanistic they thought it was a ghastly idea that we were not the only rational animals in the universe. I have no sympathy for that. They want a universe to be small enough so that we’re the biggest thing in it. That’s not my wish -- I do not care how big the universe is -- and I hope there’s some species somewhere that are better than we are. That ought to be quite conceivable.

PG: If you were to single out some of your contributions to philosophy or theology, what would they be?

CH: I do not know. I cannot choose much among my books. My first philosophical book was Beyond Humanism. I would say that is pretty much superseded. They reprinted it and some still like it. I called myself a naturalist then. I’ve given that up. I think that’s misleading. God is not natural as most naturalists think of things. For me "naturalist" means "one fascinated by nature." They are fascinated by human nature.

JK: One final question concerns the rather optimistic thrust of your writings. Do you believe that good will outweigh evil?

CH: I do not believe that any animal can be forced to live. I think that any animal that lives wants to live. It may not say so. You cannot live, certainly not long, without wanting to live. The cells of your body have their own little wills to live, so they will carry you along to some extent; but if you do not want to live, if you do not get any satisfaction out of living, you’ll not live long, and you’ll do a lot of damage to yourself psychologically. Therefore, I think that Schopenhauer was almost as wrong as he could have been. He claimed that, since we’re never content with what we have now -- we always want something else and we move on and on to something different -- this means that we’re forever discontented. I think that is a fallacy. I think we live because we do get satisfaction out of living. We do not live very vigorously or very well, if we do not. And Schopenhauer got a lot of satisfaction out of life, sometimes in pretty illegitimate ways, according to his own beliefs. He was an extraordinary puzzle. So the classical statement that "Being, as such, is good," is a little more true than many people have realized. There is some good even in painful experiences. If not, you’d lose consciousness. I remember the case where a mother who had lost her husband said that she did not want to live. Then they brought her baby out, and she said, "Well, I’ll live for you." The difference is that when she was not thinking of the child she got no satisfaction out of living, but the child gave her satisfaction. In a sense I’m a fundamental optimist. Optimism is much more right than pessimism. But extremes are always bad. Extreme optimism would mean that you’d be careless about dangers -- that is something else. I do believe there is some good in all life, and when we complain about our experiences and say how bad they are, we mean that they could be so much better. We do not mean that there is no good at all -- there’s always some good. Reality is basically good.

NOTES

1. The table that was referred to is the following:

I II III IV

1. N.n C.n NC.n O.n

2. N.c C.c NC.c O.c

3. N.cn C.cn NC.cn O.cn

4. N.O C.O NC.O O.O

I = God is in all respects Necessary.

II = God is in all respects Contingent.

III = God is (in diverse respects) Necessary and Contingent.

IV = God is impossible (or has no modal status).

1. = World (what is not God) is in all respects necessary.

2. = World is in all respects contingent.

3. = World is (in diverse respects) necessary and contingent.

4. = World is impossible (or has no modal status).

My philosophical background which drives me today to metaphysical speculation seems to be rooted in my past access to: (I) the theories of proto-logic and proto-mathematics in the Erlangen school and (2) the intuitionistic, constructivistic approach to the logical foundations of mathematics, which became one of the post-Husserlian phenomenological movements. Paul Lorenzen, founder of the Erlangen school, attempted to bring to light the genesis of logical and mathematical objects from concrete objects like bricks or stones (OLM 9). Edmund Husserl, the progenitor of phenomenological movements, was absorbed in delineating anonymous processes of the geneses of objects in general (EJ 197 ff.). Treated in his phenomenological descriptions are abstract formal ontological and formal logical objects, as well as concrete objects like the chair Whitehead’s dog jumped onto (S 4).

To make an incidental remark, Whitehead’s theories of causal efficacy and symbolic reference are too basic for the elucidation of the multiple higher order structures of sedimentated objective meanings Husserl ultimately aimed at.

As for Lorenzen’s relationship to phenomenology, I would indicate just one point, namely, that Lorenzen was influenced by his predecessor, Hugo Dingler, who started his theoretical reconstruction of science from das Unberührte (the untouched) which he had found in Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-Sein (Being-in-the-world) (PHD 7).

Thus, my main interest has been in the problem of genesis. I spent one year at the University of Pennsylvania, where Mervin Farber, former assistant of Husserl, taught. After that I went to the University of Freiburg, where I attended Husserl’s disciples’ seminars, made it a rule to look at the portrait of Husserl in the seminar room, and often strolled up and down Loretto Hill, where Husserl used to go for a walk. But, unlike Husserl, I could not gain any penetrating insight into philosophical truth.

II

Now, firstly, Lorenzen’s logic, by which he intended to overcome the conflict between logicism and intuitionism, turned out finally to be only within the boundary of intuitionism, when he introduced into his system the so-called dialogical constructivistic criteria; that is to say, he took solidarity into consideration. Secondly, I heard in Freiburg that Eugen Fink had declared himself an authentic disciple of Husserl’s rather than Heidegger’s. According to Fink, Husserl’s phenomenology is dependent upon not a few operative concepts, the meaning of which he assumes and does not explicate. Transcendental subjectivity, and stream of consciousness are among such concepts. And when solidarity became problematic, transcendental intersubjectivity rather than transcendental subjectivity came to the fore as an operative concept. It is here that phenomenological analysis found itself in an insurmountable predicament.

To make a lengthy argument short, it is because the so-called dialogical operation is irreversible that Lorenzen’s operative logic turned out to be intuitionistic logic which does not accept the principle of the excluded middle. To speak in Whiteheadian diction, irreversible dynamic process cannot produce eternal objects. In other words, eternal objects cannot be reduced to process. Husserl asserts that the time-continuum constitutes itself. It corresponds to Whitehead’s becoming. However, self-constitution presupposes, as Husserl says, something which cannot but be alluded to by the metaphor ‘flux.’ Husserl’s sentiment is so subjectively-oriented that he identifies the flux with absolute subjectivity. It is absolute, for it is beyond constitution (H X § 36). Here Husserl ‘s phenomenology transformed itself into metaphysics, a point which I once discussed in relation to Whitehead.¹

III

It is exciting to find the similarity between Oskar Becker’s (Husserl’s disciple) scheme to explicate transfinite’ and the scheme Whitehead used in his theory of extensive abstraction (CN 74f, ME 100). This might have motivated me into immersing myself in Whitehead.

Now, Whitehead is great in that genesis and solidarity are equalibrated and harmonized perfectly in his metaphysics. As for the epochal theory of time, it is not peculiar to Whitehead. Lorenzen’s step-by-step development of logical operations (e.g., piling up bricks) is epochal and Husserl’s lebendige Gegenwart (present-to-be-lived) is also epochal; but both Lorenzen and Husserl, especially the latter, were too sensitive of the process of concrescence in which they found themselves at the moment they existed. They further believe that they can have direct consciousness only of this process.

I dare say, they lacked the Whiteheadian imaginative leap. They did not know there is something they cannot even einklammern (bracket). Accordingly, the thinkers in Erlangen and Freiburg may well strive to nourish their imagination. In 1983 when I stayed in Germany, I found the textbook of one seminar in Erlangen to be Science and the Modern World and that of one seminar in Freiburg to be Process and Reality.

But we must be very careful when we supplement operative and phenomenological philosophies with Whiteheadian speculation. My impression is that Whitehead’s theory of concrescence does not have much to add to Husserl’s theory of passive and active synthesis. Husserl seems to know better about concrescence, especially in its supplementary phases, than Whitehead does. And moreover, as I mentioned above, Husserl in his later period stands closer to Whitehead in that he thinks human experiences throughout history are integrated into one person’s consciousness and his actual world is intersubjectively constituted (H VI 365ff).

Now, the distinguishing character of the Whiteheadian theory of perception over against that of Husserl and Lorenzen’s view on operativeness, is that in Whitehead a percipient event is a bodily life of mind (CN 107). Therefore, the doctrine of solidarity plays the central role in it. According to it, a bodily life is a society consisting of innumerable corpuscular societies and countless non-corpuscular societies. A society is primarily not the product of concrescence in the subject for which the society is an object. Why can a society be real rather than phenomenal? Because it is the assemblage of superjects into an organic whole not necessarily presupposing a regnant society. Actual occasions superject themselves into a nexus. It is not by being prehended and concrescenced by a dominant occasion that a nexus is brought forth. Thus far I agree with Bracken when he says,". . every society, whether it contains a presiding occasion or not, possesses an objective unity in virtue of the dynamic interrelatedness of its constituent occasions from moment to moment" (PS 18:162). Symbolically, my body exists before I recognize it as my body.

More precisely, the superject of an occasion (a) is not identical with an initial datum of a succeeding occasion (b) in the sense that the initial datum presupposes the existence of (b) while the superject does not. Let me clarify this by illustrating sense-perception.

For the present nascent sense-perception, the whole preceding bodily life is initial data. It prehends the data, objectifies them in the foreground-background structure by transmutation and brings them finally into affirmation-negation contrast. When (becoming) comes at last to (having become), then everything vanishes out of my perceptual screen. But if we are lucky enough to survive, we can re-prehend it together with other new data. James in his radical empiricism is so optimistic that he includes transition into his direct experience; but if so, he cannot explain why it is impossible for us to prehend a momental occasion of falling into sleep, still less of death. The reason is clear. Our present occasion superjects. But it cannot be prehended in the occasion itself (PR 85/130). In order to prehend it, we must prepare another occasion at least by surviving enough for that. Solidarity is real and public because it is the product of super-jections, not that of concrescences. Therefore, solidarity is beyond intuitionism and phenomenology. They cannot even bracket it. The characteristic of process philosophy is that it concludes in itself such a moment which cannot by principle be phenomenologically internalized.

Here phenomenologists may pose a question on the relationship between mind and body. But let me take up a point made by Davidson (EAE 207ff), an analytic philosopher, because it is founded on the same principle as Whitehead’s view. Briefly, a mental event and what is usually called its corresponding physical event are, according to Davidson, identical as a token; but they are of two different generic types. And there is no identical law under which these two types are connected. Davidson is right in that he regards patterns, i.e., eternal objects, as something crucial for the identification of mental events as well as of physical events. For Whitehead, likewise, the identification is the identification of sameness (CN 143f). Accordingly, an individual event itself cannot be recognized. Therefore, it is possible to maintain that a percipient occasion is physiological, and at the same time, psychological, if you like.²

Now, the other problem of dynamic process in the ultimate sense of the word, that is to say, the problem of creativity, is enigmatic also in Whitehead and process philosophy in general. I dare say, dynamic process is presupposed, rather than explicated. According to Whitehead, what has been originated publicly pervades the world, promoting feeling (PR 310/472). This promotion, rather than inertness, is presupposed. Moreover, the gap between promotion and being actually felt is tacitly put out of the question.

However, Whitehead’s adventurous theory-making is remarkable and, I would say, exquisite. He attempts to elucidate the metaphysical basis of temporality in terms of non-temporality. For example, my percipient occasion is temporal, while the with-ness of my body is an ever-present element in my perceptions of presentational immediacy. Phenomenologists talk about the aboriginal present which is at once standing and flowing. I interpret this to be an expression of the ever-presentness of the above with-ness. And in the feeling of this ever-present bodily efficacy does a complex eternal object have ingression (PR 312/475). I would say in our human existence the complex eternal object is non-temporally present, bringing forth the efficacy. For Whitehead, depth of experience is gained by concentrating on the systematic structures in the environment. Every element of systematic structure is emphasized; every individual aberration is pushed into the background (PR 318/ 485f). Thus, the delicate network of the complex eternal object extends over the strain-locus, while the background is a shadow of a pile of negatively prehended eternal objects.

Thus considered, the relish of life, though accompanied by a faint feeling of stubborn facticity, seems to consist mainly of eternal objects, whether simple or complex, shifting their modes of being from pure to real potentiality. It is to be noted that each shift is itself not an occasion, because it is too abrupt to include in itself where-in, wherefore and how. Indeed, Whitehead’s concept of eternal object’ is fascinating. The hybrid physical prehension gives personal order to my life, and the so-called two-way-functioning of eternal objects sustains the continuity of my life.

But what on earth are eternal objects metaphysically? What is the mechanism of our encounter with eternal objects? When eternal objects make up a beautiful object, I wonder, with Santayana, what the relation is between the constitution of the object and the excitement of our susceptibility. Eternal objects face us always. Is it a sort of blasphemy to try to see the rear sides of them? In other words, am I not allowed to consider the genesis of eternal objects in a Peircian way (CP 6. 189-209)?

I pondered over these questions, walking down the slope from the guest-house of the University of Heidelberg on an autumn day in 1983. I thought that whatever counter-factual worlds I might imagine, they would have by necessity something in common with the actual world, and accordingly there must be absolutely heterogeneous eternal objects even beyond the extent of our ability to conceive, which might consequently be entirely free from every paradox the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries had discovered. Far below I could command an enchanting view of the winding River Neckar flowing. It was then that I felt I saw God in the primordial nature, and a sort of Wittgensteinian metaphysical event occurred, i.e., my actual world shrank to a point, through which the vast realistic world opened (TLP 5.64). I felt I was absolutely passive in that process. This may perhaps be the logic of creativity.

However, my actual world is still haunted by the query. What are eternal objects?

References

CP -- Charles S. Peirce. Collected Papers, Vol. 6. Ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935.

EAE -- D. Davidson. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

EJ – Edmund, Husserl. Experience and Judgment. Trans. Churchill and Ameriks. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

H -- Edmund Husserl. Husserliana. Bd. I-XXVIII. Haag: Nijhoff, 1950-1988.

ME -- Oskar Becker. Die Mathematische Existenz. Max Niemeyer, 1927.

OLM -- Paul Lorenzen. Einführung in the Operative Logik und Mathematik. Berlin: Springer, 1955.

PHD -- W. Krampf. Die Philosophie Hugo Dinglers. München: Eidos, 1955.

PS18 -- Joseph A. Bracken. "Energy-Events and Fields." Process Studies 18/3. (Fall 1989): 153-65.

TLP -- Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. London: 1922.

Notes

1. At the international conference held at Nagoya, Japan. 1983, 1 presented the vague dipolarity of Hussel’s God and attempted to show all the accomplishments of Husserl’s efforts of phenomenological description as a subsystem of Whitehead’s metaphysics. (See Hiroshi Endo, "The Metaphysics of Time in Husserl and Whitehead," in Proceedings, International Conference-Process and Reality, East and West. (Tokyo: The Japan Society for Process Studies, 1984). p. 230.

2.The mind-body problem cannot be solved by the dipolar character of every actual occasion. The brain process is dipolar and the fully supplemented conscious occasion is dipolar but it can still be questioned whether or not both of them are identical. The theory of token identify is a sort of answer, although it is completely impractical in use.

David E. Roy’s article "The Value of the Dialogue Between Process Thought and Psychotherapy" (PS 14:158-74) ably suggested a number of significant areas where process thought and psychotherapy might interact to their mutual advantage. This essay attempts to make a contribution to that ongoing dialogue by corroborating some of the central features of Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal theory of psychiatry in light of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical insights about the nature of reality. Surprisingly, such an effort might be welcomed by Sullivan himself. In explicating his own notion of "dynamism" Sullivan notes that, "Whitehead, among the philosophers, has conceived the universe as an organism, and certainly there is no difficulty in seeing living organisms as particular dynamisms." He then quotes from Process and Reality to illustrate his point further (ITP 102).

Whitehead did not focus to any great extent on the subject of psychology as such, but tended to discuss psychological topics more in terms of particular exemplifications of his larger schema. Nonetheless, one can find numerous insights scattered throughout his writings which coincide to a remarkable degree with Sullivan’s clinically oriented observations.¹

In order to show how an understanding of each’s thought might lead to a better appreciation of both, the present article will be broken down into four parts, each dealing with a subject of mutual concern to the two respective thinkers. Part one will examine the extent to which both thinkers were influenced by the insights of contemporary physics in formulating their view of the human person. Next, after briefly outlining Sullivan’s thought-provoking stages of personality development, part two will discuss some of Whitehead’s writings on the subject, revealing the extent to which he had already anticipated many of the features that Sullivan describes. Part three will then highlight the significance that each thinker assigns to the role of language. This particular topic is singled out, in so far as it plays a key role for understanding both Whitehead’s notion of personal maturation and Sullivan’s theory of mental disorders. Finally, part four will touch on some areas of clinical interest that might profit from an application of what has been learned in this Whitehead/ Sullivan dialogue. Overall, this study reveals, as Sullivan himself recognized, the potential of Whitehead’s process philosophy as a means of providing a coherent theoretical ground for contemporary psychiatry.²

I

Unlike philosophers who can sometimes get lost in mazes of hypothetical ideas, psychiatrists must deal with concrete individuals. In order to treat their patients, however, psychiatrists must tacitly rely upon some operative model of the self and of the personality. This theoretical framework necessarily entails a whole matrix of assumptions and theories about what a healthy, normal human person should be, and some criteria for determining and assessing desirable modes of interpersonal relationships. For example, the model which guided Freud’s pioneering work was heavily influence by Newtonian physics, and especially by the research of Hermann von Helmholtz. This orientation enabled Freud to theorize about human persons analogically as though they were steam engines, in which finite amounts of energy had to be accounted for within a closed system. Common Freudian terms such as "resistance," ‘repression," "displacement," etc., clearly reveal his theoretical commitment.

Following classical mechanics, Freud emphasized the independence of individuals and stressed that direct contact was necessary to explain human actions. Subsequently, just as Clerk Maxwell’s field theory revolutionized the mechanical conception of physics by suggesting that action and reaction could take place anywhere within a given field of electrical energy even without the objects having to be in direct contact with one another, so too, Sullivan, drawing upon Maxwell’s in-sights, drastically challenged the underpinnings of Freud’s instinctual drive theory, by placing greater emphasis on the notions of relation and interdependence.

Rather than envisioning the individual personality as an object for study as though it were an independent, discrete entity, Sullivan believed that personality manifests itself only in relation to others. These others could be actual living persons, or else personifications derived from them, such as dream images or the characters created by a child’s imagination. To suggest, however, that an individual personality could be discussed in vacuo would be to fall prey to what Whitehead described as the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (SMW 75). To both thinkers, personality can only be viewed as a relational term. In Sullivan’s words, "personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life" (ITP 110). Investigating these observable patterns constitutes the nature of the psychiatric enterprise.

If personality is a relation, then it remains to be seen precisely what is related. Confronting this topic reveals the extent to which Sullivan’s fundamental assumptions came into conflict with those of Freud. In order to explain human behavior more adequately Sullivan found it necessary to replace what he called Freud’s "mechanism" with his own concept of "dynamism." This he defined as "the relatively enduring pattern of energy transformations which recurrently characterize the organism in its duration as a living organism" (ITP 103). According to his model, personality is conceived as a dynamic living organism made up of a number of interacting dynamisms and subdynamisms recognizable by a recurring pattern of identity. To explain more fully what he meant by the term "pattern," Sullivan invoked his own original definition, namely "a pattern is the envelope of insignificant particular differences" (ITP 104). Thus, the human organism is not a fixed, static object enduring self-identically through time but rather an ongoing dynamic relationship composed of component dynamisms in a continuous state of flux or process. A sense of personal identity is preserved, albeit always in an approximate manner, because of the similarities which are manifested in the pattern over time.

Any comprehensive understanding of an individual must include the range and scope of the dynamisms and subdynamisms which constitute that individual’s pattern of life. "Any living organism," Sullivan wrote, "must be considered in terms of three ultimate factors: its communal existence with a necessary environing medium; its organization; and its functional activity" (ITP 98). By emphasizing this three-fold approach, Sullivan’s theory went well beyond Freud’s by insisting that the domain of psychiatry be augmented with insights contributed from social psychology and psychobiology. Obviously, when one expands the matrix within which personality must be situated, there are significant ramifications for clinical practice. Not only must one view the individual patient as an operating biological organism, one must also seek to understand both the environing medium for that person, which includes all other persons with whom functional activity occurs, and the specific culture that to a large extent shapes the perceptual patterns by which that individual experiences the world. Consequently, in psychotherapy, therapists and patients together must attempt to come to terms with the whole range of relationships manifested in these three areas.³

Before turning to Whitehead’s thought, it will be necessary to refer to two more concepts which will help to illuminate this brief look at Sullivan’s theory of personality. The first of these is a secondary dynamism which Sullivan ultimately came to call the self-system. Sullivan classified the self-system as secondary "in that it does not have any particular zone of interaction, any particular physiological apparatus, behind it; but literally uses all zones of interaction and all physiological apparatus which is integrative and meaningful from the interpersonal standpoint" (ITP 164).

The purpose of the self-system is to maximize the potential for well being and minimize the presence of tension or anxiety within the organism, which arises from either organic needs or social insecurity. Its development is brought about by its reflective assessment of the educative experiences of approbation and disapproval.

As the self-system emerges, three aspects of interpersonal cooperation or personifications begin to appear based upon the infant’s interaction with the mother. When interpersonal experiences result in an increase of tenderness or the expression of approval, the infant begins to develop the feeling of "good me." Conversely, if the pattern of behavior increases interpersonal tension and creates feelings of anxiety for the infant, the personification of "bad me" surfaces. The third personification, however, goes well beyond the normal levels of anxiety that would be generated by the first two personifications. This "not me" response may be encountered in a dream, in an a schizophrenic episode, or in instances of grave mental disorders. "Not me" reflects an aspect of the self that is usually poorly grasped, and that reveals elements the conscious subject finds loathsome. The way a person deals with the anxiety which accompanies this surprising revelation is simply to block it out and deny its source, thus taking refuge behind the "not me" aspect of the self-system. A healthy personality utilizes these three modes of security operations, which might also be classified as learned modes of responding, not only to seek and maintain levels of emotional stability. but to ensure that the organism continually strives for the maximization of pleasure in interpersonal settings.⁴

Another equally important concept for Sullivan’s overall theory is his notion of unawareness or selective inattention.⁵ As a person interacts with the environment, a plethora of data is available for assimilation into one’s conscious perspective. When certain elements of that data threaten to increase the person’s anxiety levels, a conscious choice may be made to unattend to what is presented and thus maintain emotional stability. Unlike Freud, who saw unconscious motivations functioning autonomously behind such a process, Sullivan believed that this exclusionary procedure was fundamentally conscious and could be revealed to be so through the simply interpersonal activities of conversation and observation. This basic concept enables one to explain why certain persons seem totally oblivious to aspects of their environment which appear obvious to others. Like the notion of the self-system, it provides Sullivan with an additional mode of explaining how the personality incorporates data into a dynamic model of experience.

To those familiar with Whiteheadian metaphysics, Sullivan’s views may seem quite familiar. By virtue of his own research Sullivan arrived at the same fundamental vision about the nature of reality that Whitehead professed and molded it quite independently into a viable personality theory, suitable for use in psychotherapy. Sullivan’s model can easily be restated using Whitehead’s conceptual terminology of concrescences, actual entities, societies and nexus. Essentially, in conceptualizing the human person, Sullivan, like Whitehead, rejects a model of personality which relies upon a "morphology of stuff" and insists on one that accentuates the dynamic theme of process. Moreover, by emphasizing the notion that personality was the sum total of its constitutive relationships and was subject to the interpersonal forces at work in a given field of energy, Sullivan was expressing in psychological terms the more complicated notions entailed in Whitehead’s discussion of the extensive continuum.⁶

When encountering Sullivan’s three dimensional understanding of the human person, a Whiteheadian might immediately recall a similar triad in Religion In the Making where Whitehead suggests that religious self-consciousness dawns when an individual consciously realizes the confluence of three allied conceptions, namely,

This similarity of thinking and mode of expression reflects not only Whitehead and Sullivan’s general affinity of thought, it reveals on a much deeper level their mutual commitment to the same view of the human person. Where Sullivan speaks of the body in terms of interacting dynamisms and subdynamisms, Whitehead says, "the body is composed of various centres of experience imposing the expression of themselves on each other" (MT 32).

Sullivan’s notions of the self-system and of selective inattention bring to the fore two other Whiteheadian notions which might be singled out. Each relies on the presupposition that the present moment contains within it the sum total of the past to that point. For Whitehead, as indeed for Sullivan, the present always seeks to maximize the greatest actualization of value which can be attained from the data available in that actual world.

A fuller understanding of what Whitehead means by "actual world" would help one to contextualize the matrix within which the formation of security operations by an organism occur. Governed by its subjective aim, a concrescence will naturally follow the historic routes which have led to previous satisfactions and avoid those which have minimized or trivialized value realization. Sullivan’s sympathetic view of Whitehead’s model might be suggested by his frequent use of the term "prehension" to explain how an organism reacts to the data of its past (see ITP 28n, 76-77, 141). Furthermore, his concept of unawareness or selective inattention represents a creative clinical application of Whitehead’s notion of negative prehension.

The enumeration of similarities between Sullivan’s and Whitehead’s thoughts on personality could easily go on, but it seems unnecessary to belabor the obvious. While both men sought to implement a dynamic view of experience, Whitehead chose to focus on the microcosmic level which resulted in his philosophy of organism, whereas Sullivan devoted his efforts to the particular realm of human existence which yielded his interpersonal theory of psychiatry. One can therefore read Sullivan’s theory as a subset of Whitehead’s ontology or conversely see it as a concretization of what is only implicitly stated in Whiteheads vision. In any event, there appears to be good reason to believe that a study of both will further enhance one’s understanding and appreciation of each’s respective theory.

II

One of the features of Sullivan’s theory that substantially departs from that of Freud’s is his approach to the stages of personality development. Here too, one can see a real affinity between Sullivan’s thought and the sentiments expressed in Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. After briefly highlighting the Sullivanian stages, we will consider relevant views of Whitehead which must be garnered from references scattered throughout the entire corpus. In the face of both thinkers’ categorical denial that there is any such thing as a substantial self which endures throughout the constant process of transition, our task at hand will be to present their developmental insights in a language and style which truly captures the dynamic thrust of their views.

As a result of his work with schizophrenics, Sullivan gradually rejected not only Freud’s emphatic insistence on the exclusive causal role of libidinal energy but also his stages of personality development. To Sullivan’s mind it is interpersonal relationships, not the flow of sexual energy, that play the crucial role in the formation of ones personality, and continue to do so well beyond the limited timeframe envisioned by Freud.⁷ The first crucial stage in a person’s development Sullivan terms infancy which lasts from birth up to the appearance of articulate speech. During this period, the importance of the maternal relationship, especially with respect to the beginnings of the self-system, cannot be underestimated. This stage is followed by childhood, which persists until the infant manifests a need to move beyond the immediate parental relationship to seek other children as playmates. The juvenile stage, which is characterized by a need for more extensive relationships among one’s peer group, then takes over and dominates personality development throughout one’s early years in school up to and including the initial awareness of one’s sexual identity.

In a series of lectures given in 1939, Sullivan broke down his fourth stage of adolescence into the three subcategories of preadolescence, early adolescence, and late adolescence. The first stresses the need to move beyond mere peer relationships to the formation of an intimate friendship with a person of the same sex. Sullivan emphasizes the importance of this friend by taking the common word "chum" and making it a clinical term.⁸ By calling this relationship an "intimate" friendship, Sullivan means that the well-being of the other person is perceived to be as important as one’s own. The self-confidence that one gains in this stage serves as a great resource when the need for intimacy takes on a heterosexual focus as puberty ushers in the beginnings of early adolescence.

Unlike Freud, Sullivan thought that it was not until early adolescence that sexuality began to play a major formative role in shaping personality. Consistent with his dynamic orientation, Sullivan speaks of the lust dynamism as a means of conveying the whole range of sexual feelings and urges which begin to influence the organism. He points out, however, that this dynamism is but one of several operative forces and must be augmented with others -- the development of the interpersonal skills necessary to form relationships with persons of the opposite sex being perhaps the most important.

The transition into late adolescence comes not when some level of biological maturation or chronological age has been reached, but rather when an individual achieves and masters those stable patterns of sexual fulfillment and interpersonal relationship which Sullivan thought characteristic of mature adulthood. For some this transition is never made successfully and life in an adolescent mode persists.

In keeping with his dynamic views, Sullivan believed that personality was never fixed and was always subject to the modifications occasioned by new interpersonal settings. He claimed, however, that the patterns which were established in the four stages outlined above did have significant effects on how the dynamisms of personality subsequently related to the environment and how the organism as a whole was able to process data. Any major inability to negotiate these stages or to experience in a positive manner the specific interpersonal dimensions demarcated by each stage became the material for psychiatric investigation.

While a full exposition of Sullivan’s developmental stages lies well beyond the scope of the present essay, it would be beneficial here, in concluding this precis of Sullivan’s theory, to stress that the fundamental process of normal interpersonal development continues into the late twenties and possibly into one’s early thirties. On this point, Whitehead and Sullivan would be in complete agreement, as evidenced by the following quotations, which perhaps can serve as a convenient opportunity to turn to a consideration of Whitehead’s thought. In his presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England in 1916, Whitehead offered these two observations: "We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty," and "It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters" (AE 1).

Although most philosophers would generally be familiar with the stages of romance, precision, and generalization, espoused in Whitehead’s philosophy of education, few would tend to think of him as a developmentalist. Nonetheless, having seen his affinities with Sullivan’s thought in part one, there should be no surprise to learn that there is ample evidence scattered throughout his writings to suggest that Whitehead, himself, envisioned an approximate schema of personality development.

Like Sullivan, Whitehead stresses the importance of interpersonal relations in one’s overall development. But in keeping with his more ontological focus, he appears to be far more sensitive to the need for integrating all the environmental factors. Regarding specific stages based on the text, or what Whitehead might prefer to call "rhythmic cycles" one might argue for the following configuration, which appears very Sullivanian in character: Infancy, Adolescence, Youth, Particularized-Self-Transcendence, Peace. According to Whitehead, present within each of these cycles are the stages of romance, precision, and generalization.

The tasks of infancy are first to learn the differentiation of objects; second to master spoken language; and third, to be able to use that language for a classified and enlarged enjoyment of objects (see, AE 31). A child is approximately eleven years old when the three phases of the first cycle are completed. Then, writes Whitehead, "The first cycle of infancy is succeeded by the cycle of adolescence, which opens with by far the greatest stage of romance which we ever experience" (AE 33-34). The importance which Whitehead attached to this phase for the overall development of one’s personality can be gauged from his remark, "How the child emerges from the romantic stage of adolescence is how the subsequent life will be molded by ideals and colored by imagination" (AE 34). This second cycle comes to an end around the age of fifteen, when the cycle of youth makes its presence felt. A discussion of this cycle occupies a good portion of the closing chapter in Adventures of Ideas. "The deepest definition of Youth is, Life as yet untouched by tragedy . . .[it] is distinguished for its whole hearted absorption in personal enjoyments and personal discomforts. In other words, immediate absorption in its own occupations" (AI 369-70).

It is perhaps only natural that as youths initially experience their sense of independence and self-individuation that for a time their focus should be absorbed in this new discovery. But as Whitehead and Sullivan theorized, no person is self-contained, and gradually the lure of the next cycle makes its attraction felt. "Youth forgets itself in its own ardor. Of course, not always. For it can fall in love" (AI 371).

The final two cycles, which are here called particularized-self-transcendence and peace, reflect the degree to which personality encompasses the full range of relationships that ultimately constitute it. Whitehead points out that youth, "is particularly liable to the vision of that Peace, which is the harmony of the soul’s activities with the ideal aims that lie beyond any personal satisfactions" (AI 371). Although youths may be "liable to the vision," grasping it takes time, which is why Whitehead seems to insist on an intermediary stage. While the love of a particular person or thing may bring a youth beyond immediate self-absorption, and reflect the beginnings of a process of self-transcendence, "This aspect of personal love," Whitehead says, "is simply a clinging to a condition for selfish happiness. There is no transcendence of personality" (AI 373).

For Whitehead, the ultimate stage of fulfillment towards which an individual can strive reflects the same ideals and goals which Sullivan envisioned for mature, well adjusted adults. To this perspective, Whitehead gives the name "Peace" and says,

The personality which develops throughout these cycles of transition is not a substantial "self’ but rather a dynamic "nexus" or "pattern" that continually incorporates experiences while gradually expanding its conscious awareness of, and response to, the relational factors which constitute it. Contributing to this expansion are not only the physical growth of the bodily organism and one’s interpersonal relationship, but also the dynamism of the self-system. While Sullivan considers the latter to be driven by security needs, Whitehead discusses the same dynamic by placing an emphasis on the realization of aesthetic value to be achieved by the given nexus.

Up until now, the discussion of personality development has focused almost exclusively on the ideal realm where the presumption has been that everyone becomes a healthy, mature adult, capable of realizing the vision of Peace. In order to provide a more balanced portrayal of the way humans actually develop, it is necessary to begin augmenting what has been said. One way of doing this, which will shed some light on the whole topic of arrested development, is to examine the function of language in both Sullivan’s and Whitehead’s thought.

III

In addition to outlining the various stages of personality development in his theory, Sullivan also speaks about three modes of "thinking" by which human beings perceive and evaluate their experiences. The Greek etymology of the names that Sullivan gives to these three modes helps to indicate their meaning, namely, prototaxic, literally a first-ordering; parataxic, a side-by-side ordering or arrangement; and syntaxic, a putting together in order.

The prototaxic mode describes the manner in which an infant first encounters experience as a random blurring of stimuli, disconnected and without logic or reason. The infant prehends the world as a discrete series of momentary states in which there is no immediate differentiation of self from others or self from the world.

The parataxic mode allows the child to make some connections, but they are usually haphazard and lack any logical basis. A post hoc ergo propter hoc argument represents a parataxic mode of reasoning, as does the comic element behind the game of "peek-a-boo," which takes advantage of the fact that at that stage children lack what Piaget called a "conception of object permanency.

The syntaxic mode allows the child to begin forming a realistic understanding of the world and of the relationships which constitute it. Although each respective mode of relating tends to dominate sequential phases of a child’s development, they are by no means mutually exclusive. The two primitive modes of thinking may reappear throughout subsequent stages of development, and influence an individual’s reasoning process during times of stress, fatigue, psychiatric illness or periods of dreaming.

Sullivan thought that language plays a crucial role in understanding how these three modes of thinking function. In his writings, the word "language" is used to convey the whole range of symbol-making activity essential to the process of socialization. The mastery of language, Sullivan claims, enables the child to fuse various conflicting personifications in one healthy self-concept (see ITP 172-189).

In addition to a communicative role, language can serve a defensive one as well. As the child’s unbridled curiosity begins to encounter the world, sources of anxiety can threaten to curtail that curiosity. Here, according to Sullivan, language functions to protect the self-system by concealing and distorting the perception of reality in order that anxiety may be minimized. The child learns quickly when and how to use this defensive posturing.

Sullivan discusses this interpersonal phenomenon when describing a process which operates within the syntaxic mode of experience. This process, which he calls consensual validation," enables individuals to corroborate their feelings, perceptions or relationships by having those views validated by the consensus of others. In interpersonal settings which are relatively free of anxiety, "healthy" persons are able to express themselves in a manner which corresponds to the way things actually are.

In settings where anxiety levels run high, either from the immediate context or from the painful memories which that context evokes, some individuals find it necessary to engage in what Sullivan calls "parataxic distortions" whereby the self-system distorts reality in some way to offset the anxiety. The clinical phenomenon of "transference" represents such a case of parataxic distortion, in so far as the patient tends to treat the therapist as though he or she was the person of their memory.

Whereas the effectiveness of communication and interpersonal relationships are obviously enhanced by one’s honest command of the syntaxic mode, parataxic distortions cause one to misconstrue the actual nature of experience and thus can hamper healthy living. According to Sullivan, one of the main tasks of psychiatry, therefore, is to identify and then to eliminate such parataxic distortions.

For Whitehead too, language plays a crucial role in understanding human experience. He calls language "the systematization of expression," and claims that "of all the ways of expressing thought, beyond question language is the most important" (MT 48). Although he does not speak specifically of prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes of experience, the same sequential patterns are reflected in his description of the first cycle of intellectual progress, which runs "from the achievement of perception to the acquirement of language, and from the acquirement of language to classified thought and keener perception" (AE 31).

Whitehead’s specific explorations into the nature and function of language form the core of his lecture "The Creative Impulse" in Modes of Thought and of the several lectures which comprise Symbolism. In keeping with his ontological focus, White-head describes the role of language in the former lecture as that which forms the link between one’s past and the present. Language organizes and makes intelligible the fragmentary flux of experience. Whitehead considers the command of language such a crucial element for self-identity and understanding that he writes, "The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech, and they became souls" (MT 57).

For both Sullivan and Whitehead, language takes on the role that it does precisely because of its social function in mediating forms of interpersonal expression. From a psychological perspective, the more fully one can express and interpret the operative factors that shape the realm of interpersonal discourse, the more one is likely to be aware of the causal dimensions that constitute the matrix of one’s personality. Just as the naming of things represents a child’s first act of classification and an ability to share in social conventions, the naming of factors that shape one’s experience is the first step towards understanding how those factors influence one’s thought and behavior. By highlighting the importance of language in the development of personality, both Sullivan and Whitehead demonstrate not only the extent to which they had grasped this significant therapeutical insight, but how they were able to incorporate it into their dynamic view of the human person.

IV

In The Psychiatric Interview, Sullivan outlines what he perceives as the four stages of the therapeutic process: the inception; the reconnaissance; the detailed inquiry; and the interruption or final termination. Throughout these four interpersonal phases, the therapist comes to participate in the patient’s world by getting to know as much as possible about the patient’s history and mode of relating to others. Based on the verbal and nonverbal data that can be acquired in therapy, the therapist must continually test out various hypotheses as to the real nature of the patient’s illness in an attempt to help the patient better cope with his or her world.

In Whiteheadian terms, the psychiatric interview represents the therapist’s controlled attempt to treat a patient by assimilating, as far as possible, the patient’s actual world. From this perspective, the therapist can then share with the patient an alternative subjective aim, or else an awareness of the extent to which negative prehensions might be excluding relevant factors of the patient’s experience. Although a full articulation of Sullivan and Whitehead’s position lies beyond what is possible here, one may simply make the claim that, since the therapist’s view is less likely to be hampered by the same parataxic distortions which curtail the patient’s ability to see the world, both Whitehead’s philosophy and Sullivan’s psychology offer the same clinical methodology for confronting and treating the source of a patient’s anxiety.

One of Sullivan’s major contributions to psychiatry was to expand the theoretical parameters for discussing personality theory well beyond the limits of Freud’s intrapsychic realm into the arena of interpersonal relations. This essay has sought to indicate not only numerous points of agreement between Whitehead and Sullivan, but also the valuable theoretical contribution which Whitehead’s philosophy of organism can make to the ongoing development of personality theory. By further exploring the expanded relational matrix within which both thinkers envisioned personality to be shaped, therapists and theoreticians alike may derive a fuller and more adequate understanding of their subject.

Subsequent to Sullivan’s pioneering work, the direction of personality theorizing has continued to rely extensively upon the assumption that personality is essentially a relational concept. The primacy of interpersonal forces in forming personality has served as an important foundational assumption in the work of such eminent contemporary theoreticians as D.W. Winnicott, H. Loewald, W.R.D. Fairbairn and H. Kobut.⁹ Their writings, like those of Sullivan’s, independently corroborate the extent to which Whitehead’s philosophical insights might serve as an adequate hermeneutic for contextualizing and informing current clinical psychiatric practice.

References

ITP -- The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. Ed. Helen Swick and Mary Ladd Gawel. New York: W.W. Norton Company, Inc., 1953.

Notes

1. One of the earliest considerations of Whitehead’s writings from a psychological perspective is Percy Hughes’ "Is Whitehead’s Psychology Adequate?" in P.A. Schlipp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951), pp.275-99.

2. In her introduction to one of Sullivan’s works, Helen Swick Perry recounts how Sullivan had been stimulated by the ideas of Whitehead, Pavlov, Freud and Malinowski. See Harry Stack Sullivan, Personal Psychopathology (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1972). p. xxiii.

3. The joint inquiry by therapist and patient highlights one of Sullivan’s lasting contributions to psychiatry, namely that of the therapist’s role as "participant observer." For a full discussion of this concept see ITP 13-14; pp. 175-76; and Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview, (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1954), pp.19-25.

4. A further discussion of the roles and differentiations of these personifications can be found in A.H. Chapman, Harry Stack Sullivan, His Life and His Work (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), pp. 145 ff..

5. Sullivan’s full exposition of the concept of "selective inattention" can be found in Harry Stack Sullivan, Clinical Studies in Psychiatry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1956), pp. 38-76.

6. An understanding of Whitehead’s concept of the extensive continuum would surely aid psychiatrists in coming to a better appreciation of the scope and dimensions of the matrix within which personality is ultimately situated.

7. For all intents and purposes, Freud envisioned that the formative events which shaped personality occurred between a child’s birth and age five.

8. Most psychologists, in rejecting the emphasis which Sullivan placed on his concept of the "chum," think that he based its foundation more upon autobiographical data than on clinical observations.

9. For a superb summary of how the concept of relation functions within contemporary personality theory see, Stephen A. Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

Ever since the publication of Ely’s The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God in 1942, Whitehead’s solution for the problem of evil has been repeatedly subjected to the charge that it does not allow for the actuality of genuine evils. Ely’s charge was echoed by Madden and Hare in their Evil and the Concept of God (1968), and the same criticism has been set forth more recently by Harold M. Schulweis in his Evil and the Morality of God (1983).

Answering this charge is crucial for a Whiteheadian solution to the problem of evil. For if true, the charge would have two extremely troubling consequences. First, the Whiteheadian would be placed in the rather ludicrous position of trying to explain how events like the Holocaust and Stalin’s collectivization program are merely apparent evils. Second, the Whiteheadian would be supporting a solution which functions as a consistent support for quietism, oppression, and masochism. The latter consequence would follow because, logically, a solution which justifies all evils cannot simultaneously offer a rationale for the elimination, diminution or avoidance of any evil. In fact, the justification of all evils dictates the acceptance of every evil. If Whitehead’s solution involves the justification of all evils, then every evil must be evaluated positively rather than negatively, and the positive valuation of every evil is both untruthful and unethical.¹

I will argue that the critics are mistaken in their charge that all evils in Whitehead’s world are merely apparent. Whitehead’s solution for the problem of evil does acknowledge the reality of genuine evils, and I intend to pinpoint these evils.

There are two distinct arguments which the critics have used to show why all evils must, in a Whiteheadian view, be judged as merely apparent. The first argument is advanced by Schulweis. Schulweis argues that all the evils in Whitehead’s world must be viewed as apparent because God perceives every evil as a means to perfect the world. Whitehead’s God, Schulweis contends, views every evil as a stepping stone which is necessary for, and justified by, the production of a more beautiful world. In Schulweis’ own words,

Thus, according to Schulweis, Whitehead conceives of a world in which "storms and barbaric invasions, in themselves admittedly destructive, may be seen as contributory values to the adventures of ever new and increased perfections" (EMG 58).

Schulweis is aware of the unfortunate ethical consequences this view, if accurate, would have for Whiteheadians. He writes that even though "it would be furthest from Whitehead’s mind to consider that such a metaphysical theodicy could readily serve as a rationale for the repressiveness of totalitarian regimes." the ideas in Whitehead’s theodicy nevertheless "lend themselves too easily to such use" (EMO 58). If Schulweis were correct, Whitehead’s theodicy would indeed lend itself "too easily" to the support of oppressive regimes.

The second argument, which is advanced by all of the previously mentioned critics, is similar to the first, but it concerns God’s fulfillment of the divine experience rather than God’s fulfillment of the world. The argument consists in the contention that all the evils in Whitehead’s world must be viewed as apparent because God utilizes every evil as a means to perfect the divine experience.

Ely argues that what is evil for humanity is not evil for God because God sees pain, grief, and frustration "in such a way that they are valuable for him" (EWP 196). God, Ely writes, "enjoys himself by making mental additions to one’s pain and grief and frustration" (EWP 196).

Similarly, Madden and Hare suggest that Whitehead’s God is willing to pay any amount in moral and physical evil to gain aesthetic value. . ." (ECG 124). They contend that "what appears as gratuitous evil is really just the makings of aesthetic value in the Consequent Nature" (ECG 123).

Schulweis presents the same argument. "The consequent nature of God," he writes, "salvages what appears to us as evil by transmuting its discordance into divine enjoyment" (EMO 58). Therefore, "Whitehead’s aesthetic theodicy informs us that what is evil for us is not evil for God" (EMG 59). Schulweis suggests that God’s "harmony of beauty is used to justify the sufferings of innocence. . ." (EMO 59).

The two arguments may be combined into one: All evils in Whitehead’s world view must be judged as apparent because God utilizes every evil as a means to perfect the world and the divine experience. Before addressing this general complaint, however, an important technical problem in the first argument advanced by Schulweis deserves attention.

This argument rests upon a misrepresentation of Whitehead’s theory of evil. Schulweis writes that in Whitehead’s theodicy the "intermingling of evil and beauty is metaphysically necessary and justified" (EMG 58). If Schulweis were correct, then indeed evil would have to be judged as merely apparent. Schulweis, however, uses the term "evil" in an unequivocal sense and equates this sense of evil with Whitehead’s notion of destructive discord. But that which is unequivocally evil for Whitehead does not simply refer to destructive discord; rather it refers to the dominance of destructive discord.

Whitehead’s most definitive treatment of discord as it relates to evil is found in Adventures of Ideas. In his chapter on "Beauty," Whitehead initially characterizes discord and the destruction it entails as evil. He contends that perfection excludes feelings of destructive discord, and he describes discord as "in itself destructive and evil" (AI 330). Yet Whitehead immediately informs his readers that destructive discord can have beneficial consequences. Destructive discord can overcome anesthesia, allow insights into newer forms of perfection, and provide an impetus for the attainment of higher values.

In light of the extrinsic benefits of destructive discord, Whitehead realizes that he must clarify his position. He writes,

Whitehead realizes that a measure of discord may be so extrinsically beneficial that the discord, when considered in relation to the whole, must be judged good rather than evil. Though evil in itself, discord must be referred to as good if the extrinsic benefits outweigh the internal destruction. This is why Whitehead finds the enunciation that discord "constitutes the meaning of evil . . . much too simpleminded." The qualifications which Whitehead introduces for this enunciation do not alter the supposition that destructive discord, if considered intrinsically, is evil. The qualifications do, however, alter the supposition that destructive discord constitutes the meaning of evil. The qualifications alter the supposition that discord must be labeled evil in all circumstances. The qualifications, in other words, allow for the possibility that discord, in view of its extrinsic benefits, can be, on the whole, good.

Whitehead cites as his "fundamental position that ‘destruction as a dominant fact in the experience’ is the correct definition of evil." When the "Destruction of the significant characters of individual objects . . .dominates the whole, there is the immediate feeling of evil. . ." (AI 339). An experience is unequivocally evil when destructive discord dominates the whole experience, not merely when destructive discord is present within the experience.

Whitehead apparently conceives of the dominance of destructive discord as both extrinsically and intrinsically evil. The domination of destructive discord brings with it "the anticipation of destructive or weakened data for the future" and therefore derogates from the promotion of Beauty extrinsically as well as intrinsically (AI 339). Hence, the dominance of destructive discord, but not destructive discord in itself, is evil in an absolute or unequivocal sense.

Schulweis therefore misrepresents Whitehead’s thought when he equates discord in itself with that which is unequivocally evil. Accordingly, when Schulweis contends that "the intermingling of evil and beauty is metaphysically necessary and justified" in Whitehead’s cosmology, he distorts Whitehead’s position. Whitehead certainly does admit that a measure of destructive discord can be metaphysically necessary and justified. But when the measure of discord is, in fact, metaphysically necessary and justified, one cannot unequivocally refer to the discord as evil. Such discord may be intrinsically evil, but it cannot be evil on the whole. Thus, the idea that evil, in an absolute sense, is required and justified in Whitehead’s cosmology is mistaken.

Schulweis could write that Whitehead finds occasions which are intrinsically evil to be necessary and justified for the attainment of higher perfections, but he should hasten to add that such occasions must be referred to as "good" in light of the whole. For the extrinsic benefits of such occasions outweigh any intrinsic evil. The measures of dissonance, for example, which are justified in symphonic compositions render the productions more beautiful, and the squabbles which are justified in relationships make the relationships more valuable. The measure of destructive discord which is required for and beneficial to creative advance must, all things considered, be referred to as good. Schulweis, then, could simply write that White-head finds goodness to be necessary and justified for creative advance, and such a statement would be less misleading.

Aside from the more technical problem in Schulweis’s first argument, there remains the general complaint that Whitehead’s God prehends all evil as apparent because God utilizes every evil as a means toward the perfection of both the world and the divine experience. Ely, Madden, Hare and Schulweis are correct, at least in one sense, that Whitehead’s God prehends every evil as a means toward the perfection of the world and Godself. Every evil -- and every good as well -- provides God with a basis or a foundation upon which God formulates both the perfection of the world and Godself. Whitehead’s God prehends every actuality, evil or good, in terms of its contribution, negligible or significant, to God’s constantly changing envisagement of benevolent potential; and God, in Charles Hartshorne’s words, "does wring some good" out of every evil (WIG 555).

But the fact that all the evils of the actual world are used by God as a foundation upon which God perfects the world and Godself does not mean that the evils are merely apparent. If the term "apparent evil" applied simply to that prima facie evil which, from an ultimate perspective, contributes to a better future, then the term would be so broad as to include every historical evil. For as the past forms and informs the future, so the evil of the past forms and informs any future perfection. Even the most revolting evils make some contribution to the future. The future must be built upon Auschwitz, and even Auschwitz teaches valuable historic lessons. If apparent evil were characterized merely by the quality of providing a foundation for or a contribution to the attainment of higher values, all evil must be judged as apparent in nature.

The proper definition of apparent evil, however, is prima facie evil which when judged from an ultimate frame of reference is that in the place of which no other realistically possible occurrence could be better.² "Apparent" evil is not only a means to perfection, but also a morally necessary and justified means. Apparent evil not only provides a foundation for and a contribution to perfection, but is also the ethical sine qua non for the emergence of a higher perfection which justifies the evil’s reality.

Apparent evil and genuine evil are not distinguished by whether or not they serve as a ground upon which future values are built. Both types of evil provide such grounding. Rather the difference between apparent and genuine evil consists in the fact that apparent evil is morally necessary and justified while genuine evil is neither. Apparent evil makes possible, in a way that no other occurrence could, the attainment of higher value; genuine evil thwarts the attainment of the highest value which is realistically possible at any given moment. "Apparent" evil refers to prima facie evils which are ultimately judged to embody the best of all realistically possible alternatives; "genuine" evil refers to occurrences which embody those alternatives which are less than the best of all realistically possible occurrences.

The question, then, of apparent evil is not whether Whitehead’s God builds upon every evil in the attempt to perfect the world and Godself. The question is whether Whitehead’s God prehends every evil as the best that can be, as a morally necessary and justified means for the attainment of a higher perfection. If we wish to know whether Whitehead’s cosmology transforms all prima facie evils into apparent evils, we should ask, "From the divine perspective, is there that without which both the world and God could be better?"

Assuming the omnibenevolence of Whitehead’s God (that God wills the best for each actual occasion), in order for all evil to be merely apparent, there has to be an absolute conformity between God’s will and what transpires in the actual world.³ For if the actual world fails to conform to God’s aim, then actualizations will have occurred in the place of which other actualizations would have been better. If the actual world fails to conform to the will of God, God will prehend genuine evil, not merely apparent evil.

Whitehead rejects the idea that there is or can be a complete conformity between God’s will and what is actualized in the temporal world. After describing the character of God as "a character of permanent rightness," Whitehead observes, "it is not true that every individual item of the universe conforms to this character in every detail. There will be some measure of conformity and some measure of diversity. . . . So far as the conformity is incomplete, there is evil in the world" (RM 60). Every event, according to Whitehead, leaves the world with an impress of God, but the impress can be "deeper" or "fainter" (RM 152).

While God implants an ideal into the process of reality, the "ideal is never realized, it is beyond realization. . ." (MT 164). "For example, there is an ideal of human liberty, activity, and cooperation dimly adumbrated in the American Constitution. It has never been realized in its perfection; and by its lack of characterization of the variety of possibilities open for humanity, it is limited and imperfect" (MT 165). The divine ideals mold "the form of what is realized," but there is always that which would have enabled the ideal to be more completely realized (MT 165). The vision which God presents to the actual world is, therefore, a vision of "something whose possession . . . is beyond all reach; something which is . . . the hopeless quest" (SMW 275).

If the world inevitably fails to conform to the aims of God, then the world inevitably contains actualizations in the place of which others could have been better. To rephrase one of Whitehead’s sentences quoted above -- so far as the conformity is incomplete, there is genuine evil in the world. Occasions which, in Whitehead’s words, disregard "the eternal vision" of God must be viewed by God as genuinely evil (SMW 276).

As occasions of the actual world pass into the consequent nature of God, they are judged as to their value. As I have just explained, God does indeed prehend genuine evils in the actual world. But it is also important to understand that the occasions which God prehends as genuinely evil for the actual world are also occasions which are genuinely evil with regard to the completion of God’s own experience.

The consequent nature of God not only prehends or judges the actual world at any given phase, but also forms a beautiful envisagement of potential for succeeding phases. In the consequent nature God’s prehensions of the actual world are woven together with the prehension of all possibilities so that the result is an envisagement of potential that constitutes the best possible scenario for subsequent actualization.

God’s envisagement of potential for the actual world, since it must be relative to the actual world, is founded upon the previous prehension of the actual world. In one sense, therefore, the qualitative level of God’s own envisagement depends upon the quality of actualizations in the temporal world. God’s envisagement is the best for the actual world at any given occasion, but the best for one occasion may be surprised by the best at another occasion. Comparing God’s envisagement at successive phases of the temporal process would reveal different qualitative levels. The qualitative level is relative to the perfections and imperfections of the actual world and can only be as beautiful as the actual world allows: the better the actual world, the better God’s experience.

Thus, the world’s failure to conform to God’s aim not only detracts from the world’s experience, but from God’s experience as well. From God’s perspective, evils in the place of which other occurrences could be better for the world are also evils in the place of which other occurrences could be better for God.

Accordingly, Whitehead suggests that God cannot justify every evil by reason of its contribution to God’s beautiful envisagement, for there are evils whose contribution is negligible. Although God wrings some good from every evil, "the revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts (PR 346/525). The temporal world contributes only "such elements as it can to a realization in God free from inhibitions of intensity by reason of discordance" (PR 88/134f.; emphasis added). Although God operates with "a tender care that nothing be lost" or a tender judgment "which loses nothing that can be saved," there are clearly elements whose contributions to higher perfections are too meager to justify their perpetuation in God’s envisagement for the future (PR 346/525).

There is an interesting exchange of views in The Review of Metaphysics among Paul Weiss, Charles Hartshorne and A. H. Johnson concerning the interpretation of the above passages in which Whitehead implies some sort of loss in God’s consequent nature. Weiss interprets Whitehead to say that "God gives being only to that portion of the past which can be made part of a cosmic harmony" (P519).

Hartshorne argues, contrary to Weiss, that the evil of the past is preserved, but he adds the qualification that the evil is preserved in conjunction with its ideal consequent. Hartshorne views this as "sheer addition" rather than loss, and he regards the language of Whitehead as unfortunate (IP 106). Whitehead’s suggestion of loss, according to Hartshorne, should be read as a reminder "that, while the divine synthesis creates as much good as the state of the world makes possible, still this does not mean that no harm is done by evils. . ." (IP 106). The evils are not lost, but they constitute a loss in the sense that they detract from higher levels of experience.

In response to a criticism of Hartshorne, A. H. Johnson defends an earlier interpretation proposed in Whiteheads Theory of Reality (HIW 495-98). Johnson argues that the transfer whereby actual entities are absorbed into the consequent nature of God "involves some loss of content" (WTR 64). The loss, according to Johnson, is the loss of subjective immediacy. God saves evils -- with all their negative qualities -- as objects, but God is not able to save the subjective immediacy of the evil occasion.

Johnson is correct that the subjective immediacy of past occasions is lost or unsalvageable for God, but I do not think this is what Whitehead has in mind. My own interpretation of Whitehead takes account of two distinctive functions in the consequent nature: one of memory in which the entire past is preserved as an object of vivid immediacy, and the other of future envisagement which includes only those elements of the past which contribute to and do not derogate from the creative advance toward higher perfections. The future envisagement of God, in other words, excludes those elements of the past which constitute genuine evils. Those elements which constitute genuine evils are remembered in their vivid immediacy, but they are absent from God’s future envisagement. The loss in God’s consequent nature, therefore, is a loss of genuine evils as desired potential. The unsalvageable, irredeemable, unjustifiable elements of the past are not preserved in God’s vision for the future.

Whitehead does provide some indications of what God must consider genuine evils for the world and Godself. Certainly the dominance of destructive discord must count as genuine evil. While a measure of destructive discord, because of its contribution to a higher perfection, can be justified as the best of all possibilities, the dominance of destructive discord cannot.

Also, what Whitehead calls the "evil of triviality" must count as genuine evil (MG 697). When an occasion of experience does not attain, or at least aim to attain, a higher perfection, the occasion embodies that which is less than the best of all possibilities. The man degraded to the level of a hog commits the evil of triviality by becoming less than what he could have become. When Whitehead argues that the degradation of triviality is evil "by comparison with what might have been," he equates the evil of triviality with genuine evil (RM 94).

Whitehead is by no means certain that each event occurs for the betterment of the world. The world disclosed in its causal efficacy is a world "where each event infects the ages to come, for good or for evil. . ." (S 47). "Our experience . . . bequeaths its character to the future, in the guise of an effective element forever adding to, or subtracting from, the richness of the world. For good or for evil. . ." (S 58-59). Surely, those effective elements which forever subtract from the richness of the world must be genuinely evil.

Evil manifests itself as unstable, but the "instability of evil does not necessarily lead to progress" (RM 93). Evil "promotes its own elimination," but the elimination may involve "destruction" and "degradation" as well as "elevation" (RM 94). Pain among the members of a species may lead to the elevation of that species, but the species may also "cease to exist, or lose the delicacy of perception which results in that pain . . ." (RM 93). In the case of such destruction or degradation, "either the species ceases to exist, or it sinks back into a stage in which it ranks below the possibility of that form of evil" (RM 93). Evils which do not lead to progress must be counted as genuine evils that are excessively destructive or undesirably trivial.

After recounting the "evils" which accompanied the industrial revolution, evils resulting from the diversion of attention towards "things as opposed to values," Whitehead writes, "it may be that civilization will never recover from the bad climate which enveloped the introduction of machinery" (SMW 291f). This "bad climate" of which Whitehead writes would constitute a genuine evil.

In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead briefly distinguishes "between the tragic evil and the gross evil" (AI 369). Tragic evil becomes "a living agent persuading the world to aim at fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact" (AI 369). Tragic evil at least discloses an ideal of higher perfection -- "What might have been, and was not: What can be. The tragedy was not in vain" (Al 369). In contrast, the contribution of gross evil is negligible. Certainly "gross evil" and probably much "tragic evil" would constitute occurrences in the place of which other occurrences could be better.

Whitehead’s cosmology in general and his solution for the problem of evil in particular do not transform all evils into merely apparent evils. Griffin is correct when he argues that process theodicy does not deny the reality of genuine evil (OPE 276). Charles Hartshorne concurs: Although God, ‘with infinite resources,’ makes the best of what happens, it still is not entirely good that tragedies happened as they did. Something better could have happened (PS 10:94).

The critics should be aware that Whitehead rejects two theodicies which have the effect of transforming all evil into apparent evil, and his rejection of these theodicies is wholly consistent with an implicit concern to avoid the consequences which result from such a position.

After contending that "no religion which faces facts can minimize the evil in the world," Whitehead approvingly cites the book of Job as a "revolt against the facile solution, so esteemed by fortunate people, that the sufferer is the evil person" (RM 49). A theodicy of deserved suffering turns all suffering into a just fulfillment of the divine will. From an ultimate frame of reference, the suffering inflicted by a just God must be the best for the one who suffers. Such a theodicy, Whitehead implies, conveniently turns fortunate people away from the concerns of the unfortunate.

Whitehead also rejects the theodicy of Leibniz. "The Leibnizian theory of the ‘best of possible worlds’ is an audacious fudge produced in order to save the face of a Creator constructed by contemporary, and antecedent, theologians" (PR 47/74). Leibniz affirms the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God to such a degree that he must ultimately hold to the theory that every evil is merely apparent, and Whitehead indicates that he has no interest in supporting such an idea.

Whitehead, then, was aware of the manner by which solutions to the problem of evil can minimize evil as a way to make it compatible with the reality of a just and omnipotent God. Whitehead certainly intended to avoid the minimization of evil, and I find that he succeeded in doing so. Thus, the Whiteheadian is not put in the precarious position of explaining how the Holocaust or Stalin’s collectivization program are merely apparent evils. These are genuine evils; they are occurrences in the place of which others could have been better for both the world and God. Nor does the Whiteheadian support a solution to the problem of evil which functions as a consistent prop for quietism, oppression, and masochism. The genuine evils of a Whiteheadian cosmology receive a negative valuation which demands that they be eliminated, diminished, and avoided.

References

ECG -- Edward H. Madden and Peter H. Hare. Evil and the Concept of God. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1968.

EMG -- Harold M. Schulweis. Evil and the Morality of God. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1983.

EWP -- Stephen Lee Ely. "The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God: A Critical Analysis." Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy. Ed. Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983.

GPE -- David Ray Griffin. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

HIW -- A. H. Johnson. "Hartshorne and the Interpretation of Whitehead." The Review of Metaphysics 7 (March 1954): 495-98.

IP -- Charles Hartshorne. "The Immortality of the Past: Critique of a Prevalent Misinterpretation." The Review of Metaphysics 7 (September 1953): 98-112.

MG -- Alfred North Whitehead. "Mathematics and The Good." In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. 2nd ed. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951.

PS 10 -- Charles Hartshorne. "Response to Neville’s Creativity and God." Process Studies 10 (fall/winter 1980): 93-97.

PW -- Charles Hartshorne. "Whitehead’s Idea of God." The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. 2nd ed. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1951.

ROV 5 -- Paul Weiss. "The Past; Its Nature and Reality." The Review of Metaphysics 5 (June 1952): 507-522.

TANW -- R. Maurice Barineau. The Theodicy of Alfred North Whitehead: A Logical and Ethical Vindication. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1991.

WTR -- A. H. Johnson. Whitehead’s Theory of Reality. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952.

Notes

1 A more thorough analysis of the ethical consequences of theodicies may be found in Barineau (TANW 31-62). See also Peter Berger. The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 53-80, and William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1973).

2The definitions for apparent and genuine evil are derived, with some expansion, from Griffin (GPE 21-22). The definitions are extremely helpful for framing the issue of theodicy.

3 I realize that the benevolence of Whitehead’s God has certainly been a debatable point, but the controversy lies beyond the bounds of my article. See Barineau (TANW 125-52) and Griffin (GPE 275-310) for a defense of Whitehead’s version of God’s omnibenevolence.

As I understand my assignment for this conference, it is to represent a "methodological alternative in process theology" that has been given the name "rationalist" so as to facilitate its distinction from two other such alternatives, the empirical and speculative so-called. Instead of attending to features that might be thought to distinguish particular theological approaches, I propose to examine two basic types of argumentation that I believe must play a role in any such approach that claims to be fully critical. Furthermore, in a fissiparous situation in which the desire to assimilate what is new seems increasingly more important than the need cumulatively to build on what might still be defended as true, I believe we do well to attend to basic procedures that are constitutive of any and every critical theological alternative worthy of the name. For only as we do so are we likely to discover both a basis for theological consensus in principle and the extent to which such a basis may be exemplified in fact.

One basic type of argumentation I shall consider is that first-order procedure of presenting the data of experience as evidence for the validity of one’s theological interpretation. The other is the second-order procedure of analyzing the presuppositions of such a presentation and interpretation.¹ I have chosen to illustrate how these types of argumentation function in the work of Schubert Ogden, because I find them combined there in a way that is congruent with the constructive proposal I shall put forward here.²

Some starting point is required for the discussion of any issue. I assume, then, that any developed theology must offer at least an analysis both of what it claims as known (what I will call "the ontic pole") and of wherein its being known consists (what I will call "the noetic pole").³ While there is, I believe, no logically compelling reason to begin at one pole rather than the other, there may well be strategic reasons for doing so.⁴ Since not only the character, but even the status of ontology, the theory concerning the ontic pole of the basic theological relation, are evidently two of the issues precisely at stake in the deliberations of this conference, and since I judge there to be a greater agreement among the participants concerning the character (if not necessarily the structure or content) of experience, I will begin from a consideration of the noetic pole, that is, with what has traditionally been called "epistemology." Moreover, whatever "rationalist" or "speculative" flavor one may take my constructive proposal to have, such a noetic starting-point and basis will, I hope, insure its "empirical" cast.

I. Presenting the Evidence of Experience

According to Whitehead, "The word ‘experience’ is one of the most deceitful in philosophy" (S 16).⁵ As Ogden observes, it is a "field-encompassing word" we use to refer to "a whole range of observings, encounterings, and undergoings, from perceiving the world through our senses to becoming aware of the beautiful and of the claim of the good" (PP 650.

I want first to consider what I shall call the "hermeneutical analysis" Ogden employs in his discussion of the senses in which theology might be understood to be broadly empirical or experiential. He distinguishes three types of empiricism, what we may call the "classical" empiricism of the modem philosophical tradition, and two more or less revisionary forms thereof. I shall focus here on the interpretive analysis whereby he distinguishes these as ideal types. First, he distinguishes from classical empiricism a revisionary description of experience according to which sense perception is neither the only nor even the primary mode of experience, but is rather derived from a still more elemental awareness both of ourselves and of the world around us" (PP 78).⁶ On Ogden’s analysis, both the classical and this first type of revisionary empiricism "assume that the sole realities present in our experience, and therefore the only objects of our certain knowledge, are ourselves and the other creatures that constitute the world" (PP 79)⁷ With these "two more conventional types of empiricism" he contrasts a "comprehensive" type of revisionary empiricism distinguished from them by its consideration of the possibility (and then also by its claim) that the internal awareness it asserts together with the former revisionary type is "the awareness not merely of ourselves, and of our fellow creatures, but also of the infinite whole in which we are all included as somehow one" (PP 87, 80, 85). In other words, Ogden’s analysis of various descriptions of experience is informed by two distinctions, both of which apply to the noetic pole of experience: a twofold distinction between nonsensuous and sensory modes of experience and a threefold distinction of what Whitehead calls "the feeling of the ego, the others, the totality," that is, of self, other, and whole (PP 84).⁸ This comprehensive hermeneutical grid then permits an explanation of what he claims is a "sense of ourselves and others as of transcendent worth," as precisely an "awareness of ourselves and the world as of worth to God" (PP 86f)Y Ogden notes that such an evidently theistic explanation is not open to empirical or experiential confirmation on either of the two more restrictive descriptions which, as he observes, must either "refer the word God’ to some merely creaturely reality or process of interaction, or else., must deny it all reference whatever by construing its meaning as wholly noncognitive," if they seek experiential illustration for such a sense at all (PP 80)¹⁰

I turn now to the types of argumentation required for the critical theological appropriation of such a preliminary interpretation of the data of experience, taken as evidentially relevant for theology. The first general type of argument intended to lend credibility to such a description we can call the appeal to experience which, in turn, can comprise an appeal either to individual experience or to communal experience (or to what we may equally well call the history of ideas).

Consider first Ogden’s citation of Whitehead’s observation that, in support of such an experiential description, "the only mode of decision can be by an appeal to the self-evidence of experience" (PP 87). Such an appeal to individual experience is designed to convince others that one has properly described the evidence of their own experience in the relevant respect. This broadly phenomenological type of argumentation is necessary to the sort of "explicit" conviction that depends on direct and first-hand evidence, even while it properly recognizes that "our thought unavoidably moves within a hermeneutical circle which excludes any simple resolution of fundamental differences" (PP 87).¹¹ Since it makes immediate reference to the evidence of one’s own experience, a description of which is at issue, and only then is extended to all others one sympathetically imagines to be like oneself, it is essentially an autobiographical type of argumentation.

A second type of appeal to the evidence of experience is the appeal to communal experience or to the history of ideas. Again. Ogden cites Whitehead to this end. "Where is the evidence?" Whitehead asks and he replies, "The answer is evidently human experience as shared by civilized intercommunication," what he speaks of elsewhere as "the directed activities of mankind" (TPT 73, PP 87). This type of argument is again broadly evidentiary in nature, although it reflects not the "turn to the subject" characteristic of the appeal to individual experience, but rather a "pragmatic" or "linguistic" turn, as illustrated by Whitehead’s observation that the evidence of human experience as shared by civilized intercommunication "is also diffused throughout the meanings of words and linguistic expressions" (cited in TPT 74).¹² Such an appeal is an essentially historical form of argumentation.

The appeal to communal experience invokes a different sort, if also a broader range of evidence than does the individual appeal. By invoking, where possible, primary sources of what others have done and said, one appeals to data that require interpretation by someone other than their author and thus permit only and precisely "inferential" knowledge.¹³ However, doing so brings these others into court to testify on their own behalf, thereby broadening the scope of first-hand evidence and transforming the warrant for generalization from sympathetic imagination to inference from direct testimony. Where one appeal to the evidence of experience is weak, the other is strong.

It is worth pausing to take note of the logical character of the claims such appeals produce as their conclusions. The appeal to individual experience seeks to produce agreement that, "This account properly describes my experience (and that of anyone like me in the relevant respect)," the appeal to the history of ideas in its broadest form to elicit the claim that, "This describes everyone’s experience." Both conclusions are contingent or factual claims, however broad a scope of generalization one may make for them. The point is that human experience does, in fact, happen to be like this. Because individual and communal appeals are identical with respect to the logical character of the claims they propose to warrant, if different with respect to the epistemic procedures they employ, they may properly be taken to provide tests of each other and, thereby, to offer the possibility of mutual corroboration.¹⁴

Finally, we should consider the proper role of appeals to experience in theological argumentation. In the nature of the case, such appeals already assume that the experiential data invoked are relevant as evidence to the issue at hand. Thus, it is only if one is already convinced that the term "God" has to do with questions concerning the value or worth of human life that one appropriately invokes the experience of value as evidentially relevant to proposals regarding this term.¹⁵ Appeals to experience do not, therefore, establish relevance, they rather assume it. Their purpose is then to invoke experience as illustrative of a theistic explanation one has to propose for it.

If we return now to Ogden’s treatment of the three types of empiricism, we can see how, while he does not explicitly invoke it, the hermeneutical analysis we have identified is nonetheless clearly at work, implicitly shaping Whitehead’s description of experience that he is recommending there. However, this can scarcely be surprising when we realize that some such analysis is unavoidable for, because strictly presupposed by, any such description. Furthermore, even the identification of the putative content of experience proves to be normed by whatever hermeneutical analysis is employed, for one can only imagine, much less recognize as present, what one can come to identify somehow.¹⁶ Finally, some hermeneutical analysis is also presupposed by and, therefore, normative of any argument from experience, whether of the individual or the communal type, since it is only experience as interpretable in terms of some description or other to which one can ever appeal either for the mutual corroboration of such descriptions or for their illustration of a theistic interpretation. Such a hermeneutical aspect of experiential argumentation is not, therefore, distinctive of any particular "methodological alternative," but rather ingredient in them all. The question is not whether, but only how well such hermeneutical analysis will be employed with its inevitably normative implications.

We must now insist that any hermeneutical analysis not only permits, but even demands what, in another context, Charles Hartshorne calls a method of "elimination from an exhaustive division" or a statement of "the formally possible doctrines" concerning the issue at hand, in this case, that of the character and content of experience (CSPM chap. XIII, esp. 364; MVG chap. I). For the claim implicit in any such analysis is that the interpretive concepts employed therein are not only sufficiently clear to make possible their being regarded as exclusive of each other, but also of adequate range of application to comprehend the relevant options. Far from the imposition of an alien rationalism, such a demand for clarity and comprehensiveness is therefore a necessary desideratum of any interpretive theory, whether in epistemology or in the history of ideas.¹⁷ Recognition of the need for such comprehensive and mutually exclusive concepts need not restrict, but can rather uncover possible, if perhaps neglected schemes for both historical and constructive presentation. Indeed, only such a statement of formally possible doctrines can insure, to the extent such formality can be attained, that the relevant alternatives have been canvassed. I suggest that Ogden’s presentation of Whitehead’s truly "radical" and "comprehensive," indeed, "neoclassical" empiricism proves to be one such scheme. ¹⁸

Having emphasized the inherently normative significance of hermeneutical analysis for appeals to experience, we must also recognize that the relation between the description and the inspection of experience is not one-way only. The consideration of already interpreted individual and communal experience as the evidence to which one is finally responsible in the search for corroboration of one’s account can also function to shape and to criticize further hermeneutical analyses. Indeed, while it is only by virtue of some interpretive description or other that one can identify and interpret the relevant evidence, it is also only as the result of some ‘inspection of experience that one has any data to claim as relevant for interpretation in the first place.

Nonetheless, the conceptual scheme employed in interpretation has a normative character which experiential appeals logically cannot have. For while autobiographical appeals to individual experience introduce what one takes to be relevant based on one’s own experience, and appeals to the history of ideas invoke what has been taken to be relevant based on many others’ experience, the hermeneutical scheme employed determines what can be taken to be relevant to any discussion of experience at all. The presentation of experiential evidence which is a constitutive feature of any serious "methodological alternative" in theology thus proves necessarily to involve in quite distinct ways features one might variously call "empirical," "rationalist," and "speculative." For if it is experiential or broadly empirical description one seeks, and if this is always of the character, structure, and content of experience as one must somehow speculatively entertain them, such imaginative entertainment can only ever occur in fully critical fashion on the basis of a rational analysis of the possibilities relevant thereto. These features do not, therefore, so much distinguish alternative theological approaches as they do constitute complementary features of any such approach that can hope to make reference to and appeal to experience.

II. Analyzing One’s Presuppositions

A second basic type of argumentation that both can and should be brought to bear on the critical theological assessment of the relation of experience to valuation and evaluation is what I have called the analysis of presuppositions.¹⁹ will once more prove helpful to identify two versions of this type of argumentation, the "conceptual" and the "correlational" or, less aptly, "foundational." Whereas both types of analysis apply to existential, rather than to merely logical claims, it will be useful to take the former to apply within either the noetic or ontic poles of theological and philosophical discussion, the latter to the relation between them.

Consider as an example of strictly conceptual presuppositional analysis Ogden’s claim that "To exist as a self at all is possible solely on the basis of faith, so that the statement, ‘Unless you believe, you shall not understand,’ is true in a sense not only of the Christian or the religious believer but of every human being simply as such" (TPT 69, emphasis added). That there is a constitutive relation of asymmetrical dependence of the evaluative features of specifically human experience on its valuational features such that something like what Ogden calls "existential faith" is invariably involved in human existence is a conceptual observation (TPT 71f). Because, it is claimed, evaluation presupposes valuation as a condition of its possibility, any merely "disinterested" or "value-free" understanding of human reflection is of necessity excluded.²⁰ Any consideration of the evidence of experience could only in the nature of the case ever illustrate, but logically could not falsify what must always necessarily be the case, even if such a consideration could well force a limited reconstrual of the hermeneutical analysis always itself presupposed in the strictly conceptual presuppositional analysis which uncovers the necessity of such elemental valuing.²¹

Again, consider Ogden’s similarly strictly conceptual refutation of the notion of the "absurd hero," who affirms life in spite of its ultimate meaninglessness. As he points out, "If all our actions are in principle absurd, the act of heroically resisting their absurdity must also be absurd" (RG 41). That all acts are thus absurd implies that any such act is similarly absurd. The function of such analysis of presuppositions is to exclude alternatives whose truth or falsity is neither a factual nor an observational, but rather a strictly conceptual matter.

Granted that one intends to take seriously the implications for theism of such claims as those to uncommitted reflection or committed resistance against absurdity considered here, such a strictly conceptual form of presuppositional analysis is not optional, but mandatory.²² For only the demonstration of incurable vagueness or self-contradiction will refute a position which is either not clear enough to be shown to be cognitively meaningful or at least sufficiently lucid to be demonstrably meaningless and, therefore, necessarily self-contradictory. This strictly conceptual type of presuppositional analysis is not, therefore, a feature of any particular "methodological alternative," but rather belongs to any theological approach which engages the full range of options for belief.

The final type of theological argumentation that falls to consideration is what I have called the correlational analysis of presuppositions. While widely controverted, such argumentation is actually as unavoidable for a fully critical theology as are the other types we have considered. Recall my earlier claim that such analysis has to do with the relation between the noetic and ontic poles in theological discussion and is, therefore, constitutive of theology as such. Indeed, even if one begins with broadly epistemological considerations, as I have done here, one can only avoid asking and answering the question wherein the ontic correlate of such a noetic pole consists by a failure to be fully critical in taking account of what one always already presupposes. For "experience" is always "experience of." "Experience" is an inherently relational concept. Therefore, to engage in correlational analysis of presuppositions is nothing more, but also nothing less, than to make explicit the understanding of the character of the ontic correlate presupposed in speaking of experience in the first place.

Consider Ogden’s claim in support of what I have suggested we call Whitehead’s "neoclassical empiricism" that, "Just as we are never aware of our own existence except as related to the being of others, so our sense that both we and they are important is our sense of the encompassing whole without which such importance could never be" (PP 85, emphasis added). Note that the point of this observation is not to make a factual claim either about our noetic experience in itself, namely, that we do have a sense of the infinite or encompassing whole, or about ontic reality in itself, namely, that what we do experience is the encompassing whole. It is rather to make the claim concerning the relation between these two poles that we could have that noetic sense of our own and others’ importance Ogden here takes for granted we do experience if and only if there were an infinite or encompassing ontic whole to be experienced.²³ The point is that the existence of such an ontic whole is a necessary condition of the possibility of our noetically experiencing the worth we do experience.²⁴ Strictly speaking, such a claim asserts the "hypothetical necessity" that if we do experience value, there must be, as the condition of its possibility, an ontic correlate thereof.

To recap the argument as a whole: Having begun with mutually corroborating individual and communal appeals to experience to establish what he takes to be a fact, namely, that our twofold noetic experience of ourselves and others is valuational, Ogden then argues for a further noetic sense of an encompassing whole in addition to such a twofold sense of the worth of self and others.²⁵ Finally, he argues in correlational fashion that such a threefold noetic experience of valuation presupposes as the condition of its possibility an ontic whole to be experienced.

While an adequate conceptual analysis of Ogden’s argument here is necessarily complex, the basic point concerning its specifically correlational component is extremely simple. This is that the noetic pole of theological analysis, that is, our inherently relational experience of value, logically presupposes as a condition of its possibility an encompassing ontic whole.

In view of the current brouhaha over foundationalism, so-called, it seems advisable to address the issue of wherein what I have grudgingly called foundational analysis consists, at least as it is practiced by Ogden.²⁶ Again, the point is a simple one. Consider Ogden’s well known argument in The Reality of God that "the primary use or function of ‘God’ is to refer to the objective ground in reality itself of our ineradicable confidence in the final worth of our existence" (37). If we bracket only the assumption of an axiological feature for the attribution of the term "God," the basic point here is clear and straightforward. If fidelity of description demands that we take experience to be inherently valuational, then the very concept of such a noetic pole, understood as existent, presupposes an ontic correlate. As Ogden puts it, "Once we presuppose the mode of reasoning proper to religion, however -- and not to presuppose it is to leave religious issues in principle undecided -- the question whether God is real at once becomes pointless" (RG 38f). If a noetic pole is what is under discussion, an ontic correlate for it is presupposed as well. This, and only this, is what the phrase "objective ground in reality itself" or the much-vaunted term "foundation" means in this discussion. The rejection of "foundationalism" may be much ado about something, but about this particular thing there need be very little ado at all. Again, either to reject or to bracket such correlational or foundational analysis of presuppositions is thereby inevitably to leave implicit that which a critical or fully reflective theology is responsible to make explicit.

In light of this discussion of presuppositional analysis, it is perhaps worth making one final point concerning the relation between such a second-order type of procedure and the foregoing discussion of the first-order procedure of presenting the data of experience as evidence. Because first-order theological argumentation does and must presuppose the second-order assertions that presuppositional analysis uncovers, such presuppositional assertions invariably shape the hermeneutical analysis employed in any first-order presentation of experiential data. Thus, we can see that and how Ogden’s critical appropriation of Whitehead’s comprehensive empiricism as a hermeneutical grid for presenting in first-order fashion the content of experience as a sense of worth that requires the threefold distinction of self, other, and whole in order to describe it both is informed by and illustrates his second-order analysis. According to this twofold analysis, such a comprehensive empiricism proves conceptually to presuppose existential noetic faith in the ultimate worth of life and correlationally to presuppose an encompassing ontic whole. It is in such illustration that the "coherence" of argumentation may properly be said to consist. Mutatis mutandis, proponents of more conventional forms of empiricism presuppose a twofold distinction of self and contingent others only as adequate to their first-order presentation of experience of value. In any case, only that theological interpretation in which both types of argumentation are combined in their respective roles will constitute a fully critical type of inquiry.

III. Conclusion

We can conclude our consideration of argumentation in theology with respect to issues of experience and value by summarizing its main points. The purpose of presenting a description of the experience of value in theology is to bring it to bear as a factual generalization that is evidentially relevant to theistic interpretation. Appeals to individual and to communal experience function to corroborate each other with respect to both the access to and the scope of evidence deemed relevant to this purpose. Such experiential appeals presuppose the hermeneutical analysis they employ in describing the structure, character, and content of experience as they do. By analyzing one’s presuppositions, one seeks either to clarify in strictly conceptual fashion what is presupposed by the account of the noetic or the ontic pole of the constitutive theological correlation or to make similarly explicit the relations between them. Because each type of argumentation plays a distinct and necessary role in a fully reflective or critical theological analysis of the relation of experience and value, only that "methodological alternative in process theology" which employs them for their respective purposes and to the highest degree can properly be regarded as adequate. Moreover, since Schubert Ogden’s work proves to do so to the degree of testability that the present analysis permits, it can only be so judged.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. London: SCM Press, 1970.

MVG -- Charles Hartshorne. Man’s Vision of God. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964.

PP -- Schubert Ogden. "Present Prospects for Empirical Theology." The Future of Empirical Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

RG -- Schubert Ogden. The Reality of God. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

TPT -- Schubert Ogden. "The Task of Philosophical Theology." On Theology. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.

Notes

1So far as possible. I shall prescind from issues concerning both the character of specifically Christian theology and the relation between the approach I take here and that appropriate to it. In the nature of the case, as I understand it. it does not prove possible to avoid the question of the character of what is usually called "philosophical" or, less happily, "natural" theology. I address this point briefly in note 6. I have relegated a good deal of such supporting argument as I can provide here, as well as the direct polemic, to the notes.

2I shall make reference only to a small selection of Ogden’s work at that. My main interest here is in the structure and the demands of theological argumentation as such, not in an interpretation of Ogden’s theological argumentation. However, on the assumption that my constructive proposal is an appropriate interpretation of Ogden’s work, to the extent that it is independent of it, it evidently corroborates that work and builds cumulatively upon it. Moreover, to the extent that it stands up to criticism, it is itself to be regarded as precisely that sort of critical theological argumentation in which I am interested.

3 In speaking of the two basic elements as "poles," I mean to accept the classical distinction of subject ("noetic") and object ("ontic") rather than any so-called dialectical analysis such as that provided by Paul Tillich in speaking of "polarities," (Systematic Theology, vol. I [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951]). The point here concerns the structure of experience, which is to say, the relation between noetic and ontic poles, its character, and its content. I shall address the first point here with reference to the second and then develop the second and third points in the course of the argument to follow.

The issue of the structure of experience is often discussed as a choice between two epistemological theories: "realism" (in which "the known creates the knower" or the noetic pole depends on the ontic) and "idealism" (in which "the knower creates the known" or the ontic pole depends on the noetic). However, the issue is slightly more complex than this, and its solution depends on an adequate account of the character of experience. I take it for granted that this company of readers insists on the distinction, drawn in one form or another, between abstract features or aspects of immediate awareness and mediated cognition as necessary to describe the character of experience. On the basis of such a distinction, it is open to one to understand the structure of experience in the following way: With respect to the immediate relation of awareness to its data, experience is to be understood as an asymmetrical relation of dependence of the noetic upon the ontic pole, whereas, with respect to the mediated relation of cognition and its data, experience is to be understood as the asymmetrical relation of dependence of the ontic on the noetic pole. There are, in other words, moments of both "realism" and idealism" in experience, from which follows what we may call a "moderate" or "approximating" correspondence theory of truth, such as that proposed by Charles Hartshorne in reply to Richard Rorty’s polemic against the "Mirror of Nature." As Hartshorne puts it, following and clarifying Karl Popper, "We cannot simply capture the essences’ of things; but still we eliminate erroneous views of them and thus make our pictures of the world more nearly correspondent with the realities. The two extremes: We know exactly what things are. We know nothing of what they are, are both unjustified" (Creativity in American Philosophy, [Albany: State University of New York Press, 19841, p. 261).

Such a proposal seems to me to credit the understanding of the character of experience accepted by Bill Dean, while making room for an understanding of its structure that recognizes elements of both "mimesis" (as, in his view, alone constitutive of the old historicism) and "creativity" (as, in his view, alone constitutive of the "new"). Whether Dean has analyzed the "old" historicism accurately or not, what he calls the "new historicism" is not so much "new" as it is one-sided in its apparent identification of experience with idealistic creativity. In this sense, the "new idealism" would be a more accurate name for the movement he describes. (History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988], chap. 1).

4 In my judgment, it is as possible to argue from the meaning of theism (the ontic pole) to its truth for human existence (the noetic pole) as it is to argue from the meaning of human existence to the truth of theism. Moreover, in my view, each approach turns out to imply the other as a condition of the possibility of its own validity. The argument of this paper as a whole is intended as partial justification for these claims.

5As cited in PP 65.

6Ogden also distinguishes a more primal level of valuing awareness and a derived and specifically reflective, evaluative level of cognition (RG 74). It is important to note that Ogden is distinguishing highest-level abstract features, not separating concrete components, since so many arguments that emphasize cultural differences consist either in claims to produce falsifying examples or in ruling out such features from the start. These, however, seem to me invariably to invoke lower-level abstractions with greater concrete cultural content and so to involve a metabasis eis allo genos.

As Ogden himself explains, "What I mean by ‘basic confidence’ is, in Heideggerian terms, [an] ‘existential’ (Existenzial)" (RG 128, n. 32). Such a view receives nuanced corroboration in the work of the philosophical anthropologist Michael Landmann. He writes, "The anthropina of anthropology correspond to Heidegger’s ‘existentials.’" According to Landmann, "As elemental common structures, the anthropina have a merely formal character. By anthropina we mean the unchangingly fixed, ‘timeless’ basic structures of human existence. Their power of achievement must not be overestimated. They apply to the whole; they cannot explain particulars. They do not, for example, tell us why society is structured now so, now otherwise." (Fundamental Anthropology [Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America, 1982], pp. 126, 125.) On the validity of some such appropriately philosophical anthropological version of what Charles Hartshorne calls "Some Empty Though Important Truths" hangs the possibility of a philosophical theology distinct from that of any particular religious tradition as the twofold abstract anthropological structure is distinct from those relatively less abstract specifications thereof found in the various religious traditions (The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962], chap. XII.) On such a possibility, see TPT 69-93. For the purposes of this paper, I shall regard any theology whose claims are not taken from a particular religious tradition as a philosophical theology.

7Regarding this assumption (and its constitutive denial), the advice of Charles Hartshorne seems to me sound: "In studying memory, perception, or imagination one needs to distinguish between (1) What is observably present in the experience; (2) what is not observably present; and (3) what is observably absent. The conversion of (2) into (3) is justified only if it is known that the factor in question must, if present at all, be so in perceptible degree or magnitude" (CSPM 79). Of those whose empiricism is of the second, or less than comprehensive type, one wants to know precisely whether their claim is that, as Whitehead puts it, an "awareness not merely of ourselves, and of our fellow creatures, but also of the infinite whole in which we are all included as somehow one" (as cited in PP 85), (2) is not observably present, or (3) is observably absent.

8Leaving open, of course, whether "the totality" is to be interpreted in nontheistic fashion as "world" only or in theistic fashion as somehow more than this.

90n the significance of such a grid, see note 18 below.

10The former course is evidently that chosen by Dean in History Making History.

11This sort of argumentation and conviction is discussed in classical dogmatics under the headings "explicit faith" and "internal testimony of the Holy Spirit" (cf. Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3rd ed., rev. [Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1961], pp. 415, 86).

12So far as I can see, phenomenological, linguistic, and pragmatic appeals to experience can only be at odds with each other when they are misunderstood. So long as individual experience is understood to be intrinsically social in character (and so as to involve both language and praxis) and under the hermeneutical proviso referred to in note 4, there need be no such problem.

130n this point, see Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 41. This is called fides historica by the Orthodox dogmaticians (cf. Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, p. 411). While fallibility and, therefore, dubitability, are ever-present in both individual and communal cases, in that of the individual appeal, it is a fallibility in the context of introspectively hermeneutical access to the evidence of one’s own internal, nonsensuous experience that one is attempting to identify, to describe, and to explain, whereas in the case of the communal appeal, it is a fallibility in the context of sensorily hermeneutical access to the evidence of others’ attempts to do this.

14For this notion of corroboration and its difference from one of "confirmation" in the sense of being rendered firm by experience, see Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), especially p. 251, fn. 1, and Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

Moreover, it takes some care to specify in what sense, if any, experience can properly be said to "confirm" theism at all. If, as is evidently the case, appeals to experience must have the logical character of factual generalizations, they can only properly be taken to have directly probative force in relation to claims of the same logical character. Thus, only if claims regarding the existence of God are understood as logically contingent or factual can appeals to experience be said either probatively to "confirm" or to "disconfirm," which is to say, to "corroborate" or to "falsify" them. However, if such theistic claims are understood not as logically contingent or factual, but as logically necessary or modal in character, appeals to experience are properly to be regarded as having not such directly probative, but rather illustrative and, therefore, at most indirectly probative force. For while what is taken to exist contingently and, therefore, as partially restrictive of existential possibilities can be shown to be excluded by other such contingencies, what is taken to exist necessarily and, therefore, as completely nonrestrictive of existential possibilities, can be shown only to be illustrated by any and every such contingency. And a reality, the existence of which could never be negatively directly falsified or disconfirmed but only positively indirectly illustrated by experience is scarcely to be said to be confirmed thereby, either.

Finally, the necessarily interpretive character of all appeals to experience makes clear that there are no "uninterpreted facts" either to "confirm" or to "disconfirm" any theistic interpretation of them. Thus, for example, "facts" that have often enough been taken as evidence against theism (such as "the facts of evil") may prove to have falsificatory character in relation to theism not, however, directly, in their character as contingent facts, but rather indirectly, as illustrations of the implicitly self contradictory character of such an interpretation, contradicted by any and every fact, and now made explicit by being shown contradictory with specific (and always interpreted) facts. In other words, contingent facts may be probatively relevant to theism in an indirect way, but not as a function of their factual character. I have argued this case at length in my dissertation, "Evil and Theism: An Analytical-Constructive Resolution of the So-called Problem of Evil," Southern Methodist University, 1977.

In light of these considerations, and in view of the rarity of explicitly and self-consciously factual interpretations of the divine existence in comparison with either explicitly or implicitly modal interpretations, I am inclined not to speak of appeals to experience as having probative significance for the issue of the divine existence at all. (For the interpretation of contingency and necessity in terms of restrictiveness employed here, see Hartshorne, CSPM, chap. VIII, "Non-restrictive Existential Statements," pp. 159-72.)

15Whi1e it is probably the rare theistic proposal that ignores what we may call such an "axiological" feature concerning value in ascribing the quality of divinity, it is all but rare for such proposals to make clear how such a consideration relates to other, particularly to broadly "cosmological" considerations concerning causality. Thus, for example, consider the argument of Thomas Aquinas: "Again, in every genus the simpler a being, the more noble it is. . . . That, therefore, which is at the peak of nobility among all beings must be at the peak of simplicity. But the being that is at the peak of nobility among all beings we call God, since He is the first cause [a ‘cosmological’ feature]. For a cause is nobler than an effect [an ‘axiological’ feature]. God can, therefore, have no composition" (in Summa Contra Gentiles: Book One: God, trans. with introduction by Anton G. Pegis [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975], p. 104). I have treated the general issue of the "criteria" or "standards" for regarding something as an appropriate candidate for the attribution to it of the quality of divinity at greater length in "Divinity and Dipolarity: Thomas Erskine and Charles Hartshorne on What Makes God ‘God’" Journal of Religion 62 (October 1982):335-58. We may note that, in the history of theistic argumentation or "proofs for the existence of God," axiological considerations find expression above all in the tradition of "ontological," "aesthetic," and "moral" arguments, cosmological considerations in "cosmological" arguments. The two features prove to be combined in "teleological" arguments from design or order. I should now be willing to suggest that it is a willingness to take the axiological feature as ultimately determinative for the attribution of divinity that characterizes all modern forms of so-called ethical theism and distinguishes them from the classical tradition. Where such ethical theism explicitly takes both considerations into account and relates them to each other in a fully critical way, we may speak of a "neoclassical" logic at work. Such a procedure characterizes quite precisely Hartshorne’s approach to the theistic proofs.

16To hold otherwise is to suppose a form of "immediate knowledge," an absurdity if, as Hartshorne among many others holds, "human consciousness is essentially linguistic" ("A Philosopher’s Assessment of Christianity," in Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, ed. Walter Leibrecht [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959], p. 178, as cited by Ogden, "The Experience of God: Critical Reflections on Hartshorne’s Theory of Analogy," in Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and Franklin I. Gamwell [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], p. 32). As Hartshorne also points out, "The supposition that our power of ‘introspection’ is absolute, so that, unless we can consciously detect a factor in an experience it does not contain the factor, is one of the many forms of the supposition that man is as God would be -- equipped with infallibility" (CSPM 79). The suppositions of immediacy of knowledge and infallibility of introspection seem frequently to accompany each other and to result in that of the indubitability of conclusions.

17To speak of concepts as "clear" and options as "conceivable" is simply (if also surely) to give one’s theory the highest degree of the relevant sort of "refutability" or "testability" possible -- in this case, that of a hermeneutical character (cf. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 36).

18The weakness of so much historical theology is precisely the merely conventional and insufficiently critical character of its hermeneutical analysis. It is just the indeterminacy of such key concepts as "historicism" and "empiricism" in the conceptual grid of Dean’s History Making History, for example, that weakens its analysis and interpretation. We may speak by analogy with Hartshorne’s "neoclassical theism" of Whitehead’s neoclassical empiricism" precisely because it is a self-conscious revision of the classical tradition on the one hand and can be seen to consist in an analysis of the formally possible doctrines regarding the character and content of experience on the other.

19For a brilliant, if truncated discussion of "The Concept of Presupposition" and "Logical Analysis of Presuppositions" see Anders Nygren, Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of Religion and a Scientific Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), chaps. VII and VIII.

20This is not, however, to say that all interest is "biased" or "ideological" in the sense that it expresses, in Ogden’s words, "a more or less comprehensive understanding of human existence, or how to exist and act as a human being, that functions to justify the interests of a particular group or individual by representing these interests as the demands of disinterested justice" (The Point of Christology [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982], p. 94). To claim that some one of the class of particular human interests is necessarily exemplified in all human activity, even, perhaps, that what we might call a distinctively "soteriological" or "existential" feature consisting in a desire for self-fulfillment or authenticity is necessarily exemplified in all such particular interests is one thing, the characterization of any and all such features and interests as "ideological" another.

21How what must be described somehow, we might say, might be redescribed; what must necessarily be described cannot properly be either ignored or denied. See note 7.

22Of course, the reverse holds true as well. Theism has implications for these views, too!

23That Whitehead refers to the whole indifferently as "infinite" and "encompassing" here in his last work is itself warrant to look for the sort of conceptual analysis of such a whole that Charles Hartshorne has spent a lifetime providing.

24Ogden has, of course, argued at length what I have assumed, given the makeup of this group, namely, that we can experience at all if and only if our experience involves a sense of worth, that is, that evaluation presupposes valuing. While Ogden argues to the existence of an ontic whole as the condition of the possibility of our valuing, it not only can be, but also has been argued with similar care that such a reality, understood as the supreme instance" of that "comprehensive moral principle" required to account fully for human evaluation is thereby likewise necessarily presupposed by such evaluation (Franklin I. Gamwell, Beyond Preference: Liberal Theories of Independent Associations [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], chap. 4, "A Formal Condition for Political Theory," and p. 151; The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God [San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990]).

25I am not certain whether Ogden takes this argument to be a factual one made with reference to experience as exhibited individually and communally in its threefold valuational form of self, others, and the whole, or a presuppositional one based on a conceptual analysis of the conditions of the possibility of the twofold form of experience of the value of the self and others and then illustrated by such experience. He writes, "[Whitehead’s] argument then makes the second and crucial point that this sense of reality which underlies all our experience comprises infinitely more than is sometimes supposed. . . . The very nature of our experience, Whitehead argues, is such as to compel recognition of this third essential factor" (PP 85). But does he take it to "compel" such recognition as a matter of fact (that our experience does include the sense of it) or as a matter of conceptual necessity (that a description of our experience must include the sense of it in order to be coherent)? On the analysis presented here, both are entirely proper, indeed necessary forms of argumentation for various contexts and purposes.

Moreover, a third approach is possible, namely, one which employs what we may call a "strictly metaphysical" analysis concerning neither the matters of fact at issue in appeals to experience, nor the hypothetical necessity at issue in the correlational form of presuppositional analysis, but rather the strict necessity that pertains to the character of factuality as such. Indeed, such a form of argumentation ultimately proves to be as much required for a fully critical theology as are the others we have discussed, intended as it is to clarify what they necessarily presuppose concerning the applicability or capacity for existential illustration of the concepts they employ. On this point, see Ogden, "The Criterion of Metaphysical Truth and the Senses of ‘Metaphysics,’" Process Studies 5 (Spring 1975): 47-48. Indeed, this third type of argumentation is suggested by Ogden’s citation of Whitehead’s claims implying precisely such an approach that, "Also the dim meaning of fact -- or actuality -- is intrinsic importance for itself, for the others, and for the whole," and "Apart from this sense of transcendent worth, the otherness of reality would not enter into our consciousness" (PP 84f. emphasis added).

260f course, if "the new historicist theology" consists in nothing more definite in this regard than a vague "denial of extrahistorical foundations," of "foundations in a God beyond history," it does not demand to be taken seriously as an intellectual option (see Dean, History Making History, p. 18).

Introduction

The term "process theology" covers a variety of viewpoints and interests. This is true even when the term refers exclusively to contemporary Christian theologians whose thinking draws on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. The work of these Christian process thinkers focuses variously on such topics as the question of God, theological method, human nature and history, moral and ethical issues, or on the physical sciences. The primary context for some process theologians is current political and liberation theology, whereas for others it is liberal or evangelical Christianity, classical Christian thought, philosophy, or comparative thought and the history of religions.

In many instances the differences between process thinkers are grounded in personal history, personal disposition, and the interests of a particular theologian at a particular moment. But many of their differences seem traceable to differing judgments about what theology is and how the theological task should be carried out. That is, they relate to differences over method.

The purpose of this conference is to test this apparent difference over method in process theology. The motivation is partly a desire for greater clarity about what really divides us, but it is also motivated by a sense of what we share and the importance of this general perspective for contemporary theology and its broader cultures. In other words, understanding better where we differ will clarify, too, where we agree in contrast to some current alternatives.

The purpose of this paper is introductory. In it we want to provide a general understanding of process theology and the methodological alternatives it seems to us to represent. This "general understanding" is of course simply our understanding. Few of the conference participants, if any, fit precisely the abstract methodological categories we will outline. But the purpose of our analysis is less to describe particular people than to suggest different methodological types. The papers and discussions to follow will undoubtedly modify our initial and quite abstract distinctions.

Both for this presentation and for the conference in general we have selected three terms to represent what we take to be three methodological alternatives in process theology today. The terms are "empirical," "speculative," and "rationalist." None of these terms, however, belongs exclusively to the alternatives we outline; in fact, all three positions are in some essential sense empirical, speculative, and rational. But we think these terms are useful labels for the three positions we shall discuss because they indicate that which each position emphasizes, or emphasizes in distinctive ways, in comparison to the others.

WHITEHEAD AND PROCESS THEOLOGY

All three methodological alternatives in process theology draw upon the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Before we indicate the particular element of Whitehead’s thought to which each appeals, however, we want very briefly to characterize Whitehead’s philosophical viewpoint, again for the lay listener.

The most important thing to be said is that both process and relationality are fundamental to reality, in Whitehead’s view. To make this claim about process is to say more than simply that things change; it is to say that there are no essentially constant things at the most basic level of analysis. There is change, succession, flux; there are no more basic realities that are the subjects or agents of this change. As one writer put it metaphorically, in Whitehead’s view the world fundamentally is a dance, and there are no dancers.

The permanence or identity through time that we observe in daily experience, however, is also real in a sense, of course. There are dancers, really, but at a secondary level. Permanence is a generalization, or what Whitehead once called an "average fact." Things are permanent at a derivative level; the primary truth is that of process.

What we have said of process must also be said of relationality. Everything is related. The processes of activity that constitute things fundamentally are open and affected by the rest of things. So true is this, in fact, that what happens in one part of the universe impacts, however minimally, everything that comes after it. In this cumulative fashion, all things are interconnected. Separateness or individuality, like permanence, is also real, but it, too, is real at a secondary or derivative level.

In his examination of the processive and relational character of things Whitehead reached a number of conclusions quite suggestive for theological reflection. For one thing, Whitehead’s conception of selfhood is highly critical of the pronounced individualism and essentialism of modern Western religion. "No one is an island" in Whitehead’s philosophy, and that is an important resource for theological analysis and reconstruction. In addition, Whitehead understands personhood in terms of dynamism and openness rather than static continuity. That, too, is bound to recast significantly the way theological anthropology develops.

Whitehead’s view of nature is also suggestive for theology. Whitehead argued that the temporal process constituting nature, including humans, is a valuational process manifesting a faint but persistent drive toward higher and richer forms of order. This means that reality is not a mechanical display of inert, valueless matter, not even at the level of physical processes. At every level the temporal process surges forward bearing certain values and valuations that must be received in some fashion by each present moment. In human experience the past is efficacious, too, of course, but Whitehead maintained that the manner of its power in human experience is primarily non-sensory. Indeed, he thought that something like "felt" connections obtain as the basic mode of relatedness throughout the universe, whether in subhuman processes or in human experience. We shall soon return to this point.

In a developing, never completed way Whitehead talked about God, primarily as the lure toward richer forms of order in the temporal process. To the extent that Whitehead did develop a notion of God, it was a God different in important respects from the deity of the Western theological tradition. Whiteheadians have argued that the so-called process view of God is in fact more consistent with Western, particularly Christian, piety than is the God of classical theology. Be that as it may, Whitehead’s God is not omnipotent or omniscient as classical theology construes these terms. Whitehead’s God works within the temporal process, interacting with the genuine autonomy and freedom of the creatures, without guarantee that the divine purpose in the world will be achieved.

This neo-classical conception of God, as it is sometimes called, is reflected by all process theologies, but in different ways. In fact, we could identify different types of process theology in terms of their different conceptions of God. But when we look at the underlying reasons for these differences we usually are led to alternative views of theology and the theological task. That is, underlying differences about God in process theology are often differences about method. Thus we turn now to these differences, first examining what we have called "empirical" process theology.

Empirical Process Theology

Empirical process theology can be understood primarily in relation to Whitehead’s account of the character of relationality. For our purposes we can concentrate on human relatedness. Whitehead maintained that sensory experience is the highly refined and abstract outcome of another more fundamental mode of our relatedness to things. Underlying the five senses is a rich yet chaotic and vague pre-conceptual mode of perception wherein the given world enters the organic unity of chemical, visceral, and psychic processes called the human body. Two brief excerpts from Whitehead convey something of what he is saying:

Whitehead’s view of the pre-cognitive character of our fundamental relatedness to the world led him to warn against an "excessive trust in [the] linguistic phrases" (PR 12/17) with which we attempt to describe the world. He wrote:

It is this focus on the non-cognitive character of our relatedness to the world, and consequently this caution about the adequacy of language for elucidating that relationship -- it is this focus and this caution that form the basis of what we term "empirical process theology."

According to the empirical process theologian, the task of theology is to attend to the precognitive dimension of experience and to the realities given therein. Among that which is given preconceptually, there is an ultimacy to which the various religions, and their broader cultures, give witness.

The methodological point, however, is that theology can never extend itself into a "total vision of reality" (FFS 49). To quote from Bernard Meland, one of the most influential of the empirical process thinkers, language is inadequate to convey the "depth and surplusage of experience" (FFS 48) to which theology attends. There is within experience a "persisting dissonance" that defies "our efforts [to establish] rationality and coherence" (FFS 67). Experience gives structures, but they are local and fragmentary; evident in "lived experience [is] a depth of reality that exceeds and often eludes. . . conceptualization," and calls into "question all presuppositions of an underlying coherence as a given . . .which may answer to our studied and carefully designed formulations" (FFS 112).

Against modernist pretensions to intellectual self-sufficiency (FFS 142), the empirical theologian denies that the reason characteristic of the human level of emergence "is definitive of reality beyond its own level . . .or even indicative of what is ultimate" (FFS 129). As a response to the precognitive depth of our experience, Meland says, the rational quest

For empirical process theologians -- certainly for Meland -- the construction of comprehensive theological systems is suspect if not wholly indefensible, on methodological grounds. System-building may also be morally misguided, for it tends "to preclude the possibility of a more sensitive encounter with realities at the edge of our being" (FFS 129f), and these are precisely the realities to which theology in particular ought to attend.

It should be noted, however, that the empirical theologian’s strictures against system apply primarily to the theological enterprise. Theology’s concern is with the unmanageable, elusive depth of experienced reality. Philosophy’s aim, by contrast, is to elucidate the region of clarity accessible at the distinctively human level of existence (FFS 134, 1360. As long as philosophy precinds from generalizations beyond that region, remaining content to analyze and hypothesize about that which is available to conscious awareness, its systems are legitimate.

Theology can benefit from philosophy, moreover, by taking from it certain of its categories to illuminate the depths of experience. The philosophical concept of emergence," for example, can be employed to illuminate what theology has sought to witness to in its talk about "revelation," namely, "what it means to have an innovating mystery break forth from a given structure of existence" (FFS 133). In this way theology’s effort to introduce a "margin of intelligibility" (FFS 133) into its talk about the depths of experience is assisted by philosophy, without pretending that the philosophical category captures that depth "without remainder" (FFS 134).

From this standpoint, then, theology is perhaps best understood as the effort to nurture awareness of the depth dimension of human experience as it comes to expression in the myths and symbols of particular religious traditions and their broader cultures. Meland writes:

If theology’s task is not to create coherent systems, how then are its claims to be tested? The answer is two-fold. First, claims to truth must always be returned to the concreteness of our lives, there to be tested for their "fit" with experience in its depths. But because experience at its base is non-cognitive, the claims we make, in theology as elsewhere, must also be tested in terms of their consequences. Thus empirical process theology has consistently allied itself with pragmatism; truth has to do with the particular and the pragmatic, not with that which is general and supposedly necessary.

Speculative Process Theology

Those whom we are calling "speculative" process theologians do not deny the depth dimension of experience emphasized so effectively by their empirical colleagues. They maintain, however, that the precognitive depth of experience no more disallows systems in theology than in philosophy. Systems in both are possible as tentative empirical generalizations, a possibility Whitehead himself defended.

Whitehead compared the development of the speculative system to the flight of an airplane (PR 4f; cf. 7-9, 203-5). Its point of departure is always some particular "analytic observation of components of . . . experience." Its flight is the "imaginative generalization" of ideas drawn from that particular domain of experience into the lofty sphere of logical, coherent principles. The end of the speculative flight is the point where the scheme of ideas thus generated descends upon another range of experience, there to be tested in terms of its applicability and adequacy. The speculative system, so conceived, is never finalized and never absolutized. It cannot be, for its aim is always generality, general applicability. This means that systematic thought is obligated always to seek new landing points, new regions of experience, and thus obligated always to subject itself to renewed tests and the possibility of further revision.

This kind of speculation is hardly the absolutistic undertaking of traditional system building. Systems of the past have ignored the inadequacies of language and they probably have stultified our sensitivity to the deeper reaches of experience. But it is wrong to suppose that the only alternative to an absolutistic system is no system at all. A more modest quest for systematic generality is possible, valuable, even necessary. It not only locates our particular experiences, it also subjects what we say about them to the criticism of comparative analysis. In that way systematic generality provides us with fallible but crucial support in any of the spheres important to life about which we might wish to speak.

Speculative process thinkers, therefore, attempt to develop provisional, general schemes of ideas in terms of which all else can be adequately interpreted. Understood in this way, speculative thought is simply the tentative effort to draw the broadest possible relevant connections. The truth of these conceptual connections is to be tested by their adequacy to our experience, their coherence, their consistency with our other ideas, and, as we shall see, by their consequences.

Among speculative process thinkers, the philosophical framework of Whitehead in particular is taken as the resource for analyzing a broad range of issues. The work of John Cobb is the pre-eminent example of this undertaking. Drawing on White-head, Cobb has addressed topics in and between enormously varied areas of inquiry -- philosophy, theology, the encounter of religions, social problems, political thought, economic theory, ecology, biology, and theoretical physics. In one of his most recent endeavors Cobb collaborates with Herman E. Daly, the economist. Employing what Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," and relying at least implicitly on Whitehead’s entire organismic worldview, Cobb (with Daly) analyzes the deleterious abstractionism of virtually all modern economic theories. Whether of the left, right, or center, these theories, Cobb and Daly contend, have become tied to an abstract concept of money flow "regulated by a perfectly competitive market" conceived mechanistically (EC 5:2-4). "There is nothing in economic theory that requires" such narrowness (EC 5-5), but having captured their imagination this abstraction now leads all economists to discount "the effect of one person’s welfare on that of others through bonds of sympathy. . . , and the physical effects of one person’s production and consumption activities on others through bonds of bio-physical community" (EC 5-3).

Speculative explorations, such as Cobb’s, are never aimed simply at description; they seek to be critical and reformative, to reveal the conceptual inadequacies in our assumed ways of thinking that distort and destroy life. The conceptual mistakes in Western culture that have contributed to anthropocentrism, mechanism, patriarchy, individualism, materialism, and parochialism -- all of these have been subjects of extensive analyses written from this methodological standpoint by Cobb and those who follow him. And beyond their critiques, these speculative process thinkers attempt to set forth alternative models and to place these better models in a comprehensive relationship to other fields of thought.

The assumptions operative in this approach are that systematic thought is, first, possible, and, second, essential to the effective criticism and overcoming of that which inhibits the fruitful quest of the just and good life. A third assumption is that systematic explorations are tentative. As imaginative and comprehensive as these efforts can be, the claims they make are proposed provisionally to be tested pragmatically. They are tentative efforts to make illuminating connections within the realm of contingency. Indeed, it is because they speak about the contingent that they can also speak about transformation, for it is precisely because better alternatives are possible that these alternatives ought to be envisioned and pursued.

If these are the common features of speculative process thought, as we understand it, they are accompanied by differences within this methodological perspective. These differences have to do with the nature of theology. For some speculative process thinkers, such as John Cobb, theology is "any coherent statement about matters of ultimate concern that recognizes that the perspective by which it is governed is received from a community of faith" (CNT 252). Matters of ultimate concern, of course, can have urgently to do with survival on the planet, the eradication of racism and sexism, the search for a viable economic order, etc. And while the analysis that addresses these issues can be indebted to Christian tradition, the theologian who thinks about such issues may well be so innovative in relation to historic Christian reflection that his or her work on these topics is indistinguishable from that of the ecologist, the secular ethicist, or the economic theorist (cf. CNT 253). On this view, therefore, Christian theology can be anything said about matters of ultimate importance by those who call themselves Christian. Similarly, Christian process theology can be anything said about ultimate issues by those who call themselves Christian and employ the conceptuality of process philosophy.

In contrast, other speculative process thinkers (in addition to the rationalists whom we shall describe in a moment) hold that "Christian process theology" is a misnomer for much of what is done by their speculative colleagues, as valuable as this work may be. For these speculative thinkers, Christian theology is a distinctive mode of discourse with its own sources and criteria. Christian theology can be enunciated in the conceptuality of process philosophy, just as Christian theology can be articulated in some natural language such as English. But what is Christian about Christian theology, process or otherwise, must be indicated according to appropriate definitional criteria. A systematic perspective is not Christian simply because it is enunciated by a Christian or, for that matter, simply because it is insightful, transformative, or even true. There is a difference in principle between philosophy and theology, and hence there is a difference between process philosophy and the Christian theology that employs process thought as an ally and vehicle of expression.

This argument leads us to the third methodological alternative in process thought, one that draws the distinction between philosophy and theology even more sharply by virtue of what it wishes to add to the foregoing. Rationalist process theologians, like speculative thinkers, affirm the fundamental reality and importance of the precognitive depth of experience, to which the empiricists are particularly attentive. The rationalists affirm, too, the importance of tentative speculation about contingent matters of fact. But, uniquely, the rationalists (as we use the term) insist -- albeit with the same tentativeness that is required by the fallibility of all human reflection -- that some of the elements of an adequate philosophical system are properly speaking metaphysical, i.e., they make claims that are said to apply to any possible world because they are thought to be universally and necessarily true.

Rationalist Process Thought

There are aspects of Whitehead’s work that provide precedent for the rationalists’ project. Although Whitehead warned against "the merest hint of dogmatic certainty" (PR xiv), he also endeavored "to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas" (PR 3; emphasis added), and at least some of the elements of his system Whitehead himself called "categoreal conditions which flow from the final nature of things" (PR 222).

Be that as it may, the process philosopher who has most fully developed what we are calling the rationalist standpoint, and who has argued most vigorously for its importance, is Charles Hartshorne.

Hartshorne is convinced of the capacity of human reason adequately to grasp the general nature of reality, in its divine as well as non-divine forms. Underlying this confidence in reason’s capacities are Hartshorne’s assumptions that reality has an intelligible and coherent structure, that human reason can know that structure, and that there can be a basic congruence between reality and human ideas or formulations about that reality.

For Hartshorne, it is precisely the task of metaphysics to attend to the universal features of reality. In Hartshorne’s words, metaphysics is "an attempt to describe the most general aspects of experience, to abstract from all that is special in our awareness, and to report as clearly and accurately as possible on the residuum" (RSP 175). Hence, in contrast to an empiricism that focuses on the particular, the unique, and the contingent, Hartshorne proposes a mode of philosophical analysis whose concern is that which is universal and necessary, and knowable apart from any particular experience.

The method Hartshorne proposes for carrying out this analysis, he labels the a priori method, in distinction from an empirical or a posteriori method. It is essential to note what Hartshorne means by a priori. It does not mean "having nothing to do with experience." For Hartshorne, all ideas are grounded in experience. However, metaphysical ideas -- those that refer to the universal and necessary aspects of reality -- are exemplified by all experiences and thus not by any experience more than another. Thus, a priori does not mean "in distinction from all experiences" but rather "in distinction from the particularity and uniqueness of individual experiences."

But how does one discern these general, common features of reality? Hartshorne suggests two complementary methods. One, most commonly associated with a priori claims, is that of logical analysis. Presupposing the congruency of thought and reality, it seeks the most general and abstract ideas, scrutinizes them in terms of the norms of coherency and consistency, and explores whether their denial would be self-contradictory. For, Hartshorne argues, metaphysical claims or truths must by nature be logically necessary ones and therefore their denial will be incoherent. Hartshorne’s most important contribution in this area has been his metaphysical analysis of the idea of God and his development of arguments, especially a revised ontological one, for God’s existence. Such matters are logical or metaphysical issues, not historical or empirical ones. Hence, Hartshorne declares, "not warm emotions, but cold logic and intense intellectuality alone can ever resolve [them]. Here I am an ultra-rationalist" (IGE).

While much of Hartshorne’s work has focused on this dimension of logical analysis, Hartshorne has also explicated another, more experientially-grounded aspect of his metaphysical method. Arguing that all basic ideas are derived from experience, Hartshorne proposes that we examine specific experiences in search of the generic features exhibited by all reality. This approach is what David Griffin has called Hartshorne’s deep empiricism, his conviction that on the most fundamental levels of experience, the universal, necessary and common features of reality are embodied and careful attention to those basic experiences can yield general metaphysical truths, including those about God. Hence, in relation to this element of his thought, Hartshorne’s rationalism can be seen to share some commonalities with certain versions of radical empiricism. It is important to keep in mind, however, that both approaches, logical analysis, and abstraction and generalization, provide metaphysical truths that are necessary and universal.

Finally, while Hartshorne has committed himself to a life-long analysis of what he takes to be the constant and necessary aspects of reality, he also affirms the need for exploring and explicating the unique and novel features of social and personal experience. Such features escape metaphysical inquiry; they can only be revealed through a posteriori methods. It is to others that he leaves such also important tasks.

If Charles Hartshorne has been the leading process philosopher to articulate the rationalist perspective, Schubert Ogden has been the central thinker to contend for the necessity of metaphysical analysis for theological reflection through the development of his notions of faith, religion and theology.

Ogden argues that a basic faith, or confidence in life’s value, is constitutive of experience on its deepest levels. Such a faith or confidence is the basic presupposition for existence as a self at all, and the central task of philosophical theology is, in Ogden’s words, "to lay bare the faith by which every one exists simply as a human being, together with the structure of reality as revealed to such faith" (OT 75). The philosopher does this through what Ogden calls the transcendental method by which "the basic beliefs that are the necessary conditions of our existing or understanding at all," are raised to full self-consciousness (OT 77).

Ogden’s analysis of faith is relevant to religion and religious belief in at least two ways. One has to do with belief in God. Having argued that faith, or a fundamental confidence in the ultimate value of our lives, is shown by any complete and consistent analysis to be unavoidable, Ogden contends that there must be an objective ground of this trust, which Ogden calls God. Thus, "God" is conceptually necessary in order to make sense of our basic faith. But God is not only a conceptual necessity; Ogden also holds that an adequate analysis of faith discloses that constitutive of our fundamental, presensory experience is a dim awareness of the infinite whole, or God. Hence, both conceptually and empirically God is a necessary component of Ogden’s system.

However, while Ogden is convinced that faith is unavoidable and a ground for faith is necessary, he also maintains that it is impossible to develop a coherent understanding of this divine ground utilizing the categories of traditional Western theology and philosophy. The strength of process thought is precisely the fact that it provides an adequate understanding of experience and a coherent concept of God free of the incoherence of traditional theism.

Ogden’s analysis of faith also bears upon our understanding of religion and the nature of theology. Faith does not lie only in the deepest recesses of nonsensory experience. It finds expression as well in the manifold religious traditions; all religions in some manner embody this basic faith in their beliefs, rituals and symbols. They do so, however, in diverse, historically relative ways. Hence, while the faith that is the presupposition of all religions is the same, the historical traditions which manifest this faith cannot be reduced to one another. Moreover, because religions are distinctive historical developments, a central task for theology within each particular tradition is the assessment of how well any theological claim coheres with the normative witness to faith of that unique tradition. Thus theology in each of its particular forms is a discipline with its own internal criteria. For this reason theology is distinct from philosophy

While Ogden insists that theological assertions must be judged according to their cohesion with their particular tradition’s normative witness, he insists with equal vigor that each theology must also be assessed according to broader norms of truth not tied to particular religious traditions. This is important in our day when, in order to be credible, religious claims must make sense in a basically secular society.

But there is another reason for subjecting theological claims to more public tests of truth. Religious assertions, of whatever tradition, include an at least implicit claim to universal relevancy and truth. In Ogden’s words, "whatever else a religion is or involves, it crucially is or involves conceptualizing and symbolizing a comprehensive understanding of human existence that claims to be true" (OT 110). Hence, because religious concepts and symbols entail claims about the nature of reality, metaphysical analysis is not only permissible but imperative according to the very logic of these claims. What is important here is that theological claims are to be tested in relation to the philosophical rendering of basic faith, not directly in relation to that basic faith itself.

Conclusion

If our lecture ends with what we have called the rationalist alternative in process theology, that viewpoint is not likely to represent the unanimous conclusion of the discussions that will follow throughout this conference.

Speculative thinkers might argue, for example, that what is said to be universal and necessary is inevitably a function of each thinker’s relative perspective and thus is no more than a disguised report of what is presupposed by that limited point of view. Empirical thinkers might insist, in addition, that the longing for generality, whether necessary or contingent, represents a patent distortion of the testimony of -our immediate human experience.

These differences should not obscure what process thinkers hold in common. All are convinced that the heretofore dominant forms of Western thought, including their modern and postmodern variations, are inadequate, and that a processive/relational interpretation of reality holds far more promise for the present situation. All are convinced of the reality and fundamental importance of nonsensory, precognitive experience in life and, therefore, for the task of theology and philosophy. But this commonality, of course, is also the point of a major disagreement. Empirical, speculative, and rationalistic process thinkers differ, we suspect, on the nature of this dimension of experience, the proper ways of analyzing it, and in their conclusions concerning what can be accomplished by referring to this level of experience While all turn to this depth dimension of life, it is not clear that the "deep empiricism" of the rationalists, which yields universal and necessary truths, is the same as that form of "radical empiricism" whose adherents focus on the particular and the contingent. Add to these the voices of the speculative position who are wary of claims to universality and necessity, but who nonetheless believe over-arching interpretive frameworks are essential, and it becomes clear that while much is shared, many differences remain to be discussed.

Moreover, in the conversations ahead, other viewpoints than those represented here will also stand as challenges to our work together. Premier among those absent but felt perspectives will be that of postmodern thinkers who question whether either thought or experience can provide us with some common "foundation" in terms of which our ideas can be constructed and our differences adjudicated.

References

CNT -- John B. Cobb, Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.

FCG -- John B. Cobb, Jr. and Herman E. Daly. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Towards Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

IGE -- Charles Hartshorne. "Is God’s Existence a State of Affair?" Faith and the Philosophers. Ed. John Hick. London: MacMillan, 1964.

RSP -- Charles Hartshorne. Reality as Social Process. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

FFS -- Bernard Meland. Fallible Forms and Symbols. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.

OT -- Schubert M. Ogden. On Theology. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986.

RG -- Schubert M. Ogden. The Reality of God and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.