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F. Bradford Wallack (ENP 7) has called for a revolution in Whitehead scholarship. She argues that it has been a serious mistake for interpreters of Whitehead "to limit the application of his basic ontological category of existence -- his actual entity -- to just two kinds of existents: subatomic entities, such as electrons, protons, photons and the like, and human percipient experience." It is her contention that the category of actual entity (actual occasion) should be taken to refer to "any concrete existent whatsoever." In a review (PS 10:57), James W. Felt, S.J. admitted that Wallack’s call has attractions, but declined to join her on the barricades. Felt raised a number of serious problems for Wallack’s thesis, not least of which is extensive textual evidence that Whitehead, in his final synthesis, was closer to the position of the orthodox interpreters than to Wallack’s position.

Wallack contends, for instance, that the Castle Rock at Edinburgh is an actual entity (a moment of the Castle Rock, a "Castle Rock occasion") (ENP 16). Felt points out that Whitehead makes a clear distinction between single actual entities and corpuscular societies (PR 112), and since composite entities, such as the Castle Rock, fall in the latter category, they must be excluded from the former. Felt claims that Wallack as confounded "ontological" and "epistemological" aspects of actual entities and has failed to clarify how satisfaction of subjective aim is connected with being perceived as a unitary whole.

In his final synthesis, Whitehead clearly distinguished "simple" prehensions from "transmuted" ones (PR 256). In the latter, a nexus is felt as one actual entity, whereas in the former the object of the prehension is one actuality. Since Whitehead required that his categories be "applicable" (PR 3), this distinction implies an affirmative answer to the question posed earlier "whether there are primary organisms which are incapable of further analysis" (SMW 103).

It should be noted that the concept of the "elementary" (noncomposite) particle was then being shown to have great power in rationalizing both chemistry and nuclear physics. The situation in current science is quite different. Particle physics offers no definite answers as to which particles (if any) are elementary and which are composite. "Elementary" is used in an operational sense and varies with the circumstances.¹ Particles which may be regarded as noncomposite in low-energy experiments show definite structure in high-energy ones. As a leading physicist has put it, "Belief in the ‘simplicity’ of the microscopic belongs to the past" (BB xv). The question then arises how it might be possible for a composite entity to function as one actuality. What I want to propose is that recent progress in science suggests a resolution of the issues Felt raises against Wallack, which allows retention of her main point. I will attempt ("impossibile aut potius infinitum est"²) to provide a clear nontechnical summary of the scientific concepts from which the suggestion arises, but the point can be understood without that background.

It was one of Newton’s great achievements to show that a uniform massy sphere acts, insofar as gravitational interaction with an external object is concerned, as if the entire mass were located at the center. The sphere might be large or small, made of lead or of balsa wood, and these characteristics would influence some of its properties (whether it cast a large shadow or a small one, for instance), but insofar as gravitational interaction with an external object is concerned, only the total mass and the position of the center is important. In this case, the many components of the sphere have been unified into a single source of gravitational interaction, though for other purposes the extension of the sphere is important -- that is, complete unification has not occurred.

Recently, new sorts of organization have been discovered: dissipative structures in chemistry and in physics. These are similar to Newton’s sphere in that, so far as at least some interactions with the outside world are concerned, effective unification occurs. They are different from structures such as the sphere in the important respect that the formation and maintenance of the structure requires exchange of matter and energy with the surroundings.

All the structures that have previously been treated in physics and in chemistry belong to the class of "equilibrium structures"; that is, they could persist indefinitely in closed systems (regions separated from the rest of the universe by impermeable walls). In contrast, dissipative structures can only persist in open systems (that is, it is necessary for their existence that matter and energy be exchanged between the system and its surroundings). Such systems are called dissipative because their existence entails the generation of entropy (dissipation of energy). These dissipative systems are called structures because their existence involves generation and maintenance of both spatial and temporal order. Sequences of specific states repeatedly reoccur over large regions of space and long periods of time. In certain chemical cases, for instance, an initially homogeneous solution will spontaneously develop a discrete pattern of color. The pattern will be maintained for many minutes, but during that time it will undergo a regular and repetitive series of color changes. The origin of these dissipative structures is well understood. In the chemical cases certain patterns of interrelationships of catalytic (nonlinear) chemical reactions give rise to cooperative interaction of molecular species. This result gives rise to what is known as a "limit cycle." What this means is that, in favorable cases (suitable chemical composition of the system and of the surroundings), there is a closed set of states such that the existence of one brings about another, and then the successor states, so that the system eventually returns to a state which is the same as the starting state.³ (As James Joyce put it, "Finagin. ") Certain clearly specifiable sets of relationships can give rise to a sequence of states which recur in a regular (spatial and / or temporal) pattern. This is a kind of structure, but one which exists far from the equilibrium condition of zero rate of production of entropy. In fact, the existence of such structures depends on dissipation of energy. Prigogine has pointed out some of the general philosophical consequences of these scientific developments (EB 214).

Observing devices, either within the region of the dissipative structure or outside of it, may detect regular oscillations caused by variations of components of the structure, or, if their temporal or spatial resolving power is not high enough for that, they may detect only a new, averaged reading, corresponding to a novel state of affairs brought about by the closure of the set of relationships which defines the dissipative structure. That is, some percipients will interact with the system as a multiplicity, but for other percipients the system, as a whole, is the source of an effect. The closure of the network of catalytic processes has made a difference for the rest of the world. The unicity of the effect depends both on the closure intrinsic to the system and on the characteristics of the percipient. This is a type of transmutation related to, but in a sense more general than, the transmutation brought about in the case of Newton’s massy sphere. The dissipative structure manifests unitary efficacy only over time-periods that are significantly longer than the characteristic time-parameter of the structure (usually the period of a complex oscillation).

Networks of physical, chemical, or biological interactions can give rise to situations in which some (but not all) external observers perceive a unified source of effective action. This might be regarded as a kind of transmutation which, however, is highly dependent on the characteristics of the percipient entities. It should be noted that Whitehead’s identification of the epoch of a single human occasion as a fraction of a second depends on the response-time of neural networks. This is an example of the characteristics of a percipient being involved in the definition of an actuality (e.g., MT 220, AI 183).

Both the "principle of relativity" (PR 22) and the "reformed subjectivist principle" (PR 167) indicate that any conception of an actuality apart from its interrelations with other actualities, or apart from its satisfaction of subjective aim, would be high abstraction. As Felt points out, the problem is to show how epistemological and ontological aspects of particular actualities can be understood together. Whitehead once wrote (S 28): "Whenever the ‘all or none’ principle holds, we are in some way in with one actual entity, and not with a society of such entities, nor with the analysis of components contributory to one such entity." Subjective aim may be identified with the intrinsic ability of a system to set itself off from its surroundings.⁴ Dissipative structures in chemical and physical systems involve all-or-none closures of networks of relationships that, in turn, give rise to self-definition of discrete, organized regions, cut off from each other by regions of little or no order. Attainment of such organized states provides the basis for well-founded discriminations of unity.

This suggests that it would be coherent with contemporary science to regard an entity as one of the res verae if, and to the extent that, an all-or none closure of relationships provided a basis for discrimination of that entity as a unitary source of effective action. Each such case would involve a matching of spatial and temporal scales between the defining network of relationships (subjective aim?) and prehending capabilities of percipient actualities. It is clear that on this basis the related notions of elementary entities and of simple prehensions are idealizations. All prehensions are somehow transmuted, and all entities are somehow composite. The distinction between nexus and actuality is not univocal, but depends on the detailed nature of the interactions involved.⁵

This reading is more restrictive than Wallack’s version of Whitehead.⁶ It is less restrictive than the orthodox interpretation, which does seem to be the position at which Whitehead himself finally arrived. Adopting this interpretation would require major change in some aspects of process thought, but seems likely to permit additional development of great value. Whitehead had good reasons for adopting the final position that he did adopt, but there now seems to be reason to move beyond it. After all, "in philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly" (PR xiv).

References

BB -- Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980.

ENP -- F. Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1980.

Notes

1A nontechnical discussion of this point is included in B. Rajaraman’s article in Mesons in Nuclei, Vol. 1, M. Rho and D. H. Wilkinson, editors (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1979).

2 Quintillian, Inists. Orat. V. 10, 18.

3 An important characteristic of a true limit cycle is that there is a single sequence of states that is eventually reached no matter what (within wide limits) the starting state of the system. This has the consequence that if the system be driven, by some perturbation, into a state which lies off the cycle, it will return to the original sequence of states. Intrinsic capacity for self-restoration after disturbance is the defining characteristic of structures in general.

4 This concept is suggested by J. Burgers, Experience and Conceptual Activity (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1965), p. 69.

5 Unless this be true, either the first category of existence is not applicable, or some entities are elementary (noncomposite). Such entities are not identifiable among subatomic particles, among human persons, or elsewhere.

6 Justus Buchler has elaborated a ‘natural complex’ metaphysics which seems related to the interpretation Wallack favors (Metaphysics of Natural Complexes [New York Columbia University Press, 1966]). Ivor Leclerc has suggested a concept of how compound entities may function as "one substance," The present interpretation is consistent with, but somewhat more specific than, Leclerc’s proposal (The Nature of Physical Existence [New York: Humanities Press, 1972] esp. p. 311).

Capek: Their Incompatibility

In his article "Becoming: A Problem for Determinists?" (PS 6:237-48) J. Brenton Stearns raised some objections against the basic thesis of contemporary process philosophy according to which strict determinism, when consistently thought through, implies a complete elimination of becoming or, at best, a relegation of succession to the realm of appearances. The latter view, the so-called "mind-dependence of becoming," proposed by Donald Williams, A. Grünbaum, and J. J. Smart, is rejected by me; but I also reject the view that there is any incompatibility between the classical form of determinism (i.e., the strict predeterminination of the future) and the reality of becoming and/or succession. Stearns’s view is so much more interesting because he restates the process view rather accurately; he even seems to be attracted to it. He agrees with Bergson that any kind of spatialization of time eliminates effectively time itself, i.e., genuine succession. He writes explicitly: "I shall assume that the process thinkers are right in holding that an adequate metaphysics of time must recognize dynamic becoming in nature as well as in human consciousness. The question then is whether time as the process philosophers think of it is incompatible with causal determinism" (PS 6:238). This is precisely what he questions.

What are his arguments for the compatibility of classical determinism and genuine succession? He points out that "the law-like statements contain within them temporal succession, the concept of events taking place at different times." In other words, "the laws that sustain the predictions make use of the concept of temporal succession’ (PS 6:239).

He is certainly right on this point; nothing is more familiar than the notion of causally necessitated process gradually unfolding itself through time. But mere familiarity is not enough, for it does not answer the fundamental question: if the causal relation is identified with the relation of logical implication in which the premises imply the conclusion, is it possible to obtain any temporal sequence at all without surreptitiously borrowing it from experience? If the future is completely and in all its details determined now, what prevents it from being present? For the conclusion is contained, or rather pre-contained, in the premises. This is especially obvious in the classical syllogism when we symbolize the mode "barbara" by Venn’s diagrams: All S are M, all M are P; therefore, all S are P. It is obvious that the inclusion of the class S into the class P is simultaneous with two "previous" inclusions, that of S into M and M into P. There is not a trace of any succession; there is no temporal sequence at all -- except on the psychological level, in the mind of a student groping for the conclusion, not in the logical structure itself. This is a rather elementary example; but the same is true of any deductive reasoning, no matter how complex.

When a student writes a left side of the equation while leaving its right side blank, he knows very well that this blankness is only in his mind and that the result which he will obtain by a series of successive mental operations is as definite as the expression given on the left side. Unfortunately the expression "it follows" has two different meanings in nearly all languages. We say that the effect follows its cause and also that the conclusion follows from its premises; but while in the first case there is a genuine temporal sequence, there is no succession whatever in the latter case; yet, the false identification of these two very different meanings is the source of unceasing confusions. It began with Spinoza when he claimed that from the nature of God the things follow with the same necessity as from the nature of triangle the theorem about the sum of its internal angles: thus the successive causal action is assimilated to a timeless implicative pattern. But if it is so, then the question which process philosophers ask is only natural: "If the effect is precontained in its cause and, more generally, the future in the present, why is it not already here? It should be present; but it is not; why?"

Stearns answers, "because it is not; experience tells us that it is not." But this is precisely the point. In order to smuggle succession into the classical causal relation, we must borrow it from experience; for it cannot be obtained from the conceptual model itself. Let me repeat what I wrote some time ago:

Steams is aware of this difficulty, but he believes to escape it by his distinction between "definite" and "actual." These terms, according to him, are not synonymous; in other words, the events can be fully determined without being actual. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the entities can be fully determined before becoming concrete events.) This view is hardly tenable, as we shall see; but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, it does not help a classical determinist a bit. For such a view leads to the most grotesque bifurcation of reality which is much worse than that criticized so convincingly by Whitehead: on one side, the realm of timelessly valid propositions, including those referring to future events, while on the other side the temporal realm of nature and mind in which the timeless propositions are being gradually embodied. The same unanswered question crops up again: why is this diaphanous realm of ghostly timelessly valid propositions only gradually and step by step embodied into the series of successive events? Again, no answer is possible; for to say that "experience tells us so" means to concede again the impotence of the necessitarian scheme from which the notion of "gradual realization" cannot be obtained. Indeed, experience tells us so; but the conceptual model itself does not! Furthermore, experience tells us literally nothing about the diaphanous realm of fully determined entities waiting, so to speak, for their gradual embodiment; they are invented by our two-value logic whose applicability to the future events was questioned already by Aristotle. For him propositions referring to future events are neither true nor false, because their truth-value remains undecided prior to their actualization. Thus the difficult notion of fully determined, though nonactual, event is avoided.

Can such a notion be meaningful at all? What differentiates such events from actual events? Should we say that they are merely "possible"? But this is what a determinist denies, for he insists that these events are timelessly necessary, the alternative possibilities being eternally excluded. It would be thus inconsistent to regard the future necessary events as unrealized possibilities. In truth, a consistent determinist must deny the realm of genuine possibilities; the only dichotomy which he admits (besides the bifurcation mentioned above) is that between necessity and impossibility which he equates with the dichotomy between reality and unreality. Whatever is necessary is real, and whatever is impossible is unreal -- and vice versa; therefore, the future events, being necessary, must be somehow real, and if they do not appear so, it is due to our ignorance. This was the view of all truly consistent necessitarians such as Spinoza and Laplace. Time is thus reduced, in Bergson’s words, to a human incapacity to know everything at once.

Stearns, like many other empirically minded determinists, wants to have the future both fully determined and unreal; hence his difficult notion of a completely determined but nonactual event. But what then differentiates future determined events from those equally determined in the present? Nothing at all; as Charles Hartshorne says: "An absolutely definite but merely possible entity is a contradiction; for if the thing is definitely all there, there is definitely nothing which it can lack, not even ‘existence’" (BH 228). Classical determinists can take a refuge in the view that existence is not a predicate, but a mere positing in Kant’s sense. (Curiously, Stearns proposes the very opposite solution, but then finally gives it up.) Then such positing would provide a differentiating feature between two equally determined successive events -- one already existing, the other not yet in existence. But this would not explain why such positing is successive, i.e., taking place in time -- and we are back to the same unanswered question. Try as hard as you can, you cannot get rid of succession -- and succession means irreducible novelty, if it means anything at all.

Furthermore, the Kantian view presupposes the causal inefficacy of time, i.e., the view that time is merely a homogeneous container in which changes take place. Only thus would it be possible to have two qualitatively identical, i.e., fully determined, events whose only difference would be their "position in time." But this Newtonian view of time and space, as de jure empty homogeneous receptacles which are contingently filled up by concrete events, is given up by contemporary physics as I tried to show elsewhere; the space-time framework is now merged with its dynamical physical content. Moreover, the notion of the preexisting future events gradually entering into our consciousness has no physical basis whatever in the relativity theory, notwithstanding the repeated claims to the contrary.²

The indifference to contemporary physics is probably the most serious shortcoming of Stearns’s article. It is true that he discusses the problem of the relation of time to entropy; but after pointing out serious difficulties of the view which identifies "time direction" with entropy, he dismisses them with a simple declaration (PS 6:246). An even more important problem which he does not even mention at all concerns strict determinism as it appears in physics today. lie seems to be unaware of the growing cumulative evidence against it since 1927. Yet, to be aware of this evidence is the only way to confront what I would call argumentum ad familiaritatem, the argument based on familiarity, formulated by Ralph Barton Perry against Bergson long ago: what is more familiar to us than the experience of a physical process aging according to law? To use Perry’s own illustration: a simple mechanical movement of a particle whose future positions are completely and accurately predictable allegedly contradicts the assertion that succession and rigid necessity are incompatible (PPT 251f.).

I analyzed the superficial plausibility of Perry’s example before in pointing out that it is borrowed from the macroscopic realm which is for all practical purposes deterministic; the predictability of any macroscopic particle is only approximate and does not alter the basic contingencies of the elementary microphysical events of which a "particle" consists. Furthermore, on the microscopic level the very concept of localizable particle as well as the continuity of trajectory loses its meaning. Thus what appears to our macroscopic myopic perspective as a sharp and precise line is really a tube , although a very tenuous one; its transversal dimensions correspond to the quantic indeterminacies of its "positions." What appears to us as a predetermined "path of the future" is really the whole range of multiple possibilities which only in our inaccurate and simplifying macroscopic -- and macrochronic -- perspective shrinks to what it looks as an infinitely thin line of "the only possible future path." It is obvious that in dealing with subtle metaphysical questions, the "ordinary language," which is based exclusively on the limited macro-scopic experience, is thoroughly inadequate.

The previous analysis also takes care of Stearns’s criticism of the distinction between predictable and unpredictable aspects of reality (PS 6:243). This distinction is the very essence of statistical predictions according to which the predictability of the general trends is compatible with the unpredictability of individual events. While we can accurately anticipate that a future individual event will fall within a certain range of possible events, its complete specificity remains "undecided" until its own happening. The idea of complete specificity of a future individual event is, as Charles Hartshorne observed, a meaningless assemblage of words. Or, as Bergson said, it is a "retrospective illusion" based on the tendency of our imagination to project the actual present event into the past where it allegedly existed prior to its actualization as a "fully specified possibility" (!) (CM, part I).

This is not the place to discuss Stearns’s claim that if the future is unreal, so is the past. It only indicates his complete unawareness of what various process philosophers wrote about the status of the past, on the asymmetry of time, on the basic difference between "having existed" and "not yet existing," and on the intrinsic difference between memory and anticipation. Aristotle and St. Thomas were already clearly aware about the indestructibility of the past. It was such a nonmystical philosopher as Bertrand Russell who coined the term immortality of the past,"³ which Whitehead adopted and of which he made one of the cornerstones of his process philosophy. Moreover, the phenomenological analysis of our direct experience of time shows that the emergence of the present novelty and the retention of the past are two complementary aspects of one and the same process (BMP II.8). Not being aware of all this, Stearns wrongly assumes that the process philosopher advocates a completely miraculous indeterminism which would exclude any causal influence of the past. He concedes that he does not recall "A. N. Whitehead’s presenting the argument in the Bergson-Weiss form" (PS 6:243). Whitehead’s words may be different, but their meaning is the same:

This is certainly not different from William James’s claim that determinism implies the static "block universe" nor from Bergsons’s identical claim that in the universe of Spinoza and Laplace "everything is given" ("tout est donné").

The resistance to the central thesis of process philosophy is due to the entrenched traditional habits of thought as they were shaped by our limited macroscopic experience, classical physics, and the powerful Eleatic component of our intellectual tradition; hence the obstinate belief that the only alternative to classical mechanistic determinism is absolute miraculous indeterminism, negating any kind of mnemic influence of the past on the present. Such view, needless to say, has not been upheld by any process philosopher.

References

BH -- Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 3rd edition.

BMP -- Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, VII.

CM -- Henri Bergson, Creative Mind. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946.

PPT -- Ralph B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies. New York: Longmans, Green, 1916.

NOTES

1 "The Doctrine of Necessity Re-examined," The Review of Metaphysics, 5 (1951), 34; see also BMP 106-12.

2 M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand, 1969), passim; "Relativity and the Status of Becoming," Foundations of Physics 5 (1975), 607-17.

3 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic. (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1953), p. 59. See also my essay on "The Elusive Nature of the Past" in Experience, Existence, and the Good: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss, ed. by Irwin C. Lieb, (1961), pp.126-42.

Stearns: Their Compatibility

Milic Capek, eminent disciple of Bergson, supports my contention that indeterminism is the sine qua non of process metaphysics, or at least is thought to be so by the most able and inspiring process thinkers. We are told that if indeterminism is rejected the whole package must go. We would be left with the static bloc universe in which everything is given. I write not as a doctrinaire determinist but as a friend of process philosophy who thinks that many of the insights of process thought are logically independent of indeterminism and might well survive even if determinism should be true. I object to the idea that determinism is incompatible with a reflective belief in time as process, becoming, or genuine succession.

Yes, if causal determinism be true, then all true propositions about the future can be formulated as conclusions of deductive arguments in which the relevant causal laws and the initial conditions form the premises. Capek comments correctly that the conclusion "follows from" the premises in a timeless sense, that becoming cannot be derived from that deductive relationship. We must remember, however, that covering law explanations are abstractions from nature, and we must not expect every feature of nature to be derivable from them. We are familiar with the way in which temporal order can be given a spatial rendering with time lines and arrows. That is a similar abstraction from nature, and we cannot expect becoming to be derivable from it. We are familiar with the mistake of trying to force from these abstract models every feature of the world they are modeling. Because temporal order can be given a spatial mapping, we are led to think of a temporal dimension which is like a spatial dimension. We are encouraged further in this by our ability to transform observed spatial measurements into temporal measurements and vice versa as we seek to describe the facts as observable from various inertial frames of reference. We are thus tempted toward the "spatialization of time" in which time is regarded as having nothing but spatial characteristics.

I believe Capek would agree with me that mapping time spatially has its useful functions, but that this is an abstract rendering of time from which becoming cannot be derived. I maintain similarly that the deductive modeling of prediction is an abstraction from which there is no reason to expect becoming to be derivable. The fact that a timeless deductive model for rendering prediction cannot yield becoming must not be used as a proof for the thesis that the future cannot be deductively modeled in this fashion.

The Parmenidean mistake is one that Capek and I both seek to combat. Zeno asked that an infinitesimal analysis of space and time yield temporal becoming in its concreteness. But that was not possible, because the infinitesimal analysis came as the result of the application of the analytic intellect to space and time. The analysis did not capture the concreteness of what was being analyzed. Bergson himself exposed the Parmenidean mistake in this fashion in his treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes. The mistake was to assume that the mathematical rendering of some aspects of the facts ought deductively to yield the facts. If we abandon that assumption in the case of the issue at hand, we do not have to give up determinism simply because the pattern of argument in which a determinate future can be modeled does not yield becoming.

Capek charges me with a surreptitious appeal to experience to establish becoming. This charge seems to concede that belief in becoming does have empirical foundations, and I should think that would be strong foundation. We can make appeal to experiences of planning, frustration, hope, fulfillment, promise, disappointment, etc. We have no instance of being deceived in our belief that these are appropriate categories of thought for interpreting our experience. Becoming is given in experience, yes, and then we try to give a rational account of it. But concepts are timeless, propositions are timeless, and the rational relation between propositions is timeless. That is why there is a puzzle. That is why Augustine thought he knew what time is but had difficulty in saying what it is.

Is the determinist guilty of a bifurcation between logic and nature? Indeterminists had better take care in laying charges like this, since they wish to make some propositions about the future exceptions to the law of the excluded middle. I do not recommend bifurcations, simply the modest admission that a true account of some aspects of nature need not be expected to yield all truths. Why are timelessly true propositions gradually embodied? I would not say that the propositions are being embodied, Simply that the states of affairs they describe are gradually coming about. Anyway, it sounds almost like a theological question. Maybe not everything God wanted to make could be made at once. Perhaps God wanted to make a world suitable for moral beings where there should be planning, regret, consequences of action, praise, blame, etc. Maybe God wanted a causally contingent world, and temporality is a necessary feature of causal contingency. In any event, experience tells us that there is gradual unfolding of history.

In a deterministic world, are all true propositions logically necessary? If stated tenselessly, all true propositions about matters of fact are timelessly true. The events they describe could logically have been otherwise, although causally they could be only what they are They could not have been otherwise given their causal antecedents, and since the causal antecedents could not causally have been otherwise, there never were any open possibilities for the state of affairs in question other than the one which does in fact occur. Since only x is causally possible, x is causally necessary. If that is what is meant by saying that events in a deterministic world are necessary, I have no objection. Propositions which describe them are nevertheless logical contingencies, propositions which can be denied without contradiction.

I do not see how lam committed to the view that time is causally inefficacious. The hypothesis that an event is a space-time configuration or distortion is, I should think, compatible with the event’s being predictable. And I certainly do not accuse indeterministic process thinkers of holding that there is no causality whatsoever in the world.

But the crux of the matter lies in the challenge which Capek offers. What distinguishes the future nonactual event from the same event actual and present if they are equally determinate? Existence cannot be the differentiating characteristic, since existence is not a determining property. True enough, there is no difference between a possibility when not actualized and the identical possibility when actualized. And yet we distinguish possible worlds according to which possibilities are actualized. Genuine succession can then consist in the transition from one possible world to another one.

There is no difference in determinacy between the present and the past, or between the near past and the remote past. Yet the past differs from the present in that it is not actual (except in memory). In my article I showed that by reasoning like Capek’s we can show that there is no past even in the event that indeterminism is true. I will elaborate a bit more on this point. What are we to suppose that the past has lost since it was present? Is it existence that is lost? But existence is not a predicate, and so we must conclude that the past cannot have lost existence. The past event has exactly the same characteristics it had when it was present. Since the past is just as determinate as the present, it cannot have lost anything in becoming past. The argument we are examining requires us to say that the past cannot be past. We must say that whether we are determinists or indeterminists, since on both views the past maintains the determinacy of the present. Since Capek’s line of reasoning cuts against the indeterminist as well it provides no ground for rejecting determinism.

Certainly there remains the problem of saying in what the asymmetrical temporal ordering of events consists. Process thinkers should find attractive the idea that it consists in the asymmetrical internalization of one event into another. The asymmetricality of the relative past and the relative future would then have to do with the distinction between memory and anticipation. That has nothing to do with an order of becoming determinate. In becoming what is vaguely anticipated becomes vaguely remembered. That is a clear alternative to becoming determinate.

Capek might reply that if a proposition about my remembering in 1995 an event that happened to me in 1990 is true in 1985, then there is nothing holding us back from saying that the remembering in 1995 exists in 1985. Aristotle maintained that all actuality is determinate; Capek says in addition that all determinates are actual. Then, since memory is by hypothesis determinate in advance, memory cannot become, grow, or accumulate.

I answer that anticipation and memory essentially involve tensed expressions. Can we say that we anticipate that the Yankees (timelessly) win the World Series in 1985? Perhaps, but part of the sense of "anticipate" is that the event is regarded as in the future. Can we say that we remember that John F. Kennedy (tenselessly) dies from an assassin’s bullet? We would not be likely to speak that way, and in any case the sense of "remember" here contains the conviction that the event in question already happened. So in a deterministic world, "will be" expressions change from true to false, and "has already happened" expressions change from false to true. Process consists in that change and in the changes in nature which go with it. What then becomes? Memory becomes in the transition of facts from future to past. Memory must become; memory is not reconcilable with a bloc universe. It may not be determinate that my memory of my leaving home will be poignant and nostalgic, but the memory has not yet become since at the moment I still but vaguely anticipate my leaving home. Memory is compatible with determinism, and yet requires becoming, process, and genuine succession. That should be sufficient to prove that a determinist can be a process philosopher.

The God of classical theism is a being who is, in principle, ontologically independent from the world. In contrast, the God of process theism exists in an ontologically interdependent, reciprocal relationship with the world. The classical God creates ex nihilo; within process theism creation ex nihilo is denied. It should not be surprising, accordingly, that one of the chief areas of contention between these rival theisms centers on divine omnipotence. The process theist indicts the classical theist for proposing a view of divine omnipotence that makes the problem of evil unsolvable -- i.e., renders the notion of divine goodness incoherent. On the other hand, the classical theist indicts the process theist for "solving" the problem of evil by forfeiting a meaningful notion of divine omnipotence -- i.e., advocating a finite, imperfect deity who is not worthy of worship.

Our purpose in this paper will not be to defend either of the above indictments and thereby establish the conceptual superiority of either theistic option. We will attempt to show that neither indictment holds. In other words, we shall attempt to show that if one desires to pick between process theism and a coherent form of classical theism, one must do so on grounds other than the alleged adequacy or inadequacy of their respective views on divine omnipotence.

This will be accomplished by comparing two prominent advocates of these respective theisms: classical theist Alvin Plantinga and process theist David Griffin. We shall first set forth Plantinga’s classical defense for the problem of evil. Secondly, we shall critically examine Griffin’s critique of Plantinga. Finally, we shall critically analyze the relationship between a Plantingan theodicy and that affirmed by most other prominent classical theists.

I

Atheologians have long argued that theists cannot consistently affirm both of the following propositions:

One standard theistic response is to argue that the atheologian has to date not been able to produce a proposition (set of propositions) that is at least plausibly thought to be necessary and whose conjunction with (1) and (2) formally yields a contradiction (NN 165). But Plantinga has gone even further, arguing that it can in fact be shown that (1) and (2) are not inconsistent. To establish the latter, Plantinga informs us, the theist need only find a set of propositions consistent with (1) which, when conjoined with (1), entails (2) (NN 167). It is his contention that

are just such propositions -- i.e., it is his contention that (3) and (4) are consistent with (1) and together with (1) entail (2) (GFE 54).

The debatable issue, of course, is whether (1) is in fact consistent with (3). As Plantinga himself acknowledges, both theists -- e.g., Leibniz -- and nontheists -- e.g., Mackie -- maintain that

But if (5) is true, then it appears that God could have created a world inhabited by free creatures who perform moral good but no moral evil. For there is certainly nothing inconsistent in the idea of a given set of free creatures always freely choosing to do what is right -- i.e., it is surely possible that there exist a world containing perfectly virtuous, free persons. Moreover, the actualization of such a world certainly appears consistent with God’s goodness. In short, it appears that if (5) is true, (1) is inconsistent with (3).

Plantinga, of course, believes that he can demonstrate that (5) is false and (3) is consistent (possible). The essence of his argument against (5) can be summarized as follows:

1. In short, given (6) and (7), it is not within God’s power to create just any self-consistent (possible) state of affairs which is consistent with his goodness -- i.e., (5) is false. The nature of significant freedom dictates that God’s creative choices are limited by the decisions which he knows free creatures would make if created (NN 169-84).

But if (5) is false and (3) is possible, then (1) and (3) are in fact consistent. And since they jointly entail (2), his argument concludes, the atheologian’s claim has been successfully countered. Or, stated in other terms, Plantinga’s claim is that unless the atheologian can refute his "free-will defense" by establishing the truthfulness of (5) and thus the impossibility of (3), he can demonstrate no inconsistency between (1) and (2).

II

In his critique of "traditional" Christian theodicies in his book God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy David Griffin distinguishes between what he calls "I" omnipotence and "C" omnipotence. The proponent of "I" omnipotence, we are told, maintains that an omnipotent being can unilaterally affect any state of affairs, if that state of affairs is intrinsically possible," and, accordingly, must maintain that all evil is only apparent (nongenuine) (GPE 270). On the other hand, the proponent of "C" omnipotence maintains that it is not logically possible for God to unilaterally control the activities of self determining beings, even if such activities are intrinsically possible, and, accordingly, can acknowledge that genuine evil is possible (GPE 269f). It is Griffin’s contention that only a theism that entails "C" omnipotence is able to reconcile divine power and goodness with the genuineness of evil. On this basis Griffin argues for the superiority of process theism over traditional theism.

With this basic distinction between "I" and "C" omnipotence in mind, let us analyze what Griffin has to say about Plantinga’s position. In the context of talking about the exact nature of the logical problem of evil, Griffin states the following:

But to claim that Plantinga’s position does not recognize the existence of genuine evil is misleading.

Genuine evil, as defined by both Mackie and Griffin, is that evil which is not necessary for bringing about some greater good or avoiding some greater evil -- i.e., is an event "without which the universe would have been a better place, all things considered" (GPE 253). Now if God can create any possible world -- i.e., if one affirms "I" omnipotence -- then it seems clearly to follow that no evil state of affairs in the actual world is genuine. For, if God can actualize any intrinsically possible world and is wholly good, the actual world must be considered the best of all possible worlds. And since all parties agree that there are intrinsically possible worlds containing no evil at all, every instance of evil in the actual world must be seen as a necessary, desired aspect of God’s perfect plan.

But Plantinga, of course, does not affirm "I" omnipotence. He clearly argues that God’s creative options are limited by human freedom and, accordingly, that the actual world may not be the best of all possible worlds. It is simply false, therefore, to claim that Plantinga must view all evils in the actual world as necessary for bringing about some greater good or avoiding some greater evil. He need not, for example, acknowledge that all of Hitler’s actions are necessary conditions for greater goods. Such evils, for Plantinga, can be viewed as events which God did not desire but could not have prohibited without violating Hitler’s freedom. Plantinga need only acknowledge that the possible world containing Hitler’s actions -- i.e., the actual world -- contains the greatest net amount of good over evil of any possible world containing free moral agents which God was free to actualize.

In short, Plantinga’s response to Mackie is clearly not that evil is compatible with benevolent omnipotence because all evil is nongenuine. He clearly argues that it is genuine evil (as defined by Mackie and Griffin) which need not be seen as incompatible with a wholly good, omnipotent God.

Surprisingly, at a later point in the text, Griffin himself acknowledges this fact.

What then is Griffin’s real problem with Plantinga? The real complaint, we finally learn, is that "Plantinga evidently affirms the logic of I omnipotence in general, and applies the doctrine of C omnipotence only in relation to human beings" (GPE 271). That is, while Griffin acknowledges that Plantinga affirms limitations on God’s power in relation to possible worlds containing free human beings, he believes Plantinga to hold "that an actual world devoid of beings with some power of self-determination would be possible" and thus that God could have created a world containing no evil simply by creating a world containing no self-determined beings (GPE 271). It is Griffin’s contention, on the other hand, that "any actual world would contain self-determining entities" and that "extending the doctrine of C omnipotence to any world has important advantages" (GPE 271).

Griffin’s own contention is an interesting one, but before discussing it, it is important that we clarify his criticism of Plantinga’s position. It is exceedingly confusing to say that "Plantinga holds to I omnipotence in general" while applying "C" omnipotence in a selective manner. For "I" omnipotence, as it is first defined by Griffin, is a universal statement, and universal statements obviously admit of no exception. It seems, accordingly, that Griffin may be fluctuating between two readings of "I" omnipotence in his discussion.

I₁ is the more obvious reading of "I" omnipotence. It is the one which is affirmed by classical theists such as Leibniz and is the reading upon which both Mackie and Griffin predicate their criticisms of traditional theodicies. But, as Griffin himself acknowledges, I₁ is explicitly denied by Plantinga. Plantinga, however does affirm I₂, in that he does believe that God could have unilaterally "brought about" a world containing no evil if he had chosen not to create at all or to actualize a possible world containing no self-determining individuals other than himself. This distinction is crucial, for if it is not seen, it can appear that Plantinga can be lumped together with most other classical theists with respect to his views on God’s omnipotence. It should now be clear that such is not the case. Plantinga’s view of omnipotence in fact is much more compatible with Griffin’s than it is with Leibniz’s. For Plantinga, in agreement with Griffin, strongly differs with Leibniz (and most other classical theists) on the fundamental question of whether freedom necessarily limits God’s power -- i.e., Plantinga, like Griffin, denies D₁. They differ only on the question of which entities ought to be considered "self-determined."

This clarification also allows us to analyze more clearly Griffin’s claim that Plantinga commits the "omnipotence fallacy." The omnipotence fallacy, Griffin tells us, is committed by those people who believe that since

The argument is fallacious, we are told, because it is based upon the implicit, but false, assumption that

Plantinga does affirm (14). But he just as clearly rejects (15), and thus (12), and hence he cannot be justly accused of committing the omnipotence fallacy. His affirmation of (14), as we have seen, is based on his belief that

This brings us then to the real point of disagreement between Plantinga and Griffin: the question of whether every actual world must necessarily contain self-determining entities and hence whether an omnipotent being can unilaterally bring about any world devoid of genuine evil. In short, the real distinction between Griffin and Plantinga comes down to a disagreement over (16). Plantinga affirms it while Griffin does not.

What has been shown thus far is that Plantinga, working within the premises of classical theism, is able to develop a notion of "C" omnipotence and hence affirm the genuineness of evil. If the ability to do this is necessary for a viable theodicy as Griffin implies, it would seem to follow that it is in fact possible to answer the problem of evil within classical limits -- i.e., without having to resort to Griffin’s process conceptuality.

However, Griffin is not willing to settle for this conclusion.

In Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition Griffin and John Cobb explain why they believe a ‘free-will defense’ which does not include the denial of (16), and thus the denial of (14), is less adequate than their own.

Process theology, we are told, circumvents this problem because the relationship between freedom and value is necessary and not contingent.

Such argumentation, however, is not totally convincing. First the claim that "if it is not necessary that there be finite actualities . . . it makes no sense to talk about necessary principles governing their mutual relations and therefore limiting what God can do with them" is questionable in relation to Plantinga’s position. Plantinga does believe that God has the power to create or not create finite, self-determining entities, but he strongly denies that the relationship between finite, self-determining entities and God’s control over them is, therefore, not a necessary one. In fact, such a denial -- premise (6) in our discussion of his views -- is the basis for his free-will defense. And there seems no reason to deny that the concept of such hypothetical necessity is intelligible.

Second, and more importantly, the Plantingan might well question the claim that "if it were possible to have creatures who could enjoy all the same values which we human beings enjoy, except that they would not really be free, should not God have brought into existence such creatures instead?" To say that a state of affairs (5) is valuable for a person (P) generally means one of two things:

Moreover, the claim that robots and humans can enjoy the same values in relation to freedom is, of course, only meaningful if ‘value’ is read in terms of (18), for since in a world of robots there would be no actual freedom, there would in terms of (17) be no real value for the robot to experience.

But it is surely questionable whether the Plantingan need accept this concept of ‘value’. First, it is by no means obvious that process theists themselves normally discuss the value of freedom in terms of (18). More importantly, however, the claim that (18) is superior to (17) in the context of human freedom raises the serious question of divine deception. Could a wholly good God totally and continually deceive individuals with respect to the true nature of their supposed self-determination, even if it were for their own good? It might well be that God could not -- that the creation of truly free entities was the only way God could create the potential for the positive values related to freedom without negating God’s own integrity and destroying the dignity and true worth of the moral agents in question (RS 500-02).

The process theologian cannot respond by asking whether the creation of truly free individuals by the Plantingan God was worth the risk, given the potential for evil involved. For as Griffin and Cobb are forced to admit, the same basic question can be asked of the process God. "Hence, the question as to whether God is indictable for the world’s evils reduces to the question as to whether the positive values enjoyed by the higher forms of actuality are worth the risk of negative values, the sufferings" (PTE 75).

In God, Power and Evil, Griffin mentions two more criticisms of a free-will defense which affirms (16) and thus (14). He first argues that

This criticism has an initial ring of plausibility, for it is easy, from our human perspective, to identify times when we believe God could have profitably violated human freedom for the sake of humankind-e.g., in relation to some of Hitler’s actions. But such plausibility may be deceiving. First, Griffin himself acknowledges that the Plantingan can only allow the occasional violation of human freedom, and there is no way for us to know to what extent God has profitably violated human freedom already. Secondly, although it is easy from our perspective to identify, in isolation, certain ‘free choices’ which we believe should have been vetoed by a Plantingan God, what must actually be demonstrated to make Griffin’s contention a strong one is that the entire world system (the different possible world) of which such a violation would be a part would in fact result in a significant increase in the net amount of good in comparison to the actual world. But it is difficult to see how this could be established in any objective sense. Then, finally, Griffin’s criticism has a questionable ‘utilitarian’ ring to it. It may well be the case that God so respects the ‘humanity’ of each particular individual that he will seldom, if ever, override those decisions which are significant in an individual’s own life history, even if the actualization of such decisions will negatively affect large numbers of people. Or, to generalize this point, it may well be that God’s respect for humanity severely limits the use of his power to violate the freedom of individuals.

In short, it appears that this criticism has more psychological appeal than logical or evidential support.

Griffin’s other criticism is related to natural evil: "making C omnipotence a contingent matter, and limiting its scope to human existence, means that the problem of evil in the subhuman world must be treated in terms of some other principle, and none of these has proved satisfactory" (GPE 272).

Griffin realizes that natural evil presents no consistency problem for Plantinga.

In other words, Griffin’s argument is that process theology presents a much more plausible explanation for natural evil than can classical theism.

It is true, of course, that by appealing to the freedom of Satan and his cohorts to explain natural evil, Plantinga himself, has adopted a defensive, seemingly ad hoc manner of preserving the consistency of his position. But it must be recognized that one who adopts a Plantingan free-will position need not necessarily respond in this manner.

It can be plausibly argued that while it might appear that Plantinga’s free-will defense is only relevant to moral evil, it actually has significant, necessary ramifications for how God’s power can be conceived in relation to nature. F. R. Tennant, has argued, for example that

In other words, it can be argued that every possible world containing free moral agents must be a world characterized by regularity. If this is so, however, there is a definite sense in which God’s power even in nature must be seen as limited in such worlds. God cannot unilaterally bring it about that events in nature be perfectly correlated with the needs of specific humans. To achieve such a correlation would necessitate a myriad of special interventions by God in nature, and this would conflict with the necessity for regularity in nature which is in turn necessary, given God’s intention to create free, moral creatures. In other words, God’s activity in nature in a moral universe must be characterized by general providence (regular activity) as opposed to special providence (miracle).

The upshot of this is clear. The classical theist can (and must) develop a notion of "C" omnipotence in regard to divine power in nature.

The door is thus opened for the classical theist to affirm the genuineness of nonmoral evil as the evil clashes between nature and human aspirations need not be acknowledged as willed by God by the classical theist who consistently draws out the implications of the free-will defense for the natural order.

It can be argued, however, that to minimize the miraculous and thereby conclude that what occurs in nature in relation to particular persons cannot be controlled by God alleviates the problem of natural evil only up to a point. Another dimension of the problem remains unexplained. It is one thing to appeal to nature’s regularities to explain why God cannot control how nature will affect particular persons, but it is another thing to explain why God created the kind of regular system we experience. We can admit the need for a uniform system of natural laws, but why must this system contain horrifying, seemingly gratuitous evils -- e.g., tornadoes, earthquakes, cancer, etc.?

In response, the classical theist can argue that the recognition of the law-abiding, determinate character of nature also explains why our natural order, even though created by a wholly good and powerful God, might not represent the ideal state of affairs.

If nature is a determinate, law-abiding system, it follows that we cannot have the benefits of this determinate order without the unbeneficial by-products which logically follow from this very order. For example,

In short, beneficial aspects of the very determinate natural order that make human life possible can be seen as implying, as unavoidable by-products, aspects not beneficial to human life. The good cannot be obtained without the bad because they both flow from the same natural order. Consequently, to do away with all natural evils implies doing away with the very aspects that make life as we know it possible.

Given the above analysis, nonmoral evils do not have to be seen as incompatible with the goodness of the classical God. If the very natural order that makes life possible logically implies evil, God cannot be blamed for the presence of these evils.

In other words, there is a meaningful sense in which the classical God does not directly will nonmoral evils. Nonmoral evils exist as unwanted, though unavoidable, by-products of an otherwise good natural order. They are, therefore, genuinely evil both from the human and divine perspectives. The only reason God does not prevent them is because preventing them would entail preventing the very determinate natural order that makes life possible.

The process theologian, however, may well remain unconvinced. It is one thing to grant that a moral world must contain natural regularities and that some nonmoral evil is an unavoidable by-product of such regularities, but quite another thing to grant that we must have the exact types and amount of natural evil which we in fact experience in the actual world. It seems possible to conceive of a natural order which, like ours, would make moral and rational life possible, but, unlike ours, would not contain features so alien and frustrating to the purposes of the very moral activity it supposedly makes possible. Moreover, if we can conceive of a natural order that would make moral activity possible without generating an excess of evil features, why did not the classical God create such a world? In other words, it appears that God, by actualizing another world containing a less hostile natural order could have increased the net amount of good in the actual world without damaging the integrity of human freedom.

The prima facie plausibility of this contention, however, is also deceiving. It is certainly possible to identify aspects of the present natural order which it seems could be profitably removed. It might appear, for example, that a world in which no tornadoes occurred or no cancerous cells developed would be superior to ours. But this is by no means a settled question. We are not simply dealing with isolated features within nature but with a whole determinate system. To make adjustments at one point will have effects elsewhere. Consequently, to dismiss verbally unwanted aspects of our present natural order will not do. One must rather conceive of another entire determinate natural order which would neither imply the present evils, nor imply any similar or new evils, but still imply the goods that make human life possible. But this is certainly no easy task, at least for a finite mind. Moreover, with each advance in our scientific knowledge, the difficulty of this task becomes more apparent. "The more we know about the structure and interconnectedness of the physical universe, the less easily can we imagine alternative universes which retain the good features, but lack the bad" (ESR 73, cf. PRT 187).

In short, if those dissatisfied with the classical account of nonmoral evil currently under discussion are not able to present a better world, "the (classical) theist does not have to show that it was impossible for God to create a better set of world-constituents or natural laws, or even that this is the best of all possible worlds" (IPQ 179-98).

The critic, then, is left only with the claim that the nonmoral evils might not be justifiable in that there might be a better conceivable order. But unless some alternative system is presented, this remains only a possibility. Consequently, it is not clear that the classical approach in question is weak or less adequate than the process approach. Both present internally consistent and possible explanations which can, in principle, account for the presence of nonmoral evil and, most importantly, do not deny the reality of nonmoral evil or the goodness of God in the process.

The process theologian may, of course, think that this type of ‘explanation’ has little more plausibility than Plantinga’s reference to "Satan and his cohorts" in that it also only offers another unilluminating, defensive hypothesis. The differences are, however, quite significant. Plantinga, in positing "Satan and his cohorts" as the ‘explanation’ for nonmoral evil is admittedly only attempting to defend the consistency of belief both in God and nonmoral evil. He is in no way claiming that there exists any good reason to believe Satan is the cause for evil or even that Satan exists. The classical response to nonmoral evil we have been discussing begins by affirming "C" omnipotence in relation to humans and then argues that there do exist good reasons to believe that such a moral world would include instances of genuine nonmoral evil and plausible reasons for assuming that such a world would have the types and amount of genuine nonmoral evil we presently experience. In short, the classical theodicy we have been discussing is not simply defensive.

III

In the above we have shown that it is possible for the classical theist to develop the notion of "C" omnipotence in regard to God’s relationship to both humans and nature. Consequently, we have offered a defense for classical theism against the stock indictment posed by the process theist. Classical theism, we believe, can affirm the genuineness of evil and reconcile this with God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence. In this sense the above argument can be interpreted as an argument for the coherence of classical theism.

However, this is not the only conclusion to be drawn. The above defense of classical theism has undermined the stock indictment many classical theists direct against process theism: the belief that the classical theist affirms a more powerful, worshipful God. Process theism is seen as deficient inasmuch as it offers a God who is in comparison clearly not the greatest conceivable being. The basic reason for this feeling of superiority is the fact that most influential classical theists -- e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin -- have affirmed "I" omnipotence.

However, our discussion and defense of Plantinga has shown that, when worked out coherently, the classical theist must affirm a notion of omnipotence practically identical to that of the process theist -- i.e., our discussion demonstrates that the classical theist must, like the process theist, acknowledge that human freedom places necessary limits upon God’s power in both the moral and natural realms.

In other words, our discussion has shown that even when starting with classical premises one still ends up with process-like conclusions concerning divine power. The power of the process deity is thus not deficient, for there is not a coherent alternative to which the process deity falls short. Consequently, our argument can just as easily be seen as a defense of process theism.

Unfortunately, Plantinga, himself, has not explicitly acknowledged the fact that his analysis of the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom is basically an attack upon, not a defense of, the view of omnipotence that most classical theists seem to hold; moreover, many such classical theists seem not yet to have perceived this tension for themselves. Hopefully, discussions such as ours will help rectify this problem.

References

ESR -- Brian Hebblethwaite. Evil, Suffering and Religion. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1976.

GFE -- Alvin Plantinga. God, Freedom and Evil. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.

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

IPQ -- Bruce Reichenbach. "Natural Evils and Natural Laws: A Theodicy for Natural Evils," International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (June, 1976), 179-98.

NN -- Alvin Plantinga. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

PT -- F. R. Tennant. Philosophical Theology, vol. 2. Cambridge: The University Press, 1929.

PRT -- Ninian Smart. Philosophers and Religious Truth. London: SCM Press, 1964.

PTE -- David Griffin and John Cobb. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976.

RS -- David Basinger. "Human Freedom and Divine Providence: Some New Thoughts on an Old Problem," Religious Studies 15 (December, 1979), 491-510.

Hartshorne:

I begin by acknowledging the considerable merits of Professor Neville’s book. His discussion of my philosophy in particular is well written, reasonably fair and accurate, and in some parts generous. I thank him for these qualities. One admires the ingenuity and flexibility of his thinking.

Some disagreements among philosophers concern little more than the choice of points to emphasize. Thus I find acceptable what Neville says about moral continuity in an individual’s career; but my lack of emphasis on the moral aspect of self-identity or continuity, in contrast to the identity or continuity with others, has led my critic to suppose that I deny the self-identity aspect. My essential contention against substance theories is that the self-identity is abstract compared to the concreteness of the momentary actualities, and my critic’s agreement with this, qualified by a "perhaps," suggests that we differ here only in emphasis. I am pleased to learn about the seven features of my thinking with which Neville largely agrees (p. 49-54).

We do disagree about "perishing." I hold that the satisfaction contains its process of becoming ("the being cannot be abstracted from the becoming"), so that to prehend a past satisfaction is to prehend the becoming, the subjective immediacy itself, of the past actuality. The past presentness, the past becoming (which did not prehend itself, it simply was itself) is now prehended. And I see Neville’s and others’ arguments against this as verbal confusions. Prehending is retrospective, and past process is what is given. Nothing is lost, with the qualification that all nondivine prehending is more or less indistinct (Whitehead’s "negative prehensions") so that, except for God, much of the past is dismissed as irrelevant and in this sense is indeed lost. But not for God, by whose adequate prehending actualities "live forevermore."

Neville thinks that even God has negative prehensions. But then Whitehead’s version of omniscience ("the truth itself is how all things are together in the Consequent Nature") must be given up, or else there must have been aspects of the past about which there is no truth. The idea of the past losing some of its quality (as in George Herbert Mead’s philosophy) seems acutely paradoxical. It is the past which must conform to the "excluded middle": such and such did happen or it did not happen. If it did happen, the "it" is still definite. If the immediacy was simply indefinite, then the loss of this negation is no definite loss.

That all the past is preserved in God does not mean that "no evil lasts forever." My critic here seems to forget that I believe, as Whitehead and Berdyaev did, in a suffering God. 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, better for God, who has "lost" something, not in the sense of first having and then not having it, but in the sense of not acquiring a value God could have had. The divine suffering is still there. Existence is partly tragic, even for God.

Neville’s reasoning that God, being infinitely resourceful, must be able to persuade us to do exactly what God’s initial aim for us calls for, so that we are not free after all, assumes that the initial aim is as determinate as the final aim. But the final aim is the actuality itself. I say that the initial aim is only an abstract suggestion, an outline or sketch. God does not want us to merely duplicate the initial aim. The idea is meaningless or contradictory.

That metaphysical principles are in my view a priori (pp. 70-74) is correct, though this seems contradicted by what is said elsewhere (p. 46). Correctly formulated, the principles make sense; otherwise, they are more or less subtly incoherent or hopelessly vague. But since experience is pervasively, though in varying degrees, indistinct, and language is no absolute means of thinking clearly, we have only a fallible power of judging the coherence and clarity of our formulations. I grant that experience can "corroborate theological claims" if these are properly formulated. But I follow Popper in classing as a priori all statements such that no observation could disconfirm or falsify them. Whitehead’s category of the ultimate could not conceivably be falsified by any experiences. Neither could Neville’s idea of a creation of form by the wholly form less; but then it could not, so far as I see, be corroborated by any experience either. So how do we know what we are talking about with such a formula?

Concerning the necessity that worldly and divine prehending must ever continue to produce new actualities, I agree with Whitehead that it is part of the meaning of "event" to be destined to be prehended by subsequent events, this destiny constituting the very ‘being" of the event. Creativity as ultimate connotes this. I try to defend the view by putting the question, "What could make an event the last event?" I see no internal character of the event that could do this. (Some "black hole" enthusiast might dispute this.) Would there be mere nothingness "after" the event? I hold a general theory that mere unqualified "nothing" fails to make sense and could not make any statement true. Bergson in Creative Evolution makes this point neatly. All truths have some positive aspect, as Plato saw. The question, ‘Why is there not nothing?" is ill-formed. The alternative to something is something else, not absolute nothing.

I grant to Plato and Neville that there are eternal norms or ideals, and I have no quarrel with Plato’s Good as more than mere being. There is an eternal divine purpose. My difficulty with "eternal objects" is that I think the purely eternal is too abstract or indefinite to include a particular hue and shade of color or other definite quality of feeling. I also think there are emergent as well as eternal norms and universals. On this issue I am a Peircean.

Neville’s dictum that "determinate complexity" requires an explanation, so that only the wholly indeterminate is ultimate and uncreated, I find subtly ambiguous. The whole numbers are definite, and in that sense determinate, but are they created? Any particular pair of things has been created; but it is another question whether pairedness has been created. My view is that there have always been pairs and could not be. Contingency is not in definite complexity but in particular complexity, like the complexity and determinateness of two apples. The most abstract definiteness or complexity I regard as necessary, for contingency just is the freedom of creativity to produce this or that instead. But the abstract essence of creativity as such, well characterized by Whitehead, is not produceable. It eternally is. It is determinate in its extremely abstract definiteness but is not determinate in the sense of having been de novo determined. God, the eternal abstractor, necessarily and always envisages it as an aspect of any and every concrete actuality. It has not been determined in the sense of having been made but is the identity of making as such. Experience in the generic sense as creative synthesizing of antecedent instances of itself is the implicit or explicit subject matter of all thought that understands itself.

Theistic proofs are cogent only for those who find their conclusion credible. If not they will reject the premises or the mode of inference. For me it is credible that creativity, just in itself, has a necessary duality of unsurpassable and surpassable forms. This duality is the supreme contrast. Implicitly, usually without distinct consciousness of this, any instance of the surpassable or nondivine kind of experiencing refers to the unsurpassable or divine kind, which I hold is eternally individual as well as universal and which is the measure of all else than itself. Not mere creativity, but divine-nondivine creativity, is what guarantees the ongoing of the creative advance. It carries its own eternal norm and necessity in itself.

"The abstract is in the concrete" means not only that a painful experience instances pain, but that an unrealized purpose is real if some actuality does so purpose or intend. Universals express similarities of concrete realities, but they are also entertained as ideas or ideals. Over and above all the actualities, with their qualities, purposes, and ideas, there need be nothing further. "The concrete and the abstract" is no more than the concrete as exemplifying, experiencing, intending, abstracting, the abstract.

Similarly, "God and the world" is no more than God as prehending the world. The inclusive reality is the worshipful reality. This is Whitehead’s idea as I interpret it, although I emphasize more than he did the divine inclusiveness. The problem of the unity of the divine personal society is for me the most difficult one. A wholly simple, formless deity presents a very different but not necessarily less formidable problem.

A Jewish hymn contains the lines:

One could read a similar idea into the Buddhist notion of sunyata or emptiness. This is the attempt to make the wholly abstract yield the concrete, the less produce the more. Creativity as envisaged in process philosophy is the passage from an actuality to a greater and, in a sense, more richly concrete actuality; however, the description of this transition involves a kind of complexity that is not an empirical or particular complexity but the a priori, utterly general or abstract complexity, complexity as such, one might say. To abstract even from that is indeed to arrive at the empty. Is this emptiness the worshipful reality? Merleau-Ponty writes about a "negative philosophy," analogous to the negative theology, to characterize the mysterious ground or source of subject and object. It is not positively describable. A related idea is that of Karl Jaspers’ "the encompassing." My position is that subjects as such explain their own relation to objects (Whitehead’s "feeling of feeling") and need no more ultimate ground. Subjects encompass objects. Similarly the complexity of subjectivity as free synthesis of previous instances of such synthesizing explains everything, including itself, since it is the principle of subjectivity whose concrete objects are also subjects, the rest being abstractions from and by subjects.

According to a Japanese Buddhist friend, the foregoing view is too dualistic; according to Neville, it is not dualistic enough. There is too little contrast. According to my agile-minded critic the contrast between preservation and final loss is missing. But then on his view many contrasts are finally lost, as their terms drop out of perception or memory. I admit that there are contrasts between (relative) order and (relative) disorder, but what absolute disorder can be I do not know. There is an optimal ordering in the divine synthesizing of the creatures. I do not reject the contrast between joy and sorrow, even as valid for God. As Whitehead declares, "the attribution of mere happiness to God is a profanation," a magnificent saying to be taken together with, "God is the fellow sufferer who understands." The cross symbolizes an ultimate aspect of existence. Universal creaturely freedom means risk of frustration, suffering, in which God, the ideal Sensitivity, ever after fully participates.

The idea of our freedom being identical with God’s freedom recalls Royce’s view that our volitions are simply our share of the Absolute Will’s volitions. God decides how we and he suffer, which I find both sadistic and masochistic.

I interpret the book of Job differently from Neville. Job has not made a world and was not there when the world was made, so he is not entitled to make the inference from the occurrence of an evil to the conclusion that God has deliberately chosen that evil. "Omnipotence is too problematic a notion to serve as premise of argument. I take Whitehead and Peirce, preceded by Cournot and Boutroux, to have come closer to giving us a viable concept of divine creating than anyone had in the time of the writing of Job. God makes possible, but does not determine, the decisions of creatures. God does decide the kind of laws that are to obtain in a cosmic epoch. Not the Primordial but the Consequent Nature does this, for the laws are contingent and noneternal.

Another way to put the main issue is the old one of the analogical nature of theological concepts. Divine prehending and being prehended, and hence being influenced and influencing, are analogous to ordinary prehending and being prehended, and so have a meaning from experience; but sheer formless ground of formed actualities seems to break any analogy available from experience.

The issue is subtle and Neville is to be congratulated for having focused upon it so sharply.

Cobb:

Robert Neville’s book is indeed what its subtitle states, a challenge to process theology. The challenge is sensitive, informed, and serious. It is consciously directed toward process theology from a perspective that is quite different and fully self-conscious. Neville’s evaluation of the importance of process theology and the continuing contribution of process cosmology is generous. My first and last words to Neville are words of appreciation. In between, of course, there will be’ criticism.

Neville’s basic thesis is that whereas Whitehead’s cosmology is of great and continuing value, his doctrine of God, and those of process theologians influenced by him, "cannot be sustained in critical scrutiny" (p. 146). Nevertheless, his concluding sentence is: "The philosophical cosmology of which process theology is a part is a rich enough matrix to nurture other and perhaps more viable conceptions of God" (ibid.). My disagreement with Neville here is moderate. I agree that neither Whitehead nor any one else in this tradition has provided a problem-free doctrine of God. Despite many points at which I cannot accept Neville’s formulations, I find much to accept in his criticisms both of Ford’s theories of genetic succession and of Hartshorne’s societal view of God (which I followed in A Christian Natural Theology [Westminster, 1965]). I agree that Whitehead’s philosophical cosmology is a rich enough matrix to nurture other and more viable conceptions.

The disagreements are nevertheless important. For me the recognition that no extant process formulation is free from difficulties calls for continued reflection within the tradition of process theism. For Neville it supports a position which has other roots. Neville implies that this quite different doctrine has fewer conceptual problems, and there, too, I disagree. But these disagreements would be difficult to adjudicate. Two other disagreements are more important.

First, we disagree about the importance of a conceptually perfected doctrine. The lack of such a doctrine in the process tradition would distress me if other traditions had achieved such doctrines. But I know of no doctrine of God in any tradition that is not beset with problems, and I am impressed by the ability of process theology to deal more adequately than others do with many of these problems. The lack of a perfected doctrine of God in any tradition would distress me if I found a perfected account of reality in some atheistic tradition. But on the whole I find the study of atheism quite reassuring as to the advantages of theism. I might still find the lack of a fully consistent doctrine of God distressing if I thought that this lack distinguished reflection about God from reflection on other topics. But I find no fully consistent doctrine of human beings, of subatomic particles, of evolution, of economics, or of the status of mathematical objects. The lack of satisfactory theories in these areas does not lead me to total skepticism. On the contrary, some theories seem sufficiently strong to give appropriate guidance to life or thought. I see doctrines about God in the same way.

The question about process theism for me, then, is not whether it is problem free but whether it is sufficiently cogent and fruitful to warrant continuing work within this tradition. Although we will never solve all conceptual problems, we may work past some of those that are now most troublesome. My own judgment, informed by Marjorie Suchocki, is that we need to reflect more radically on the undeveloped insights of Whitehead about the profound difference between the one nontemporal actual entity which originates conceptually and the many temporal actual occasions which originate physically. The process of weaving physical feelings upon the matrix of conceptual feelings is surely quite different from the genetic phases of conceptual supplementation of initially physical feelings. Despite the dictum that God is not an exception to metaphysical principles, we can not apply to such an everlasting process in the divine life the speculative account of concrescence applicable to temporal occasions. In some respects the everlasting concrescence of God must resemble temporal succession as well as genetic succession, and in some respects it must be profoundly different from both. How far speculations about this unique divine process can take us toward conceptual clarity, and how far, if they did, this would indicate their accuracy, I do not know. It seems to me unlikely that human thinking is well adapted to understanding the inner life of God.

Much more important to me than the question as to whether God can at once establish and exemplify the metaphysical principles are questions about how God is related to the world. For now I will leave it to others to argue about the strictly metaphysical issues, but I cannot forbear to enter the argument where Neville’s formulations of Whitehead’s position undercut what seem to me matters of much greater importance for process theology. I will limit myself to two points dealing specifically with Whitehead’s view of God’s relation to the world, trusting that others will respond to the criticisms of Ford, Hartshorne, Ogden, and Winquist.

Neville thinks that in Whitehead’s doctrine God limits human freedom (p. 9). To me it is of utmost theological importance to think of God as the giver, the creator, of human freedom. I have learned how that is so from Whitehead, although some of Whitehead’s formulations and some formulations by Whiteheadians can lead to the disastrous impression on which Neville builds his case against Whitehead.

My Whiteheadian understanding of the relation of God and freedom is a response to the question, "How is freedom possible at all?" The dominant response in the ordinary language and analytic literature is that, in any radical sense, freedom is not possible. There are hard determinists and there are soft determinists and there are even some indeterminists, but there is very little that supports the Christian view of radical personal responsibility. The reason, I think, is that it is generally assumed that insofar as what happens now can be explained at all, it must be explained in terms of what has happened previously. If it is not so explained, it is simply random.

The alternative to this, provided by Whitehead, is that an occasion is affected not only by the causal efficacy of the past but also by the lure of relevant possibilities. This lure enables it to become something more than the determined outcome of the past. Further, the possibilities are not random but ordered in terms of degrees to which an occasion may appropriately transcend its given situation. One is not merely given an abstractly open future but also invited to realize that possibility which will be best both for the immediate present and for the relevant future. The occasion is thus called to decide. The decision may be self-damning or heroically responsive. It is usually somewhere in between. Without that call there would be no free decision, for there would be nothing to decide about. I find this view quite different from both Neville’s own proposal and his caricature of Whitehead. I find it much more fruitful for continuing reflection about grace, freedom, and sin then either.

A second point of interpretation of Whitehead’s understanding of God’s relation to the world has to do with the intimacy of this relation (p. 18 and passim). Neville insists that for Whitehead this relation is fundamentally external and objective, failing to do justice to the religious need for intimacy. I agree that there is a religious need for intimacy, and I believe that clarifying how that need is met is one of Whitehead’s great strengths. If the picture communicated by Neville were accurate, I would indeed be distressed.

Neville is committed to an intimacy of the relation of God to the inner subjectivity of human experience which is satisfied for him only by a carefully qualified identity. He criticizes Whitehead for representing God as a mere datum of experience, and he pictures the relation of God to actual occasions as external to their subjectivity.

It is true that Whitehead is at pains to establish the nonidentity of actual occasions with God. The intimacy he describes is one of communion rather than union. Hence the particular kind of intimacy Neville favors is rejected. But in contrasting the intimacy he favors with Whitehead’s position, Neville distorts the latter. He neglects to make clear that the data of an occasion, the many, are constitutive of the occasion. The concrescence of the occasion is nothing other than the many becoming one. God is, in Whitehead’s words, incarnate in every occasion. This is a strong sense of incarnate.

Neville also stresses that for Whitehead God knows us only in our objective condition, not in our subjective immediacy. This is likely to suggest to the reader that God knows us as we might know a fact or an object of vision. Of course, Neville knows better than that. His point is that God knows occasions only as they are satisfied, and he interprets this, as many Whiteheadians do, to mean that the immediacy of an occasion is alien to God. This is not however, the way the texts read.

For Whitehead, the way in which one moment of my experience flows into its successor is not denuded of immediacy by the fact that it has attained satisfaction. What is felt by the later occasion are the feelings of the earlier occasions. It is true that modifications are introduced into the later occasion and that in the temporal flow the immediacy of the earlier feelings fades. Whitehead’s intuition is that in God this immediacy does not fade.

My point is that for those whose religious needs are not for identity with deity, however qualified, one can hardly imagine a doctrine that more fully expresses the intimacy of grace than does Whitehead’s. As one for whom the radical nonidentity of temporal creatures with God is of great religious importance, I greatly prefer Whitehead’s approach.

In explaining why I do not agree with Neville’s presentation of Whitehead on freedom and immediacy I have already indicated the importance of the religious questions one brings to bear on the doctrine of God. This is the second area of disagreement between us. Even when we agree in our interpretation of Whitehead, we disagree in our evaluation. Neville agrees that the religious question is more important than the conceptual one (p. 3).

Religiously there are those for whom it is essential that God be understood as the cause of everything that happens as it happens. There are others for whom it is essential that worship be directed to One who is good and loving and whose character is manifest in the efforts to overcome injustice rather than in inflicting it. Both themes are found in the Bible and in the three great traditions that stem from it. Neville identifies with "the religious feeling that God’s moral character is revealed in events, for better or worse" (p. 11). I belong to the group who cannot worship that reality whose moral character is even partially revealed in the Holocaust or in the torturing of a single innocent child. Of course, I do not agree with Neville that "the price of this move is to make the actual course of events irrelevant to God’s moral character" (ibid.). But for me, and for most Christians, some events are far more revelatory of God’s character than are others. And process theology explains how and why this is so.

Neville’s preference for what he regards as a more classical doctrine of God is grounded more in this religious preference than in the doubtful claim that he can provide a formulation on that basis that has fewer conceptual problems than the formulations of process theologians. My preference for a Whiteheadian theism, similarly, is grounded in my religious preference even more than in my conviction that its conceptual problems will progressively yield to further reflection.

A closely related difference appears conceptual but is in fact existential or, in Neville’s terms, a matter of sensibility (p. 46). For Neville every plurality cries aloud for explanation in terms of a unity. Those who live and think by this intuition and need for unity will certainly not be satisfied with Whitehead’s philosophy. It explodes at every point into pluralities of entities, principles, and categories which are complexly interrelated. No one thing explains or grounds everything else. Different questions lead to different multiplicities and pluralities. I like this. It has for me the feel of reality. It conforms to my conviction that adequacy to the facts is more important than conceptual consistency and integration, but I can understand that others find this exasperating and wish to impose upon it a hierarchical order.

For Neville, the central theological question is to "account for the existence of the complex world." He wrongly supposes that Whitehead intended to answer this question by reference to creativity (p. 38). I agree with Neville that Whitehead gives no such explanation of the existence of the world as a whole. Like the Buddhists he regards this as an unprofitable question. It would be a great accomplishment to explain why particular events have the character they do while sharpening our intuition as to what, at bottom, is going on. For Neville this is utterly unsatisfactory. For him the question is about the unitary reality responsible for their being anything at all. He is far from the first to ask such a question, and indeed such continuity as his doctrine of God has with the Western theological tradition depends on this partly shared question.

Neville thinks that the only alternative to his "empiricist" sensibility is a "rationalist" one (pp. 46ff). According to this sensibility, creativity can only be an empirical generalization. In contrast, I see Whitehead as avoiding both of Neville’s alternatives. Creativity is neither an empirical generalization about what is going on nor the efficient cause of the being of things. It is instead the answer to the question as to what the being of things is. It is an answer that resembles to a remarkable degree the results of Heidegger’s quest for the being that has been forgotten when Western philosophy chooses between the alternatives proposed by Neville. But like Whitehead, Heidegger knows that the answer to this question is not the Biblical God.

Ultimate religious and existential p references are hard to debate. Fortunately, however,- Neville and I have shared concerns, particularly for interreligious understanding; and one of his claims, specifically against me, is that his doctrine of God is more supportive of dialog between the religions than a process doctrine can be. Further, the issue on which his claim hinges is that of the Whiteheadian distinction of God from creativity, which the title of the book highlights as his primary object of attack. Neville argues that this distinction should be rejected, whereas I have increasingly found it vindicated by its fruitfulness for dialog, especially between Christians and Buddhists.

Neville points out that in The Structure of Christian Existence (Westminster, 1967) I deal with the plurality of cultures and religions only anthropologically. He is correct. He asserts that subsequently I have recognized "that the conception of God, defined by process theism, is incompatible with the Buddhist perspective, not a common ground for potential dialog" (p. 136). Here he is partly correct, since I agree it is not a common ground, but he is chiefly wrong. What I wrote in the passage to which he refers was as follows: "What Buddhists see is, with unknowable limitations and qualifications, there to be seen. What they see seems inconsistent with what Christians see, but it is my conviction that ultimately it is not inconsistent, and that we can understand how both Christian theism and Buddhist atheism are true" (JCTP 154).

My intention here is not to quibble about Neville’s accuracy in representing my position but to debate the advantage of distinguishing God and creativity, an advantage I affirm and he denies. His argument here is that the affirmation of God distinguished from creativity introduces an element incompatible with Buddhism. This would indeed be an obstacle to the kind of interaction both Neville and I want to see between Buddhism and Christianity. Hence it is important to reiterate that I do not believe the two positions are ultimately incompatible, even though I stress their pro found differences. I regret that Neville did not take into account my essay on "Buddhist Emptiness and the Christian God", for if he had, our discussion could begin with fewer misunderstandings. Also, if he had consulted Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Westminster, 1975), he would have seen that I continued to deal with themes which he treats exclusively from my earlier book and would have avoided criticizing me for positions I have not held for a decade.

Neville’s positions on the unity and self-identity of the ultimate and on the prerequisites of dialog cohere well with one another and stand in the main tradition of both metaphysics and dialog theory. I believe that this theory of dialog has brought the practice of dialog near to a dead end -- at least in Japan, where the dialog is most advanced and where I have had some chance to study it. Hence I do not think that the fact that Neville’s metaphysics would have a better chance of providing a common ground for dialog, even if it were true, would commend it. On the contrary encouraging the search for this sort of common ground only confirms the present impasse.

Since my position is unusual, I must explain it. One question is that of the conditions of fruitful dialog among religious traditions, in this case, Buddhism and Christianity. The general assumption has been that since they are two religions, they can engage in dialog because ultimately they are about the same task -- relating people properly to one and the same ultimate reality. Having the same task, each can explain its approach to the other. The result, on this theory, should be that mutual appreciation is enhanced and perhaps that each can learn something from the other.

But what happens? As long as it is assumed that the Christian God and Buddhist emptiness are two ways of understanding one and the same reality, two responses are possible. There can be argument as to which understanding is superior, and there can be a quest for overlaps of understanding in the tradition. The first option, argument, rarely proves fruitful. The second, the quest for overlaps, usually leads to the common ground of mysticism. In the most extreme Western mystics, especially Meister Eckhart, Christians find in our tradition a view of ultimate reality that makes contact with Buddhists. There can be a comfortable dialog between followers of Meister Eckhart and Buddhists. Neville may recognize that his proposal cuts in this direction.

Is this what we want? It is not what seems most important to me. After the followers of Eckhart and the Buddhists have come to mutual understanding, what about the 99 per cent of Christians who worship the God of the Bible instead of realizing their identity with Eckhart’s Godhead? Surely we are the ones who most need to be in dialog. But how is this dialog to be managed? Are we back to arguing whether Yahweh or Emptiness is a better conceptualization of the same reality?

To me it seems a great gain when this argument is abandoned. But it can truly be abandoned only if we can genuinely recognize that Buddhists and Christians have both been on the right track in their respective affirmations. In view of the profound differences involved, this moves us toward the view that Buddhists and Christians have been attending to different features of experience and of what is experienced. Only so can the affirmations of both be true without profoundly contradicting the truth of the other.

I am denying, then, that common ground in Neville’s sense, which is the conventional sense, is desirable for Buddhist-Christian dialog. Of course, there must be some "common ground." There must be mutual respect and willingness to listen and enough overlap of language world to provide starting points for conversation. But the most interesting and valuable dialogs occur between people who have explored different spheres and who can inform one another about these regions. Buddhist-Christian dialog enters a new and more promising era when Buddhists really want to know about Yahweh and the Father to whom Jesus prayed and about how belief in this God structures life and society, and when Christians really want to learn about Emptiness and about what it means existentially to realize Emptiness.

A major obstacle to entering this new phase of relations is the continuing assumption that ultimate reality must have one particular character, or lack of character. Whitehead, on the other hand, with quite different concerns in mind, distinguished creativity as the ultimate from the Biblical God, who is also, in a different sense, ultimate. I suggest that creativity is ultimate reality and that God is the ultimate actuality. I am convinced that what Whitehead meant by creativity is what Buddhists have called dependent origination or Emptiness and that Whiteheadians have much to learn about this poorly developed aspect of Whitehead’s thought from the living Buddhist tradition. Christian openness to learning this will move the dialog forward.

We have much to learn also about the relation of creativity and God. Whitehead’s intuitions here were profound and illuminating, but certainly not exhaustive and definitive. Whitehead knew that beyond some quite abstract matters, what more is to be said of God is to be learned from global religious experience. If he had recognized the independent religious importance of creativity, he would surely have said the same of it and of the relation of God and creativity as well. The global dialog of world faiths will surely not leave this discussion where Whitehead dropped it, but the dialog could move much more freely, much faster, and much further if it took advantage of his insights.

Since I take seriously the Whiteheadian view that religious insight and experience is metaphysically important, I have become more willing to use the word God in a way Whitehead did not. For many Christians the kind of ultimacy that is attributable to creativity belongs to what they worship, although the active! responsive! directive/ gracious character of what Whitehead called God is even more important. Reading Whitehead with this sensibility, I was struck by his statement that in God, the otherwise characterless creativity acquires a primordial character. This suggested to me that what many Christians worship as God the Father is creativity as primordially characterized by truth and grace. Perhaps what Whitehead calls God could better be called the Word.

I have another reason for rejecting Neville’s alternative. I have explained why it would not be an advantage for dialog even if Neville’s doctrine helped provide common ground. But it is also important to recognize that it does not provide such ground. He himself recognizes this in passages other than the one in which he is criticizing process theism for failing to provide such ground. He knows that his God is not Yahweh or the Father of Jesus Christ (p. 142). He knows also that his thinking is alien to Buddhism at least in the Theravada form (p. 8). I believe it is equally alien to all forms of Buddhism.

The question that leads Neville to God as ontological creativity is a metaphysical radicalization of the Western question about a creator ex nihilo, whereas Buddhist thought rejects all search for a metaphysical unity grounding diversity. For Buddhists such questions are unprofitable and fail to recognize the actual human situation. Like Whitehead, they seek to understand the concreteness of experience and the factors that jointly constitute it. Indeed, they are much less willing than Whitehead to reason from the immediate to the partly autonomous nature of the factors constituting immediacy. Neville s ontological creativity cannot serve as common ground for a discussion between Christians and Buddhists because it is not acceptable to either.

Neville begins and ends his book with words of high praise for Whitehead and for process theology. In between he proves himself an astute critic, the best that process theology has had. I am following a similar format in reply. He invites process theologians to disengage their doctrines of God from Whitehead’s insights on this topic. I would like to invite him, instead to contribute his considerable talent to helping us in what he himself regards as a possible task -- that of working out "other and perhaps more viable conceptions of God" in the rich matrix of "the philosophical cosmology of which process theology is a part" (p. 146).

REFERENCES

JCTP -- John Cobb’s Theology in Process, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Thomas J.J. Altizer. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977.

Ford:

In God the Creator (University of Chicago Press, 1968), Neville proposed that God is in himself completely indeterminate, rendering himself determinate only in terms of whatever world he chooses to create. Since God is thus free to create any world (and hence any metaphysical system) he wills, Neville’s theology is compatible with any cosmology whatever, so long as that cosmology makes no attempt to characterize the divine. The cosmology Neville has adopted is largely Whitehead’s, so he finds it necessary to criticize Whitehead’s conception of God in order to make room for his own. Whitehead in turn rejects just this sort of external creator who lies beyond the categoreal principles he creates (SMW 134f, RM 86f, PR 521).

Neville thus has a privileged vantage-point from which to criticize the whole enterprise of process theology. This book draws together his critical studies of process theologians over the past decade or so, examining the writings of Ford, Hartshorne, Ogden, Windquist, and Cobb. A dominant theme, reflected in the title, is that process theism is fundamentally misguided in its effort to reject the widespread identification of God and creativity.

This is clearly a basic issue. Instead of postulating a wholly external creation by a transcendent Creator, as many traditional thinkers do, Whitehead envisages many acts of partial self-creation, of which God’s is chief. Creativity, the name he gives to this activity of self-creation, is not exclusively identified with God but is shared with all actual entities. This nonidentification has at least these seven advantages:

1. In creating itself, each creature is exercising a real freedom distinct from God’s. Its freedom is not compromised by being also somehow God’s action, or by being already known as determinate by God’s foreknowledge.

2. On this process view every actuality has ultimate significance as contributing to the experience of God. Human striving is ultimately meaningful because it enriches that cosmic, everlasting, conscious appreciation. Since God does not create everything, what we create enriches what he has created.

3. A plurality of self-creative acts introduces a measure of potential conflict and incompatibility, which is the mark of evil. God is responsible for the ideals whereby the actions of the world might be coordinated, but the world is responsible for all physical actualization, for its good and for its evil. Above all, the nonidentification of God with creativity exempts God from the responsibility for evil.

4. If both God and the world share in a common creativity, there is a mutual solidarity between them whereby God’s agency can be discerned in the activity of the world. The Biblical account of creation illuminates the process of evolution once creation is understood to be the gradual emergence of order out of chaos through divine guidance instead of being the ontological production of being out of nothing.

5. Nondivine creativity insures that God’s experience, and also his responsive action, be contingent upon the world’s actions. This means that there are nonnecessary aspects of God which cannot, even in principle, be known philosophically. The God of the philosophers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Religious people have known this a long time, but now there is a good philosophical reason why the philosophers should know it as well.

6. If God and finite actualities are all alike instances of creativity, such that God is also a being and not being-itself, then God becomes metaphysically intelligible as the chief exemplification of the categories.

7. The advantages of distinguishing God and creativity for the purposes of relating Christian theism with Buddhist emptiness are amply presented by Cobb in his response.

Despite these reasons, many of which look quite impressive to the process theist, Neville, with many others, champions the identification of God and creativity. They have at least these three reasons for objecting to their nonidentification:

1. Unless my creativity is derived from God, he is not the source of my being. Such a God is not ontologically ultimate.

2. If my exercise of creativity is distinct from God’s, then God cannot penetrate to my innermost being. The mysticism of identity, to which many mystics have testified, would then be impossible.

3. Monotheism insists upon a single ultimate. If we have two, the rightful claims of each will be subordinated to the supremacy of the other, or the two will simply be left uncoordinated. These difficulties could be avoided by identifying the two in a single ultimate.

Neville champions this side of the debate; Whitehead, the other. Rather than enter the lists on the side of Whitehead, as I have done several times in the past, I would like to propose a way of modifying his philosophy so as to surmount this particular division and thus reap many of the advantages of both positions.

On the face of it, such a proposal looks preposterous. How can creativity both be identical with God, and yet also not identical? That sounds like Hegelian obfuscation, abhorrent to univocally minded Whiteheadians. If we make some temporal distinctions, however, univocity can be recovered. God may be identical with the whole of future creativity, while yet being entirely distinct from the present creativity we exercise.

This view conceives of God, self, and the world indexically, as the future, the present, and the past, respectively. The past world is the totality of concrete determinations which have already been achieved. The self is the immediately present concrescent occasion, striving to unify the world it receives. For it no other occasions as yet exist. God also influences the self, Whitehead teaches, by providing the possibilities as to how that past world can be unified. Since contemporaries cannot influence each other, God appears to be part of this past which influences the self. But we may modify Whitehead by conceiving of God as a future activity objectified for us as these possibilities which constitute our initial aim.

Whitehead distinguishes between becoming and being. The becoming of an actuality is its own activity of self-creation, important to itself, quite private and inaccessible to others. Its being is its public side, how it affects others. The being of occasions consists in concrete determinations. We are not told in what God’s being consists, but I propose it consists of possibility -- not just of abstract, nontemporal possibility, but of the real specific possibility serviceable to nascent occasions. The specific possibility the newborn occasion needs is just how to unify the world it confronts.

This possibility is specific to just that region of the extensive continuum. It is also a way of unifying the past. In fact, it represents the maximum way that past can be unified for that particular region short of introducing the arbitrary determinations actualization entails. If this specific possibility which becomes the subjective aim is the way God is objectified for that occasion, and it is specific just to that nascent region, we may conceive of it as the result of God’s self-creative activity in just that region.

On this view each occasion, as it becomes concretely determinate, immediately affects, to a greater or lesser extent, its entire future. Thus everywhere in God its impact is felt. At every particular region within God these influences from the past are being actively unified in terms of those possibilities which would bring them together by concrete occasions. At the point when they are completely unified as far as they can be by divine activity, these regions are atomized into individual present concrescences. Complete unification requires concrete determination, but concrete determination, arbitrarily deciding for this rather than that, requires the pluralization of creativity. Creativity, which is one in the future, exercised solely by God, becomes many in the present, as exercised by us.

This activity of the future, which we have assigned to God, is not the same as future activity. It is not some activity which will happen by and by. Rather we have to conceive of the entire spatiotemporal continuum, apart from the past, as being dynamically altered by each determinate event. God is in unison of becoming with every concrescent occasion. But this is the becoming of the future, not the present, in that it affects those regions of the extensive continuum which have not yet become present. God is in unison of becoming with the present, but his being, the result of this activity, constitutes future possibility.

This theory obviously requires fuller justification, particularly with respect to its modification of Whitehead. I hope to provide one in due course. Here, however, I would like to use the theory in commenting on the three advantages proposed for identifying God and creativity:

1. God is the source of my creative activity, if the activity of the future simply becomes the activity of the present. The creativity of that particular spatiotemporal region is first God’s, now mine. God directs himself into the many occasions of the present, but is not diminished thereby, since the future is inexhaustible.

2. Insofar as my creativity has its source in God, the mystic may experience identity with God in terms of creativity. On the other hand, what God achieves in terms of the possibilities he creates in creating himself remain forever distinct from the achievements of finite occasions. This is basic to the experience of Western monotheism which permits at best a mysticism of union.

3. God as the creativity of the future is a single ultimate which may be experienced either as the source of creative possibilities for occasions or as the source of their creativity. The identification of God with present creativity eliminates God’s role as the source of creative possibilities. This the nonidentification strategy has sought to preserve, but it can be preserved without the need for postulating two ultimates.

If God is the creativity of the future, then, we have the advantages proposed for the identification of God and creativity. The arguments for the nonidentification of the two, however, primarily have in mind God and present creativity. If we recognize that finite occasions exercise creativity in the present, whereas God’s creativity is always exercised with respect to the future, it is never the case that God and the concrescent occasion are each acting in the same place at the same time. Rather God has already provided the possibilities by which the concrescent occasion now acts. The creativity is derived from God, but God’s and the occasion’s exercise of that creativity is distinct. As long as the creature’s exercise of creativity is distinct from God’s, the first five reasons for the nonidentification can be affirmed of our modified theory.

Our sixth reason states that if God is a being and not creativity-itself, then he is the chief exemplification of the categories. But if God is the creativity of the future, it is questionable whether he is a being. Beings are present concrescences, which perish by becoming past. God never perishes; he never becomes past by becoming something determinate. If he is the creativity of the future, which is forever future, he passes on his creativity to present occasions to fully unify and objectifies himself not as determinate actuality, but as definite possibility. In this way God is never a being but always a becoming.

This does not mean, however, that God is not a concrescence, just because that concrescence does not terminate in determinate actuality. As sheer becoming, God still exemplifies the categories Whitehead has devised, for these are really categories of becoming, unlike the categories of other philosophies, which are categories of being.

Finally, I agree with John Cobb that these two senses of ultimacy must both be cherished: ultimacy as the source of our creativity, and ultimacy as the source of our own creative possibilities. Neither should be judged or rejected in the name of the other. On the other hand, in the absence of any overarching theory of how these two may be united, we have the continuing problem of the conflict of ultimates. Hopefully the theory of God as the creativity of the future may provide just such a resolution.

Students of Whitehead can find much of interest in the metaphysics of Justus Buchler. Buchler, like Whitehead, subjects traditional substance-quality metaphysics to a devastating critique. If we regard, as surely we must, such rejection of substance-quality metaphysics as one of the distinguishing traits of process metaphysics, Buchler is a process metaphysician. But Buchler, again like White-head, does much more than find fault with traditional metaphysics -- he elaborates an alternative system of categories.¹ Because his alternative categorial scheme is very different, the points Buchler makes in criticism of traditional metaphysics are interestingly different from those made by Whitehead. Indeed, though Buchler draws on the insights of various metaphysicans including Whitehead, his categories are genuinely original.² Consequently, Buchler’s metaphysics offers to Whiteheadians the illumination of a novel perspective on the shared goal of the rejection of traditional substance. Furthermore, this shared rejection of substance-quality metaphysics leads to a shared rejection of classical Christian theology, and it is Buchler’s original perspective on the rejection of such traditional theistic doctrines as creation ex nihilo which John Ryder explores below. After his account, I will explore the relevance of this account to the possible development of an ordinal, process theology based on Buchler’s categories.

Ryder:

In his Metaphysics of Natural Complexes, Justus Buchler presents and develops the categorial framework of a general metaphysics. One of the primary functions of a system of this generality is its applicability to a wide range of more specific subject matters. A general ontology is designed to provide a framework for interpretation of such areas as experience, science, art, ethics, and religion. It is the task of this paper to consider some of the consequences of Buchler’s ordinal metaphysics for one component of most religious systems, God. Our scope will in fact be limited to two specific issues: the existence of God and God as creator.

The discussion will be framed for the most part by the categories of natural complex, ordinality, prevalence, scope, contour, and integrity. For Buchler, everything is a natural complex, including such things as material objects, fictional characters, ideas, relations and laws. To say that something is a natural complex is to say that it is not simple, that it consists of subaltern traits. A natural complex is an order of complexes; it locates (i.e., it is a sphere of relatedness for) its subaltern traits. Not only does a complex locate traits, but it is itself a trait located. Every complex is an order that locates traits and is itself located in an order, a context. That every complex is located in some order or orders is Buchler’s principle of ordinality. When a complex maintains traits in a particular ordinal location, it is said to prevail, to be prevalent, in that order.

Complexes may prevail in any number of orders, and for each order in which a complex prevails it has an integrity. A clock, for example, has an integrity as a time piece, a piece of furniture, and a wooden object, among others. The totality of a complex’s integrities is its gross integrity, its contour. In addition to its integrities, a complex has subaltern traits which do not influence its ordinal locations. The individual splinters of wood in our clock are such constituents. These constituents fall within the scope of a complex. Each of the categories just discussed, i.e., complex, ordinality, prevalence, scope, contour, and integrity, will bear on the forthcoming discussion of God and God’s characteristics.

In an ordinal metaphysics, "whatever is, in whatever way, is a natural complex" (MNC 1). God, then, is a natural complex. This of course does not imply an affirmative answer to the question "Does God exist?" God is a natural complex in so far as it prevails in some order or another. The order in which it prevails might be the order of literature, or the order of complexes that have had an important influence on the course of human history. To say that God prevails in these orders would not provide the kind of answer called for by the question "Does God exist?" The question must itself be understood in ordinal terms. To ask if God exists is to inquire into the ordinal locations of a discriminated complex. In particular, the question might concern the location of God in the order of complexes to which devotion is due, or the order of complexes that create other complexes. "Does God exist?" is a question that wishes to identify a specific integrity of the complex God.

Given the necessity of understanding the question "Does God exist?" within the terms and categorial framework of an ordinal metaphysics, it may be better to dispense with the question altogether -- dispense with it, that is, only in the terms in which it is usually couched. In an ordinal metaphysics, existence outside of some order is an unintelligible notion. To ask if God exists is to ask whether God prevails in order x or order y. God is already discriminated, and to that extent must prevail in some order. To take the question of the existence of God at face value, we would have to answer yes to it. God does exist, at least in the order of myth, or that of symbol. But these are not the sorts of responses that fully satisfy the question. The question "Does God exist?" is not equivalent to the question "Does God prevail?" Outside of prevalence in some order, though, the term "existence" can have very little meaning in an ordinal metaphysics. Thus Buchler says that "the question whether God exists or does not is a symptom of deficiency in the categorial equipment of a metaphysics" (MNC 8). It is better, i.e., less ambiguous and more clearly meaningful, to ask what orders God is located in rather than if God exists. A complete answer to this question would amount to an articulation of the contour of the complex God.

How can the question of the ordinal locations of God be answered? One way would be to look at several of the traditionally assigned attributes of God and consider whether these attributes can be consistently held along with the workings and conditions of ordinality. One such characteristic would be God as creator ex nihilo. If God is a creator ex nihilo, then certain things must be true. It must be true, for example, that at the point when God had not created the world, there was nothing other than God alone. If an ordinal metaphysics allows for this possibility, then it may allow for the possibility of God’s being located in the order of complexes that create, or create ex nihilo. If this characteristic of God is found not to be possible in an ordinal metaphysics, then it is not possible that God is located in the order of complexes that create ex nihilo. If God cannot be located in this order, then God cannot be a creator. The same methodology must be applied to all the traditional traits of God. Once that is done, a picture will emerge of the nature of the God that an ordinal metaphysics can recognize. We will not pretend here to offer an exhaustive analysis of the characteristics of God. Rather we will treat only one of them. This will clarify at least a bit what an ordinal metaphysics does or does not allow for.

To say that God is a natural complex is to say a number of things, or a number of different kinds of things. Consequences follow in different branches of inquiry. One of the kinds of consequences that follows from God’s being a natural complex is ontological. If God is a complex, then, by definition, God is not simple or indivisible. As a complex, God, to use an awkward phrase, is composed of constituent complexes. The constituent complexes are what constitute God. This in itself is contrary to one of the more prevalent features of the God of much of monotheism, viz., its simplicity. Further consequences follow from this ontological point, one of which has to do with God as creator. If God is a creator ex nihilo, then there was a point where God had not yet produced his creation, or at least this is the popular conception. Leaving aside the difficult question of how there could be a "before" if time was not "yet" created, there are still difficulties in the notion of a creator God. Presumably, when God had not yet created the universe, there was nothing in existence other than God. But if God is a natural complex, there must be complexes other than God for there even to be God. If God is a complex, then this complex locates other subordinate complexes. That is, it has constituents. These constituents cannot be the same as God, since God, as a complex, is the order within which they are located. In order for God to be, certain subordinate complexes must be as well.

An ordinal metaphysics places further stipulations on the nature of any given complex. Not only must the complex locate subordinate subcomplexes, but it must itself be a subcomplex of another, perhaps more pervasive, complex. All complexes both locate and are located. If God is a complex, then God is located in at least one order. Here again, the image of God (as cause) standing alone, prior to everything else (its effects), is untenable. An order is defined by Buchler as "a sphere of (or for) relatedness. It is what ‘provides’ extent, conditions, and kinds of relatedness" (MNC 95). An order necessarily distinguishes complexes in certain ways and along certain lines; it necessarily delimits complexes and the relations among them. Complexes are what they are by virtue of their ordinal locations. The multiplicity of orders, which includes the idea of orders as delimiters, is what provides the many-faceted nature of complexes. The ordinal location or locations of a complex are what provide, or constitute, its integrity or integrities. The contour, or gross integrity, of a complex is what determines it as that and just that complex. Buchler characterizes identity as "the continuous relation that obtains between the contour of a complex and any of its integrities" (MNC 22). In an ordinal metaphysics, the very notion of identity, of a complex being the complex that it is, is a function of the stipulation that every complex must both locate traits and be located in an order of traits. For God to obtain at all, it is necessary that it both locate traits and be itself ordinally located. Neither of these conceptions seem to be compatible with a creator ex nihilo.

Even the principle of ontological parity creates trouble for a creator God. Much if not all of the more Platonic strain in the history of Christian thought turns to a large extent on a principle of ontological priority, but this is not the source of the trouble suggested here. Even though the principle of ontological priority has played such a crucial role in our philosophic and theological development, there is an equally strong tradition wherein the notion of degrees of being does not figure quite as prominently. The point at which the principle of ontological parity interferes with a creator God is in the context of the idea of existence itself. Whatever is, is a complex, and no complex "is" more than any other. Many things, and many different kinds of things, cart be said "to be." It has become traditional philosophically to erect as a model of existence a rather crude spatiotemporal paradigm. But this is clearly too restrictive. There are many kinds of complexes that do not seem to fit this paradigm, but yet must be said "to be." Possibilities are one such kind of complex. There has also been a strong tendency in philosophy to consider "being" as in some sense equivalent to actuality. This conception places possibility in some sort of ontological limbo. A more coherent way of looking at all of this is to say that actuality "is" no more than possibility "is." A possibility is no less of a complex, with all of the appropriate ordinal conditions, than is actuality. If either can be said "to be," then so must the other.

If God were a creator, then the possibility of what he creates obtains along with him. It would not do to suggest that God creates this possibility as well, since that would only push the question back one step. The question would then have to do with the possibility of this creation, and this could easily lead to an infinite regress of the possibility of the creation of the possibility of the creation of. . . . The possibility of creation must be understood as a complex, located in certain orders, and as obtaining along with, and in relation of some kind to, God. Again, the idea of a creator ex nihilo is severely hampered by the categorial demands of an ordinal metaphysics.

There is one further point that would be worth making here. It has to do with an issue already raised, viz., the identity of a complex. It was pointed out earlier that Buchler locates the identity of a complex in the continuing relation "between the contour of a complex and any of its integrities." I will try to show why this way of characterizing identity is important for the coherence of an ordinal metaphysics, and in particular how identity in this sense allows for some of the more characteristic features of Buchler’s treatment of the question of God. The issue of identity should also show the importance of a principle mentioned earlier, viz., that all complexes must themselves be ordinally located.³

One of the more interesting points that Buchler makes in connection with God is that:

On the basis of this, it would be appropriate to say that God prevails in the orders of literature, mythology, historical influences, etc. At the same time, there are orders in which God does not prevail, such as the order of complexes that create other complexes ex nihilo. The body of this paper has been an attempt to show that God could not possibly prevail in this order. The curious thing about this, though, is that the orders in which God cannot prevail are precisely those orders which seem to frame the historically most characteristic and persistent traits of God. If God cannot prevail in the order of complexes that create ex nihilo, as well as others which could be elaborated, then God cannot be a creator, etc.

Yet it seems necessary, especially in light of the principle of ontological parity, to say that God does prevail in some of the other orders already mentioned. However, if God cannot create and do many of the other things customarily attributed to the Divinity, one wonders whether the God that does prevail in the orders of historical influences and literature is the same God that cannot prevail as creator, etc. If the two "Gods" are not one and the same, that is if we are doing something more than viewing the same complex in a number of its ordinal locations, then the point of saying that God does prevail in this or that order loses much of its force. Yet it does look as if it is not the same complex under discussion in the two cases. The complex "God" that prevails in these orders is the God who has created what is, who may perhaps preserve its prevalence and towards whom persons strive.

It is crucial for an ordinal metaphysics to be able to show that the complex seen in terms of each of these orders, including those in which it prevails and in which it is not located at all, is the same one. This is accomplished by the particular way in which identity is characterized. Another point of considerable relevance here is that complexes are indefinitely ramifiable, which is to say they are amenable to indefinite inquiry and analysis (MNC 24, 56 & 102). In so far as they are ordinally located they are relational, and in so far as they are relational, their traits and integrities are inexhaustible.

What this point amounts to is that an elaboration of the traits of a complex must include both the traits of the complex in terms of each of its ordinal locations as well as each of its ordinal locations as among its traits. It would be curious to suggest that at a given point all the ordinal locations of a complex, all of its integrities, have been exhaustively delineated, since this would imply that all possibilities for the complex have ceased to obtain. If the integrities of a complex are indefinitely ramifiable, then so are its traits. The important implication of this, at least for our purposes, is that a discussion of the traits of a complex, if it hopes to achieve any sort of adequate scope, cannot limit itself to a consideration of a complex only in terms of one of its ordinal locations. A proper response to the question "What are the attributes (traits) of God?" must include those traits that obtain for the complex in terms of a number of its ordinal locations. God, then, could not be adequately characterized solely as a creator, preserver, judge, goal etc. The description must include those traits relevant in other ordinal locations as well. God is also a major force in human political and social history, in literature, etc.

If one introduces at this point Buchler’s account of the nature of identity, the question of the sameness of a complex across its ordinal locations should be answered. A complex has an integrity for each of its ordinal locations, and identity, to repeat a phrase cited twice already, is the "continuous relation that obtains between the contour of a complex and any of its integrities." The identity of a complex is not a function of this or that integrity. If it were, then we would be forced to say that a complex in one of its ordinal locations is not the same one as the complex considered in another of its locations. Since identity is a function of the relation between the contour, or gross integrity, of a complex and any of its integrities, the possibility of speaking of the "same" complex across ordinal locations is assured. Consequently, the categorial relations of an ordinal metaphysics allow us to say of God that while it cannot be a creator, etc., it, the same God, is locatable and identifiable in other ordinal locations.

It is clear, then, that whatever character an ordinal metaphysics may recognize God as having, it does not include God as a creator ex nihilo. As I have indicated earlier, it does not follow from this that it would be appropriate to say that "God does not exist." God prevails in any number of ordinal locations, but not as a creator. Peter H. Hare’s remarks that follow consider in further detail the possibilities of examining the traits and functions that can be ascribed to God, which is to say the possibility of an ordinal theology.

Hare:

John Ryder has argued that Justus Buchler’s metaphysical principles do not allow God to have at least some of the traits he is thought by traditional Christian theists to have. More specifically, using Buchler’s categories of natural complex, ordinality, prevalence, scope, contour, integrity, and relation, he argues that God cannot be creator of the world. Ryder’s careful account of the conflict between Buchler’s metaphysics and the metaphysics of Christian theism is surprising. I find it surprising not because his exposition of Buchler’s views is inaccurate. His exposition is faultless. Nor do I find it surprising because I do not think worthwhile the examination of the implications of Buchler’s metaphysics. Certainly Buchler’s ambitious and original categorial scheme deserves attention, much more attention than it has received. What I find surprising is that Ryder should consider it remarkable that the metaphysical principles of Buchler, or those of any other philosopher, are violated by Christian theology. In the history of metaphysics it has been common -- it has been the norm even -- to have metaphysical principles violated by Christian theology. For example, a metaphysician will commonly assert as sound metaphysical doctrine that every event has a cause, and yet will also assert, as a doctrine of Christian theology, that God’s acts do not have causes. Or, as sound metaphysical doctrine it is asserted that everything that manifests design must have a designer, and yet as sound theological doctrine it is also asserted that the design manifested in God is without designer. Or, it is asserted as sound metaphysical doctrine that all existence is contingent, and yet as sound theology it is asserted that God’s existence is necessary, i.e., noncontingent. This fundamental sort of inconsistency seems to be endemic among metaphysicians.

In other words, it would have been remarkable if Buchler’s metaphysics had not been found to contradict basic tenets of Christian theology. It would have been remarkable not just because Buchler is working in the tradition of American naturalism but also because, as I have just pointed out, such a conflict is common among many sorts of metaphysicians, not just among naturalistic metaphysicians.

Although I applaud the accuracy of Ryder’s account of the relations between some of the tenets of Christian theology and Buchler’s categorial scheme, I worry that Ryder may unintentionally give the impression that Buchler’s metaphysics is narrowly naturalistic and strongly antitheological in character when quite the opposite is the case. It seems to me that, all things considered, Buchler’s categorial scheme is a naturalistic metaphysics that is unusually open to theological development. To be sure, Buchler’s metaphysics quite appropriately rules out certain theological tenets of the sort Ryder describes. But Buchler’s is not a militantly naturalistic metaphysics of the sort one finds espoused by Sidney Hook, for example. Indeed, I venture the opinion that Buchler’s is the most broad and open naturalistic metaphysics yet produced. That breadth and openness is one of his system’s most characteristic features, and I would not like to see that admirable breadth and openness obscured by Ryder’s emphasis on the conflicts between Christian theology and Buchler’s system of categories.

More than any other feature of his system it is Buchler’s principle of ontological parity that ensures the openness of his metaphysics. According to that principle, "no complex is more ‘real’, more ‘natural’, more ‘genuine’, or more ‘ultimate’ than any other" (MNC 31). While this principle, of course, rules out any theology in which God is considered the ultimate reality, i.e., rules out traditional theism, it does not rule out other sorts of theology. When I speak of "other sorts of theology," I do not have in mind only a Deweyan or a Randallian sort of theology in which "God" is considered a human symbol of the unity of social ideals. It should go without saying that Buchler’s metaphysics leaves room for religious humanism. Buchler’s metaphysics, I am suggesting, leaves open the possibility of more than a humanistic sort of theology. I can find nothing in his metaphysics that requires that divine reality he reducible to human reality. It is a serious mistake to suppose that the fact that his metaphysical principles preclude traditional theism implies that they allow only humanistic conceptions of God. There is much metaphysical room between the extreme of traditional theism and the extreme of religious humanism. Humanism is by no means the only conceivable religion compatible with the principle of ontological parity. Let us consider the intriguing question of what nonhumanistic theologies Buchler’s metaphysics will allow.

Whitehead advised us to seek a concept of God according to which he is the "chief exemplification" of our metaphysical principles, not an exception to those principles "invoked to save their collapse" (PR 343/ 521). Whitehead may not have done a very good job of following his own advice, but it is good advice nonetheless. What might be the "chief exemplification" of Buchler’s metaphysical principles? Couldn’t we develop as such an exemplification a category of "divine proception"? "Proception" is the term Buchler uses to refer to the life-process of a human individual. I can find nothing in his principles which precludes a superhuman form of proception. There seems to be nothing in his characterization of individual experience that precludes a form of proception in which far greater than human powers are exercised. If proception in its human form involves the exercise of powers of assimilation and manipulation of natural complexes, could not a divine form of proception involve much greater powers of assimilation and manipulation? If the cumulative order of complexes which constitute the history of a human being is what Buchler calls the "proceptive domain," is it not metaphysically permissible to conceive of a much more inclusive proceptive domain, a "divine proceptive domain"? If human experience has what Buchler calls "proceptive direction," couldn’t we suppose that much more influential forms of proceptive direction can be found -- what might be thought of as a process form of Providence?

In short, I can find nothing in Buchler’s metaphysics that rules out -- or even discourages -- the development of an ordinal, process theology. Of course, process theology is associated with the work of Whitehead, and Whitehead has been severely criticized by Buchler for his arbitrary use of a principle of ontological priority.⁴ Yet there seems to be nothing in the nature of process theology which requires that some entities be considered "more real" than others. If process theology were freed from Whitehead’s "strain of arbitrariness," it would seem to be compatible with Buchler’s metaphysical principles.

The theological possibilities inherent in Buchler’s metaphysics can, I think, be illustrated in other ways. For example, Buchler has said repeatedly that metaphysicians should cure themselves of the bad habit of treating the spatiotemporal complex as the fundamental entitity. Surely this openness to realities that are not spatiotemporal invites the development of the notion of a divine reality that is located in various orders but not in a spatiotemporal order. If part of the motivation behind theistic theology lies in the need to believe that reality is not merely spatiotemporal, then a theology developed from Buchler’s metaphysics would satisfy that need without committing the theologian to the metaphysical absurdity of a God that is not a natural complex.

Another feature of Buchler’s metaphysics that invites theological development is his insistence on the reality of possibilities, a reality that follows from his principle of ontological parity. If part of the motivation behind traditional theology lies in the demand for a recognition of the genuine reality of possibilities and not merely the reality of here-and-now actualities, that demand could be satisfied without departing from Buchler’s metaphysics of natural complexes.

My thesis, then, is that one of the remarkable features of Buchler’s metaphysics is that it allows (by virtue of the principle of ontological parity) the development of a nonhumanistic theology, a development not allowed by other systems of metaphysics in the naturalistic tradition and a development that should be welcomed by process theologians.

References

MNC -- Buchler, Justus. Metaphysics of Natural Complexes. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1966.

Notes

1 For a comparison between Buchler’s and whitehead’s critiques of’ traditional substance, see Beth J. Singer, "Substitutes for Substance", Modern Schoohman. 53 (1975), 19-38.

2 For helpful discussion of the relations between Buchler and many other metaphysicians, see Stephen David Ross, Transition to an Ordinal Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), passim.

3 For a detailed discussion of Buchler’s treatment of identity, see Marjorie C. Miller, "The Concept of Identity in Justus Buchler and Mahayana Buddhism", International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976), 87-107.

4 See Buchler’s "On a Strain of Arbitrariness in Whitehead’s System", Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 589-601.

Whitehead’s account of the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy, as he explicitly states, is dependent upon a definition of straight lines in terms which make no appeal to measurement (unlike the definition, ‘the shortest distance between two points’): "It is to be noted that this doctrine of presentational immediacy and of the strain-locus entirely depends upon a definition of straight lines in terms of mere extensiveness" (PR 493; cf. also 495-96). Accordingly, straight lines are defined in terms of a scheme of extensive connection. The definition of a straight line requires that some geometrical elements be incident in another geometrical element: "The locus of points incident in a ‘straight segment’ is called the ‘straight line’ between the endpoints of the segment" (PR 466, def. 5). See also his earlier definitions of ‘geometrical element’ (def. 13), ‘point’ (def. 16), ‘segment’ (def. 18), ‘end-points’ (def. 19), ‘straight’ (def. 3), and ‘incident’ (def. 15). ‘Being incident in’ is defined only as a relation between geometrical elements. But this definition contradicts a derivable theorem that no geometrical element a is ever incident in a geometrical element b. Moreover, from this theorem we can demonstrate that, according to the explicit theory of extensive connection Whitehead proposes, all geometrical elements are points. Since no geometrical element can satisfy the definition of a straight line in terms of mere extensiveness, it follows that Whitehead’s geometrical account of presentational immediacy and of the strain-locus is untenable in its present form.

In my demonstration of these claims, the relevant theorems will be derived from Whitehead’s definitions and assumptions in the chapter on "Extensive Connection," particularly definitions 2, 7, 9-13, 15-17, and assumptions 6-9, 23-26. The reader will want to have Whitehead’s text in front of him in examining this argument.

1. Every abstractive set must be composed of an infinite number of members. This follows from Assump. 9, Assump. 6, Def. 10, Assump. 7, and Assump. 8.

An included region B is said to be ‘part’ of region A (Def. 2). Comparing this use of ‘part’ with that in Def. 16 seems to yield an inconsistency in so far as points have abstractive sets as members (Def. 17) and abstractive sets have parts, i.e., included regions. Therefore, points have parts.

I shall not argue for the importance of this inconsistency since it is easily resolved by a terminological revision, i.e., by refusing to call included regions ‘parts’.

2. Any two members of the infinite number of members of an abstractive set are such that one of them includes the other nontangentially. This follows from criterion (i) of the definition of an abstractive set (Def. 10).

3. Of any two member regions A and B of an abstractive set such that B is nontangentially included in A, there will be an infinite set of regions nontangentially included in B, such that A includes them all and B includes all of them but A and B. This follows from the transitivity of inclusion (Assump. 6), the asymmetry of inclusion (Assump. 8), the irreflexivity of inclusion (Assump. 7), and the fact that every region includes other regions (Assump. 9).

4. Any two members of an abstractive set themselves determine an abstractive set. This follows from the satisfaction of the two criteria determining an abstractive set, i.e., nontangential inclusion and there being no region included in every member of the set (Def. 10), and from 2 and 3.

5. Member regions A and B determine an abstractive set to be called a. This follows from 4.

6. Regions A and B include member regions C and D of a such that A includes B, B includes C, C includes D. This follows from 3.

7. C and D of abstractive set a determine an abstractive set to be called B. This follows from 4.

8. Every region nontangentially included by A or B is a member of a. This follows from 3 and 5.

9. Every member region of an abstraetive set a included by region B is also a member region of an abstractive set . This follows from regions C and D being members of a and also regions determining the set (7).

10. Every member of an abstractive set /3 includes some members of . This follows: from the transitivity of inclusion (Assump. 6) such that if C includes D, C includes D and whatever else D includes; from criterion (i) from the definition of an abstractive set which states that any two members of an abstractive set are such that one of them Includes the other nontangentially (Def. 10); and from 1, which asserts the infinity of members of an abstractive set and thereby assures us that every region including another region necessarily will include more than one region.

11. Every member of an abstractive set a includes some members of the set . This follows from 8, 9, and 10.

12. Abstractive set a covers abstractive set . This follows from Def. 11 and from 11.

13. Every member of an abstractive set includes some members of an abstractive set a. This follows from 9 and 10.

14. Abstractive set covers abstractive set a. This follows from Def. 11 and from 13.

15. Abstractive set a and abstractive set are equivalent. This follows from Def. 12, and from 12 and 14.

16. Abstractive set a and abstractive set are members of the same geometrical element. This follows from Def. 13 and from 15.

17. Abstractive sets a and cover every member of the geometrical element of which they are members. This follows from Assump. 23 and from 16.

18. Abstractive sets a and are covered by every member of the geometrical element of which they are members. This follows from Assump. 24 and from 16.

19. Abstractive sets a and are equivalent to every member of the geometrical element of which they are members. This follows from Def. 12 and from 17 and 18.

It is worth noting that were the paragraph following Definition 11 in Process and Reality included as part of that definition, an inconsistency could be generated. It is asserted that "when the set a covers the set , each member of a includes all the members of the convergent tail of provided that we start far enough down in the serial arrangement of the set " (PR 455; emphasis mine). This need not be inconsistent with Definition 11 which states that a covers "when every member of the set a includes some members of the set ," we merely conceive of the "some members" as those very same members as "all the members of the convergent tail of ." However, we must remember that equivalent abstractive sets cover each other. Thus, each member of , if is to cover a, includes all the members of the convergent tail of a. This seems possible until we remember that the relation of inclusion is asymmetrical (Assump. 8). Therefore, since every member of must include all the regions of a’s tail, some of the including regions will be in ’s tail. A tail region of will include all the regions of a’s tail. Since a tail region of a must also include all the tail regions of ’s tail, it is necessary that at least one of the included regions of ’s tail be a region which includes the a region including it. This is a violation of the assumption of the asymmetry of inclusion (Assump. 8).

If all the member regions of equivalent abstractive sets are required to include all the members of each other’s convergent tails, it is clear that there can be no equivalent sets (Def. 12) insofar as equivalent sets require mutual coverage. Without the possibility of equivalent sets there can be no geometrical elements (Def. 13) and without the possibility of geometrical elements there can be no points (Def. 16).

I have not chosen to hold Whitehead to the full ramifications of the paragraph following Definition 11, but rather to construct my argument within the scope of the more liberal Definition 11 without the unfortunate paragraph immediately following it.

20. If every member of an abstractive set includes some members of another abstractive set, it will always be the case that every member of that latter abstractive set includes some members of the former abstractive set. This follows from 11 and 13.

We will not be troubled by the assumption of asymmetry of inclusion (Assump. 8) since we are not requiring every member of either abstractive set to include all of the members of the convergent tail of the other. All we require is that some members of one set, regardless which ones, be included by every member of the other. Even where regions of one set are also regions of the other, asymmetry of inclusion is not violated as only ‘larger’ less converged regions of either set include ‘smaller’ more converged regions and never the converse. An included region will therefore never include its includer.

If we conceive of the Chinese nest-of-boxes toy as an analogue of an abstractive set (PR 454; cf. also CN 79), remembering that there is no last box, it is clear that unless two abstractive sets are superimposed there will be no inclusion of any member region of one set by a member region of the other. But when the sets are superimposed, it is apparent that there will be member regions common to both. Moreover, when every region of one set includes some regions of the other set, every region of the latter set will include some regions of the former set. Once superimposed, the two sets become indistinguishable. A new observer on the scene might notice that the present largest, least converged box is larger than before, or that there are more boxes than before. But he might also notice no difference whatever from the box situation prior to the superimposition of the additional ‘nest-of-boxes’ abstractive set. Whether or not the difference is noticed depends upon whether or not the additional nest-of-boxes has a largest member larger than the largest member of the initial nest-of-boxes.

The above is by way of illustration through an analogue and nothing has been asserted that is not a consequence of the proof wherein it is demonstrated that to cover is to be covered.

21. The two abstractive sets of 20 cover each other. This follows from Def. 11 and from 20.

22. The relation of covering, if it is to hold between any two abstractive sets always holds symmetrically. This follows from 20 and 21.

23. The two abstractive sets of 21 are equivalent. This follows from Def. 12 and from 21.

24. The two abstractive sets will be members of the same geometrical element. This follows from Def. 13 and from 23.

25. The two abstractive sets will be equivalent to every member of the geometrical element of which they are members. This follows from an argument analogous to 16 through 19, i.e., Assump. 23, Assump. 24, Def. 12, and from 22.

26. When every member of an arbitrary geometrical element a covers every member of an arbitrary geometrical element b, every member of geometrical element b will cover every member of geometrical element a. This follows from the symmetry of coverage (22).

27. The members of geometrical element a and the members of the geometrical element b are equivalent to each other. This follows from Def. 12 and from 26.

28. The members of geometrical element a and the members of the geometrical element b are members of the same geometrical element. This follows from the definition of a geometrical element (Def. 13) and from 27.

29. Geometrical element a is identical to geometrical element b. This follows from 28.

30. No geometrical element a is ever incident in a geometrical element b. This follows from 29 and Def. 15 which asserts that "a is said to be ‘incident’ in the geometrical element b, when every member of b covers every member of a, but a and b are not identical." We have seen that a and b must always be identical when every member of b covers every member of a.

31. All geometrical elements are points and all member sets are punctual sets. This follows from Def. 16 and Def. 17 and from 30.

A further, less formal, and more general proof is included to meet the objection that my argument depends upon deriving the abstractive set a from an abstractive set and then deriving from a. Under these conditions, it might be objected that it is no wonder that a and should both belong to the same geometrical element.

1. If set a covers set , every member of the abstractive set a includes some members of the abstractive set . (From Definition 11).

2. a’s largest, least converged region is either bigger, smaller, or the same size as ’s largest, least converged region.

3. If a’s largest region is the same size as ’s largest region and every member of a includes some members of , it is clear that every member of also includes some members of a.

4. If a’s largest region is smaller than ’s largest region and every member of a includes some members of , then every member of includes some members of a. The inclusion of members of a by ’s largest members, i.e., all those larger than a’s largest region, will require the transitivity of inclusion (Assumption 6).

5. If a’s largest region is larger than ’s largest region and every member of a includes some members of , then every member of includes some members of a. Those members of a included by members of will be those "far enough down in the serial arrangement of the set " (PR 455), i.e., those members of a which are sufficiently converged to allow ’s member regions to include them. The existence of those members "far enough down" requires that a have an infinite number of regions, which a is said to have according to the paragraph following Definition 10. (See Def. 10 and 1 in the preceding argument.)

6. To cover an abstractive set is to be covered by that set, i.e., symmetry of coverage. The rest of the argument that no geometrical element a is ever incident in a geometrical element b, and that all geometrical elements are points, is as before, i.e., that which follows the symmetry of coverage theorem (22).

I must confess that I do not like to reason on the basis of the largest region of an abstractive set. Whitehead remarks that "though an abstractive set must start with some region at its big end, these initial large-sized regions never enter into our reasoning" (PB 455). Moreover, although Whitehead does speak of ‘big end’ and ‘far enough down’, I believe such terms to be logically improper in the context of a theory which is logically prior to measurement. These terms may be used metaphorically, but should not themselves play a formal role. Therefore, I have constructed my argument upon the longer and more formal proof.

Rejoinder

A Reader, justifiably unhappy with the conclusion that all geometrical elements are points, would probably attack the mainstay of the demonstration, that mainstay being the symmetrical character of the relation of covering (22). Looking back at the original definition of demonstration, that mainstay being the symmetrical character of the covering (Def. 11), one reads: "an abstractive set a is said to cover an abstractive set when every member of the set a includes some members of the set ." As a measure of caution one rereads the definition of an abstractive set (Def. 10) and attends carefully to criterion (i) of that definition. "Any two members of the set (of regions) are such that one of them includes the other nontangentially" (PR 454, emphasis mine).

The reader gladly asserts that I have been overly restrictive in my interpretation of Def. 11. Nowhere in that definition of ‘cover’ does it state that ‘includes’ is to be read as ‘nontangentially includes’. I am at once accused of deriving my theorem of the symmetry of coverage from a fallacious and overly restrictive interpretation of Whitehead’s original Def. 11. It will be argued: it may well be that symmetrical coverage does occur between or among abstractive sets when the inclusion is nontangential, but inclusion need not be nontangential. If tangential inclusion allows for nonsymmetrical coverage, there will be no theorem 22, and the conclusion that all geometrical elements are points cannot be derived. Some geometrical elements will not be points. My accuser might supply the following proof.

1. Let us begin with an example where an abstractive set covers another abstractive set a but is not covered by a.

2. The sets will not be equivalent since equivalence requires that each set cover the other.

3. The sets will belong to different geometrical elements since only equivalent sets belong to the same geometrical element.

4. Any member set of the one geometrical element a will be covered by any member set of the other geometrical element b, since all the members of any geometrical element are equivalent.

5. Geometrical element a and b are not identical since the equivalent a sets of a are not equivalent to the equivalent sets of b.

6. The geometrical element a is incident in the geometrical element b since 4 and 5 together satisfy the definition of incidence (Def. 15).

7. Geometrical element b is not a point since it has geometrical element a incident in it, and the definition of a point (Def. 16) requires that it have no geometrical element incident in it.

It would seem that I am now forced to renounce the whole of my argument based upon the theorem of the symmetry of coverage which was itself derived from an apparently overly restrictive interpretation of ‘includes’ in Def. 11.

Actually ‘includes’ as opposed to ‘nontangentially includes’ is a pseudo-issue. Irrespective of which way ‘includes’ is to be interpreted, Whitehead’s attempt to define straight lines remains unsuccessful. If ‘includes’ is restricted to nontangential inclusion, then coverage is symmetrical and we are able to derive the theorem that all geometrical elements are points. However, if ‘includes’ is broadened to allow tangential inclusion, we are then across the other horn of the dilemma. It can then be shown that no geometrical element is a point. Any arbitrarily selected abstractive set can cover and not be covered by some other abstractive set a, if the inclusion of the member regions of the covered set a is allowed to be tangential. It follows that a geometrical element b associated with any group of equivalent abstractive sets is such that it always has some other geometrical element a incident in it, the reason being that each of the equivalent abstractive sets which are the members of a geometrical element b is such that each can cover and not be covered by the a equivalent abstractive sets which are the members of the geometrical element a. And if every geometrical element has some other geometrical element incident in it, no geometrical element can be a point.

Were we to restrict ourselves to the sort of two-dimensional circular regions found diagrammed in Process and Reality, we would not be able to construct a counterinstance to the symmetry of coverage even if we allowed inclusion to be tangential. Remembering that Whitehead warns us not to be misled by the limitations imposed upon us by such diagrams (PR 450), let us interpret ‘inclusion’ as allowing tangential inclusion and ‘region’ as allowing any desired shape, in which case asymmetrical coverage can indeed be obtained. For example, it is possible to construct an abstractive set of ovate regions which covers but is not covered by an abstractive set of circular regions.

If it is also possible to construct an abstractive set of circular regions such that: (i) the members are concentric; (ii) every member tangentially includes some members of some other abstractive set a (in which case covers a); (iii) a does not cover , then we may have confidence in the claim that any arbitrarily selected abstractive set can be shown to cover some other abstractive set asymmetrically. If an abstractive set can be constructed which satisfies these very constraining criteria, it ought then to be acknowledged that any abstractive set can cover asymmetrically.

It remains to specify the nature of the a set covered by but not covering . Every member of a includes part but not all of any member; otherwise, we risk symmetrical coverage since inclusion is transitive. It is to be remembered that every abstractive set has an infinite number of members. We can conceptualize but not visualize an infinite abstractive set; we understand that it has no smallest (most converged) member. There is no logical limitation which prohibits every a member region, even the least converged, from having one end which is smaller than any arbitrarily selected member, even members well down the convergent tail of . The small end of any a region cuts into and thus includes part but not all of even the very converged regions. (An a member cannot be circular; at least one end must be elongated and pointed.) By this reasoning every a member escapes including any member; nevertheless, covers a.

We conclude the formal discussion by noticing that either all geometrical elements are points, which follows from the theorem of symmetrical coverage (22), or no geometrical element is a point, which follows from allowing tangential inclusion to satisfy the definition of coverage, a liberalization which enables any abstractive set to asymmetrically cover an a set.

(My use of the expressions ‘shape,’ circular,’ ‘ovate,’ ‘concentric, ‘big,’ and ‘small’ are intended solely as conceptual aids. They are to help the reader identify the relevant abstractive sets, a sets become possible when the meaning of ‘include’ is liberalized and not because they are somehow logically dependent upon concentricity, measurement, or any logically prior definitions of particular shapes.)

If no geometrical element is a point, then Whitehead’s geometrical account of the perceptive mode of presentational immediacy in terms of mere extensiveness is untenable, as it is when all geometrical elements are points. Def. 5 of a straight line requires that there be a "locus of points incident in a straight segment" (PR 466; emphasis mine), and without points we once again have no definition of straight lines.

To refute my argument requires the satisfaction of two criteria. Asymmetrical coverage between abstractive sets must be possible, i.e., the refutation of theorem 22. It must also be established that it is not always possible to construct a covered set a such that a’s associated geometrical element can be said to be incident in ’s associated geometrical element (for if a covered set a can always be constructed where a does not cover its coverer, then all geometrical elements are not points). If these two criteria are satisfied, some geometrical elements will be points and some will not, and straight lines can be definable in terms of mere extensiveness.

Since the appearance of The Principle of Relativity in 1922, Whitehead’s departures from the traditional Einsteinian interpretation of the special and general theories of relativity have been discussed and criticized. Throughout most of this discussion, however, the central issue has been perceived to be whether Whitehead’s 1922 interpretation is superior to or inferior to Einstein’s interpretation. An issue that has been grossly neglected, however, is whether Whitehead ever modified his view of relativity from the one presented them. Since Whitehead’s later work comprises for the most part his metaphysical views, with questions of physics treated only peripherally, they have figured just slightly or not at all into discussions of Whitehead’s interpretation of relativity. This impression that Whitehead forsook purely scientific considerations for metaphysical ones in work subsequent to The Principle of Relativity thus has issued into a tacit assumption that Whitehead’s views on relativity never significantly changed after 1922. In the following I wish to challenge this assumption with regard to only one but a very central relativistic concept -- simultaneity -- and thus I will show that Whitehead indeed not only modified that concept, but in Process and Reality he actually repudiated his earlier concept in favor of one what is more compatible with Einstein’s. In support of this argument I will also forward an explanation of why such a shift occurred, and what such a shift might imply in terms of Whiteheadian metaphysics.

In the early works on the philosophy of science, Whitehead established that he takes exception to the Einsteinian concept of simultaneity. Oddly enough, in The Principle of Relativity, where one expects a rigorous treatment of such topics, one does not find Whitehead’s own definition of simultaneity or even an argument against Einstein’s. The reason for this seemingly egregious oversight is twofold. First, Whitehead lays out in The Principle of Relativity assumptions carried over from his philosophy of nature which are different from Einstein’s and which imply a concept of simultaneity different from Einstein’s.¹ ‘Second, Whitehead’s concept of simultaneity can be found to be implicit in his discussions of his theory of spacetime, though he never draws specific attention to it or directly asserts the nature of his divergence from the Einsteinian concept.

Whiteheadian and Einsteinian relativity both embody views of time which stipulate that time measurement is to some degree observer-dependent. This enables both views to claim equally that what is a simultaneous set of occurrences for one observer may not be for another. But what is very distinct in these views is the manner in which simultaneity is defined and the assumptions which underlie these definitions.

For Einstein, simultaneity is an operationist concept that is defined by actual measurement under certain specified conditions (RSGT 22f.).² The simultaneity of two or more spatially distant events is determinable for an observer by correlating their spatial distance from the observer with their observed occurrence by the means of light signals. If the events are equidistant from the observer and are observed to occur at the same time, then the events are said to be simultaneous.³ On the basis of this operationist definition of simultaneity, Einstein then proceeds to establish how the clock-time of distant events may be simultaneous. Assuming that clocks of identical construction and running-rate are placed at the events, then when "a particular position of the pointers of the one clock is simultaneous (in the above sense) with the same position of the pointers of the other clock, then identical ‘settings’ are always simultaneous (in the sense of the above definition)" (RSGT 24, italics his). Note that this establishes the clock simultaneity of events distant from the observer, though the same determination of clock simultaneity of distant events with events of the observer’s world-line may be deduced from the description as outlined by Whitehead (PNK 51f.). What is important about this measurement of simultaneity is that it depends upon the operationist definition of simultaneity.

There are two important assumptions that underlie Einstein’s definition. One is that the determination of spatial distance between events is possible, which Einstein provides by stipulating that the events occur within a fixed coordinate reference frame (the so-called Galilean space or inertial frame) (RSGT 11). Another is that light signals connecting events have a uniform and finite velocity for all possible observers (RSGT 17).

Evidently Whitehead could not countenance the latter assumption, not because he could not accept the constancy of the speed of light as a physical law, but rather because Einstein used this assumption in order to define simultaneity (PNK 51f.). But as I shall show below, Whitehead believed that Einstein’s definition of simultaneity actually only provides a possible means of establishing the clock simultaneity of events, and that there is a further and more fundamental sense of simultaneity which is secreted in the former of Einstein’s assumptions cited above.

As evidence for my contention, I direct attention to Whitehead’s explication of the Einsteinian concept of simultaneity (PNK 51f.). In those passages Whitehead notes that Einstein provides a means for establishing the clock simultaneity of an event distant from some event of an observer’s world-line. Whitehead then states that this account is defective not as a measurement, but only as a definition of simultaneity.

Two important points issue from Whitehead’s criticism. First, it is evident that Whitehead is taking exception to Einstein’s definition of simultaneity, not to the specific means of employing light signals to synchronize distant events chronologically. At no point does Whitehead state or insinuate that the Einsteinian method is theoretically inadequate for the determination of clock simultaneity. Rather, Whitehead believes that simultaneity is something above such operations. Second, as Whitehead explains elsewhere in his criticism, the meaning of simultaneity is actually contained in the preconditions by which such operations are made possible.

Standard interpretations of Whiteheadian relativity have slighted this and other similar statements by Whitehead in regard to his displeasure with Einstein’s view. Whitehead is not dismissing the Einsteinian method of determining clock simultaneity theoretically (although in PNK 53f. he certainly downplays its practicality); rather he is rejecting it as a definition of simultaneity. Whitehead believes that the true definition of simultaneity is found within the first assumption of the Einsteinian account given above, namely, the assumption that events must occur within a single reference frame in order for their occurrence as simultaneous to be meaningful at all. Apparently, Whitehead feels that such an assumption clearly carries with it a concept of simultaneity that is logically prior to an operationist one:

It is imperative to note here that Whitehead does not maintain that all members of a consentient set share the same intuitive or phenomenological definition of simultaneity, but only the same potential chronometry of clock simultaneity.⁴ Hence, Whitehead’s consentient sets are nothing more than classes of events which are at absolute rest relative to one another. In other words, members of a consentient set share the same inertial frame (cf. PNK 31). It is this fact that Whitehead believes conceals the true meaning of simultaneity, for Whitehead clearly believes that the existence of such frames is indeed factual: "This spatio-temporal framework is not an arbitrary convention . . . Thus, the space of a consentient set is a fact of nature; the traveler with the set only discovers it" (PNK 32). Involved in this factuality besides the spatial element is a corresponding temporal one, and thus granting the existence of these frames entails granting the existence of a Newtonian-like simultaneity that holds within the frame.

Whitehead’s own definition of simultaneity is unfortunately not very clear in these early works. In The Principles of Natural Knowledge simultaneity is introduced as a relation characteristic of durations.

Two features of simultaneity can be inferred from this passage. The first is that although the presence of a duration to a percipient is epistemically possible through sense-awareness, simultaneity itself is the relation that constitutes the qualifying characteristic binding all events perceived and unperceived into the duration. Thus, another feature of simultaneity is that it is some sort of objective relation extending to all events fulfilling that relation beyond the events present to a particular observer’s sense-awareness (cf. CN 53).⁴

What then is the nature of this relation? Since durations have no specific temporal thickness, but vary with the particular duration of the perceiver’s specious present (CN 59, 69), simultaneity cannot have to do with the relations between events as they are extended temporally, but spatially. Such a spatial relation is indeed objective for Whitehead (PNK 32); thus, the homogeneity of spatial relations is claimed in The Principle of Relativity as the basis for the uniformity of physical relations generally (R 8). However, nowhere in The Principles of Natural Knowledge does one find a precise definition of simultaneity in terms of spatial relations.

In The Concept of Nature Whitehead introduced the concept of co-presence, which is a relation that expresses the spatial separation of events distinct from their involvement in particular durations (CN 177). Whitehead defines co-presence initially as a two-termed relation between events that share the same instantaneous space (in a duration whose temporal extension is ideally reduced to zero) according to some observer (CN 177).⁵ Co-presence as a two-termed relation is symmetrical, but when extended to many terms may or may not be transitive (CN 177). However, when any given number of events are transitively co-present, then they are simultaneous. The simultaneity of a duration may therefore be defined as the relation of mutual co-presence of its constituent events.

As an informative definition, however, this expression of simultaneity in terms of co-presence leaves much to be desired. Recurring to Whitehead’s own explanation of co-presence, events are co-present only if "on some or other system of measurement" they "are in the same instantaneous space (CN 177). But since instantaneous spaces are determinable only by what appears to actual observers (albeit perhaps in different families of durations -- CN 177), these spaces taken together constitute all nature as it may be divided into alternate classes of durational experiences. This implies that all co-present events are actually simultaneous in some duration. Since in this sense co-present and simultaneous events are coextensive, neither relation can claim either empirical or logical precedence over the other.

Such an inability to analyze simultaneity in terms of simpler relations is really unsurprising, however, given that Whitehead’s conception of space and time assumes the homogeneity of spatio-temporal relations: "In this respect we have to dissent from Einstein who assumes for this [spatio-temporal] structure casual heterogeneity arising from contingent relations" (R 25, cf. the Preface v). In short, Whitehead believes that the preconditions that underlie the special theory of relativity reveal fundamental truths about nature, and therefore the structure of space and time should embody properties required by these preconditions. As seen above, the primary assumption about space and time required by this theory is that inertial frames must pre-exist actual measurements, and thus Whitehead asserted in his own inimitable terminology that they do in fact exist. Further, such an assumption, Whitehead urges, dispenses with the necesslty to believe that the constancy of the velocity of light is pertinent to spatio-temporal structure, for that structure is predetermined only by the existence in nature of interrelated spacetime frames (CN 193).⁶

Hence simultaneity for Whitehead is the spatial spread of events in a given inertial frame as defined by a given duration, and is Newtonian in the sense that each instantaneous space in a frame provides a single present class of all events in nature relative to that frame. However, it is non-Newtonian insofar as there is no single, unique definition of simultaneity, for there are many alternate families of durations in nature (CN 59, 178).

In effect, Whitehead realized that Einstein’s assumptions of inertial frames for given events introduced a tacit Newtonian-like simultaneity which makes any operationist concept of simultaneity logically dependent on it. This, I submit, is the reason Whitehead rejected a definition of simultaneity based upon light signals, not because light signals do not really have an invariant velocity or are somehow irrelevant to our operational determination of clock simultaneity:

The following question arises quite naturally at this juncture: given the previous account, why then did most philosophers and theoreticians reject Whitehead’s concept of simultaneity for Einstein’s? After all, Whitehead apparently does not radically diverge from the Einsteinian point of view, but rather emphasizes one assumption of Einstein’s and claims that it logically supersedes his other, resulting in a shift away from Einstein’s operationist definition of simultaneity to Whitehead’s "empirical-realist" definition. Why then is the operationist approach felt to be conceptually superior?

The concept of simultaneity, whether Whitehead’s or Einstein’s, is expounded as part of the special theory of relativity.⁷ That theory demonstrates how inertial principles and the constancy of the speed of light may be preserved for all observers utilizing the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations. Moreover, Einstein realized full well that special relativity required the assumption of the existence of inertial frames, much as Whitehead insisted:

However, it is clear that Einstein regarded the existence of such frames heuristically, and not as a factual existence, for he resumes the above quotation with the statement, "On the basis of the general theory of relativity, on the other hand, space as opposed to ‘what fills space,’ which is dependent on the co-ordinates, has no separate existence" (RSGT 155). It is this link of spatial relations with the theory of gravitation in the general theory which Whitehead criticizes as evidencing the "casual heterogeneity" of spacetime "arising from contingent relations" (R 25). Whitehead cites in defense of his own view the a priori necessity of uniform spacetime in order for empirical measurements to be possible and to have universal application (R v, 9, 25).

The difference between Whitehead and Einstein on this head amounts to a disagreement over the status of special relativity. It is no minor difference as to their respective views on the status of spacetime, however. For Whitehead, the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformations reflect absolute relations between real frames which exist in nature. For Einstein, however, they merely represent particular exemplifications of more generalized transformations which in the case of the proved existence of non-Euclidean spacetime more precisely describe actual spatio-temporal structure than do the former (RSGT 152f).⁸

But again, why did the majority of thinkers prefer Einstein to Whitehead on the subject of relativity? For the most part, I believe the reasons boil down to two. The major reason is that Einstein’s principle of equivalence, which correlates and consolidates the concepts of inertial and gravitational mass and which in turn introduces the curvature of spacetime in the general theory, has no analogue in Whitehead’s theory.⁹ But perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this essay, Einstein’s entire approach in special relativity presumes that the nature of causality in the universe has a direct bearing upon spatio -- temporal structure. This approach is reflected in Einsteinian special relativity in the use of the constancy of the speed of light as an assumption which determines in part the spatio-temporal metrical relation for any observer. Whitehead, conversely, assumes the existence of given spatio-temporal metrical relations which relegates the finitude of causal propagation to the status of a factor within those relations, not constitutive of them.

Simultaneity for Einstein is thus a concept intrinsically related to causality. Given any particular world-line event, events not causally related to that event (lying in the "space-like" direction of a Minkowski diagram) are simultaneous with the event in some time-frame.¹⁰ However, for Whitehead simultaneity merely is the factual occurrence of events in durations which are spatially separated according to the instantaneous spaces of moments in those durations.

Later in the Lowell Lectures of February, 1925, Whitehead again reiterates these same themes (SMW 179,181f.), making it apparent that at this time he still subscribed to this departures from Einstein on simultaneity and relativity. However, Science and the Modern World also marks the introduction of the novel idea of epochal time (SMW 182-86, 196-98), and in so doing, marks the beginning of a subtle but considerable change in Whitehead’s view about spacetime and causality.¹¹

These changes are not fully evident until the appearance of Process and Reality in 1929. Of course, in the typical manner of Whiteheadian conceptual transition, these changes are quietly interwoven into old and new ideas. The clearest and possibly most concise indication of Whitehead’s change of mind may be found where he remarks that the "misapprehension [concerning potentiality and actuality] is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other" (PR 61/ 95, emphasis his). This abruptly contrasts with Whitehead’s earlier position, for, following Einstein, Whitehead here proclaims explicitly that causality is a limitation placed upon physical relations. Consequently, simultaneity as a physically relevant relation is at least restricted by a causal parameter. No such limitation of simultaneity as a physically relevant relation exists in his earlier philosophy of nature.¹² In addition, Whitehead appends a note to this statement which has an oddly apologetic tone, especially when one reads the note (as I think one must) as explaining how the statement above is compatible with Einsteinian assumptions: "This principle lies on the surface of the fundamental Einsteinian formula for the physical continuum (PR 61/ 96). This appears to be no less than an admission that causality indeed is an assumption needed for spatio-temporal relationships, and is not a concept merely derivative from them.

I use this passage to characterize Whitehead’s shift away from his own earlier views to those of Einstein’s, but more solid evidence can be found elsewhere. The absence of any remarks about or definitions of simultaneity by Whitehead, or of any criticisms forwarded against Einsteinian simultaneity is very significant.¹³ One might object that since this is a metaphysical work, such a divergence from Einstein might have been felt to be non sequitur or redundant of earlier work. But this is an essay about cosmology as well as metaphysics (note the title page), and Part IV is meant to be an exposition of matters pertinent to spacetime. Therefore I submit that no divergence is noted between Whitehead and Einstein on the topic of simultaneity because one no longer exists. If indeed I have correctly interpreted the connotation of the above passage, this is the case.

As a more persuasive argument for my contention, note the definition of this loci relative to an occasion M (PR 123f./ 188f.), as well as the later definition of durations also provided (PR 320f./ 487f.). In both passages Whitehead utilizes as his principle of differentiation the physical property of causal relatedness. There is no suggestion that alternate spacetime systems exist in nature which determine the loci or durations relative to M, but rather the issue is whether in fact M is causally related or relatable to other occasions or not. Further, Whitehead no longer distinguishes between "co-present" and "simultaneous" events, but only establishes whether events are contemporary or not. This single relation -- "contemporaneity" -- has come to supplant the older relations simply because the older assumptions behind these relations have been dropped in favor of the more orthodox Einsteinian assumption that causality is intrinsically bound to spatio-temporal concepts in this cosmic epoch.¹⁴ Thus, Whitehead defines all occasions that are contemporary with M as lying in a single locus (PR 123/ 188), and all that are mutually contemporary as lying in a single duration (PR 125f./ 192, 320/ 487). Hence simultaneity (contemporaneity) as a physically relevant relation has become a function of causal independence only, and thus to this degree Whitehead has moved away from his own earlier stance closer to that of Einstein’s.

It is important to note that I have referred to this simultaneity as a physically relevant relation, and not as a physical relation. This is so because simultaneity thus understood is a logical relation which establishes classes of events satisfying it, although no two events satisfying it actually have any sort of physical relationship of simultaneity. In fact, simultaneity in this analysis precisely is the denial of physical or causal relationships. Nevertheless, this appraisal of simultaneity stands in great contrast to earlier claims, for example, where Whitehead proclaims that "simultaneity is a definite natural relation" (CN 53). It is this Einsteinian character of Whitehead’s later account which distinguishes it so markedly from the Newtonian character it had earlier. Moreover, this definition of simultaneity implies that clock simultaneity must be established empirically by the means of causally connected events. Thus simultaneity for Whitehead is now an extensional concept the actual membership of which is established indirectly through measurement and its associated theoretical structure. But to say this is merely to say that simultaneity has thus become for Whitehead an operationist concept.

Granting that there is this conceptual evolution of simultaneity from the earlier to the later Whitehead, when and why did such a shift occur? As to when, there is no indication that Whitehead significantly altered his opinions on relativity from 1919 to the Lowell Lectures of 1925. However, Science and the Modern World also introduces the epochal theory of time, which stands as a great modification of Whitehead’s event ontology. It is the advent of this theory which best accounts for the conceptual transformation I have attempted to show. According to Whitehead’s earlier theory of events, events in a duration were assumed to overlap in such a manner so as to produce the spatial relation of co-presence. It is this spatial extensiveness which was shown earlier to serve as the basis for the relation of simultaneity. However, the epochal theory of time disposes of this foundation of spatial extensiveness, and hence this distinguishing characteristic of durations is likewise lost.¹⁵

These latter conclusions must have occurred to Whitehead as well, for only after Science and the Modern World Whitehead introduced the concept of causal efficacy as the primitive relation which binds events together. Thus it was quite appropriate for Whitehead to redefine the distinguishing characteristic of durations in terms of causality, or to be more precise, the lack of it. Consequently, Whitehead’s concept of simultaneity likewise underwent a transformation from a geometrical concept with direct physical relevance to an extensional concept with much more indirect physical import. It is this transformation that I have attempted to underscore by my previous exposition.

Finally, it remains to be seen what impact such a conceptual change in Whitehead’s scientific thought had upon his metaphysics. In Whitehead’s early view of simultaneity, this property expressed a certain real togetherness or objective becoming between events which occur in the same duration. The objective nature of this property was expressed by Whitehead in his claim that the space of consentient sets was a fact of nature (PNK 31, CN 53). Thus events which share the same instantaneous spaces of a particular family of durations all become within durations which share the same meaning of chronometry for their constituent events (at least potentially, by Einstein’s method of clock synchronization). However, there is not just a single family of durations, and each family constitutes a different spatiotemporal system (CN 59). Hence, any given event partakes of an indefinite number of relations of simultaneity, since any given event occurs in an indefinite number of spacetime systems. In terms of this property of objective simultaneity, events d)f different spacetime systems become as their associated spacetime systems dictate, and thus becoming is a complex matter of the interlaced becoming of diverse spacetime systems (CN 178).

The theory of epochal time dispenses with this difficult concept of simultaneity qua objective becoming. One should expect therefore that thereafter becoming would be something other than an objective property holding between occasions. In Process and Reality it is quite evident that this is the case. Becoming is associated with the subjective processes of concrescence (PR 25/ 38, 35/ 53, 283/ 434, and others), while the relationship which obtains between occasions in durations is an extensional concept of simultaneity. This results in the events of such durations sustaining a "unison of becoming" (PR 125f./ 192), which expresses (a) that these events are disconnected causally and transitively so, and (b) that they may share the same chronometry. It is easy to see that (a) and (b) reflect a conceptualism which only differs from that of Einsteinian special relativity with regard to the Whiteheadian theory of atomic events. While this difference is certainly more than trivial, it is certainly a smaller difference than had existed only a few years earlier.¹⁶

References

RSGT -- Albert Einstein. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, translated by Robert W. Lawson, fifteenth edition. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1961.

Notes

1I have not found a reason to believe that Whitehead significantly changed his scientific views from 1919 to 1925. His own testimony in CN vii shows a close tie between PNK and that work, and the notes appended to the second edition of PNK in 1924 indicate more of a honing of earlier thoughts than a rejection of them. The discomfiture that Whitehead shows in those notes does portend of conceptual changes to come, however.

2 I use the term "operationist" here only to stress the empirical content of Einstein’s concept of the temporal measurement of spatially separated events. It is not my intent to associate Einstein with the philosophical school of operationalism.

3 It is important to note that this definition is not merely an intuitive one, though it does rely upon an intuitive notion of "at the same time."

4 See F. S.C. Northrop, "Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science," in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. by Paul Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1951), pp. 193f., for an exposition of the view that Whiteheadian relativity in the early works requires merely an intuitive definition of simultaneity. Such an interpretation, though consistent with Whitehead’s overall empiricist approach, does violence to the passages cited above as well as others. Thus, I argue that Whitehead does not insist that all observers in a consentient set share the same intuitive perception of events in their durations, but only that the spatially separated events in those durations may share the same clock synchronization.

5 To be precise, this relation should be shared not by events, but by event-particles.

6 The importance of this claim should he emphasized. My view opposes that of many traditional interpreters who criticize Whitehead’s use of "c" in his transformations as unjustifiably ad hoc. If one should take the sort of position that I have argued for above, this awkward ad hoc nature of c disappears. Of course, the vengeance of such an assumption as I have ascribed to Whitehead is that it makes impossible the development of a general theory of relativity along the lines of Einstein’s.

7 Whitehead never terms his theory "special" because, as I argue below, he develops no general theory analogous to Einstein’s.

8 Whitehead admits that a non-Euclidean geometry would be consistent with his theory so long as its axioms produce a uniform geometry (R v). A defect of Whitehead’s theory, however, is that it shows no way an empirical determination of this question can he made.

9 Whitehead’s own account of gravitation is ensconced in his idea of "impetus," which appears to treat gravitation as an old-fashioned Newtonian force (CN 181f.). However, it is possible that later (in PR) Whitehead began to see defects in his view (see note 14).

10 Whitehead also resorts to Minkowski diagrams (R 31), but of course his view of duration alters his interpretation of them from the normal one.

11 I follow Ford in his argument that the epochal theory of time was a discovery Whitehead made subsequent to his delivery of the Lowell Lectures. See Lewis S. Ford, "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17/3 (September, 1977), 251-64,

12 Of course, this mention of a physically relevant concept of simultaneity is meant to distinguish it from the intuitive sense that often pops up in the early work (e.g., PNK 184, which refers to ". . . the apparent character of an event simultaneous with our percipient event …")

13 In fact, I find in none of Whitehead works after 1925 any criticism suggestive of the type in PNK.

14 In R 97f./ 149 Whitehead sets out what may possibly be the most explicit embrace of the Einsteinian assimilation of causality with the gross structure of spacetime in the present cosmic epoch. In this passage Whitehead states that the geometrical properties of the present cosmic epoch (as opposed to other possible "geometric societies" -- PR 97/ 148) are effected by the predominance of the "electromagnetic society" of occasions, which I take it includes the predominance of the important property of the finitude of causal propagation. This is tantamount to the admission that it is this factor of causality that determines the metrical properties of spacetime in this epoch, which is Einstein’s very assumption in special relativity. However, I relegate this capitulation on the part of Whitehead to Einsteinian special relativity because of Whitehead’s assumption, carried over from R, that the geometry of spacetime must be systematic (PR 330/ 503). Hence Whitehead’s divergence from Einstein on general relativity is in PR much for the same conceptual reasons as it was in the earlier work. However, note the conciliatory air of PR 332f./ 506-08, and especially paragraph three of Section VI as contrasted with CN 181f.

15 Here see Whitehead’s note pointing out that no distinction between durations and strain-loci existed in CN (PR 128/ 190).

16 I am indebted to Rem B. Edwards for his encouragement, as well as Roger Jones for his many spontaneous and lengthy expositions on relativity. I owe special thanks to Lewis S. Ford for a seminar he presented in June, 1981, during which some of the arguments in this article first came to mind. I also much appreciate the incisive comments on this paper from James W. Felt, S.J.

Many interpreters read Whitehead as maintaining in PR that sensa and patterns are distinguishable in terms of their modes of ingression. This view holds that while patterns cannot ingress without some sensa, sensa can ingress independently of any pattern. For example, John Lango writes:

Two assumptions underlie this view. The first is that Whitehead intended to distinguish sensa and patterns on the basis of their capabilities for ingression. The second and more subtle assumption is that ingression is a simple doctrine that attempts merely to explain how eternal objects are instantiated into or withheld from actuality. In what follows I will show that the first assumption is clearly wrong and that the second assumption glosses over certain important distinctions Whitehead made about his doctrine of ingression.

Whitehead himself encountered difficulties in attempting to distinguish sensa from patterns in view of their common roles as eternal objects. A sensum, he declares, "In one sense . . . is simple; for its realization does not involve the concurrent realization of certain definite eternal objects, which are its definite components" (PR 114 / 174). Yet, "a pattern is in a sense simple: a pattern is the ‘manner’ of a complex contrast abstracted from the specific eternal objects which constitute the ‘matter’ of the contrast" (PR 115/ 175). Whitehead observes that "A pattern and a sensum are thus both simple in the sense that neither involves other specified eternal objects in its own realization" (PR 115/ 175). Whitehead envisages no basis for the differentiation of sensa and patterns thus far. "But a pattern lacks simplicity in another sense, in which a sensum retains simplicity":

By "realization" in this passage Whitehead is often read as meaning "ingression": no pattern as a particular manner of relatedness can obtain without the simultaneous ingression of other eternal objects (sensa) that constitute its matter: "The realization of a pattern is through the realization of this contrast,"

Moreover, sensa are declared to have some form of realization that differs from that of patterns: "But the realization of a sensum in its ideal shallowness of intensity, with zero width, does not require any other eternal object, other than its intrinsic apparatus of individual and relational essence; it can remain just itself, with its unrealized potentialities for patterned contrasts" (PR 115/ 176). If by "realization" Whitehead also simply means in this passage "ingression," then apparently sensa can be realized -- can ingress -- apart from patterned contrasts, If this is true, then Lango’s case is made, and patterns and sensa are discriminable by their diverse capabilities for ingression.

It may be readily seen that Lango’s interpretation leans heavily upon a consistent usage of "realization" in these passages that is taken as univocally synonymous for "ingression," along with the further assumption that ingression is a doctrine that only deals with the admission of eternal objects into actuality in some one given way. Both these points are, however, objectionable.

In regard to his doctrine of ingression, Whitehead distinguished three different ways in which an eternal object can function in the concrescence of an actual entity: " (i) it can be an element in the definiteness of some objectified nexus, or of some single actual entity, which is the datum of a feeling; (ii) it can be an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of some feeling; or (iii) it can be an element in the datum of a conceptual, or propositional, feeling" (PR 290/ 445).

The first two modes have to do with how an actual entity is physically realized by way of the ingression of eternal objects (PR 291-92/ 445-47). The third mode of ingression, however, Whitehead views as "restricted" to the conceptual entertainment of eternal objects within an actual entity: "Now the third mode is merely the conceptual valuation of the potential ingression in one of the other two modes. It is a real ingression into actuality, but it is a restricted ingression with mere potentiality withholding the immediate realization of its function of conferring definiteness" (PR 290-91 / 445, my italics; cf. PR 44/ 70). Thus, though physical and conceptual ingression are both modes of ingression, they differ from each other in the way the eternal objects involved in each mode find access into actuality.

To return to sensa and patterns, it does not appear that the context of those passages cited in favor of Lango’s view can allow for a straightforward identification of an occurrence of "realization" to be taken as simply interchangeable with "ingression." For instance, in continuing to characterize sensa Whitehead says:

Here Whitehead is trying to make a distinction between "ideal" realization and realization as the ingression of contrasts. The respective difference between these two sorts of realization turns upon the difference between conceptual and physical ingression.

Note, however, that in this passage Whitehead does not attempt to distinguish sensa and patterns in regard to their physical ingression, for he says that sensa cannot "in fact" ingress apart from actual contrasts. The upshot of this is that no sensum can in fact ingress apart from some other sensum or sensa with which it is capable of forming a contrast.² But, as was seen earlier, the actual formation of a contrast entails the actual realization (physical ingression) of a pattern. Therefore, since sensa cannot physically ingress individually, they cannot do so apart from patterns.

Yet, if sensa and patterns cannot be distinguished in terms of monadic versus polyadic physical ingression, how can they be distinguished? Here I recur to an earlier remark of Whitehead’s: "A pattern and a sensum are thus both simple in the sense that neither involves other specified eternal objects in its own realization" (PR 115/ 175, my emphasis). From what has gone before, the meaning of "its own realization" is obviously a part of what has been characterized as "ideal" realization, which was seen to be linked to conceptual regression (cf. PR 87/ 134). Now, it seems that such "ideal" realization primarily pertains to what Whitehead calls the "individual essence" of an eternal object (PR 165/ 251, cf. PR 44/ 70), and he means by this that every eternal object regarded abstractly as an entity unto itself -- in its individual essence -- requires no reference to other specified eternal objects. Thus, it is in their capacities as eternal objects that both sensa and patterns have individual essences by which they can be conceptually identified without reference to other eternal objects.

Yet, some conceptual difference does seem to exist between the individual essences of sensa and patterns: "But a pattern lacks simplicity in another sense, in which a sensum retains simplicity" (PR 115/ 175-76). In its individual essence, Whitehead claims that a sensum "can remain just itself, with its unrealized potentialities for patterned contrasts" (PR 115/ 176, my italics). Thus a sensum can be conceived with regard to its individual essence without reference to any other eternal object whatsoever. But, though a pattern does not require "other specified eternal objects in its own realization," its individual essence cannot be abstracted from all other eternal objects since "the realization of a pattern necessarily involves the concurrent realization of a group of eternal objects capable of contrast in that pattern" (PR 115/ 176, my italics). This means that patterns not only require sensa for their physical ingression, but the "ideal realization" of the individual essences of patterns cannot exclude sensa from their very concept. Thus, though the individual essences of neither sensa nor patterns require references to other specified eternal objects, sensa presuppose no other eternal objects in their individual essences, while patterns do presuppose sensa. In this abstract fashion Whitehead can maintain that while relata may be atomistically conceived, relations cannot be conceived apart from some potential relata that make them up. Thus Whitehead’s distinction between sensa and patterns concerns only the conceptual differences in their individual essences and is independent of the question of the physical ingression of these entities.³

It should be observed, however, that "no individual essence is realizable apart from some of its potentialities of relationship, that is, apart from its relational essence" (PR 115/ 176). Obviously, "realizable" here means something other than "ideally realizable," which need only involve the individual essence of an eternal object. This is to say that the physical ingression of all eternal objects involves their relational essences. Therefore, sensa and patterns do not differ in the respect that they must be essentially related to other eternal objects in physical ingression, and this aspect of their relational essences guarantees that no eternal object can physically ingress individually.

By considering the simplest instance of the physical ingression of eternal objects as in the case of two sensa (PR 115/176f), we see that the physical ingression of any eternal object requires the concurrent ingression of at least two other nonidentical eternal objects so that an actual contrast obtains. In the case of two sensa the simple pattern formed between the sensa can easily be seen to require the ingression of its components for its own ingression, and thus it stands in accordance with this law. But Whitehead’s stipulation that all eternal objects physically ingress only in actual contrasts yields the result that every sensum likewise requires for its ingression at least one other sensum and the consequential pattern of the contrast between them, and hence the ingression of sensa is equally governed by this law. Upon reflection it may be seen that this "law of multiple ingression" traces its roots directly from Whitehead’s attribution of relational essences to all eternal objects and is implicit in PR 114-15/ 174-76).⁴

Whitehead took extensive pains to distinguish his eternal objects from traditional universals, primarily because of the problems involved in traditional theories of predication.⁵ One desideratum of the traditional view is that qualitative universals can instantiate monadically apart from any other qualitative universal. For example, redness may inhere in an object without the necessary involvement of any other universal. Whitehead’s complaints about the oversimplifications involved in such a view led him to bestow both relational and individual essences upon his eternal objects. Since eternal objects are thus conceived to be necessarily related to one another in physical ingression by way of their relational essences, the monadic ingression of an eternal object is rendered systematically impossible. Thus the requirement for multiple physical ingression is incumbent upon sensa as eternal objects. It is this feature of sensa that distinguishes them from traditional qualities.

Notes

1 Lango makes the same point in Whitehead’s Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press. 1972), p. 28f.

2 Since the Category of Objective Identity requires that "there can be no duplication of any element in the objective datum of the ‘satisfaction’ of an actual entity" (PR 26/39), the possibility of a sensum’s ingression with itself in some dual manner is precluded. See also PR 225/ 344.

3 It should be noted that I have carefully avoided the issue of whether any eternal object can monadically and/or polyadically ingress conceptually, and this is due to a lack of definitive reference in PR on the matter. At any rate, if "ideal realization" primarily concerns the individual essence of an eternal object as I have suggested, there is a sense in which any eternal object may ingress individually in this conscious way (PR 115/175-76).

4 During the completion of this essay it came to my attention that Paul F. Schmidt has made a similar point in his Perception and Cosmology in Whitehead’s Philosophy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967). P. 93: "the ingression of one eternal object in some event necessarily involves the ingression of other eternal objects." Although Schmidt derives his view from the SMW chapter "Abstraction," he evidently finds the basis for his observation in statements Whitehead made about the relational essence of eternal objects, and this buttresses my own conclusions.

5 See William Christian’s An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 221f, for an excellent summary of Whitehead’s departure from traditional views on universals. I point out, however, that even Christian does not fully explicate Whitehead’s doctrine of the relational essence of eternal objects as is attempted in this paper, for he chooses to focus on the internal relatedness involved in objectification rather than the internal relatedness that also obtains between eternal objects themselves.

Ford: Professor Weiss, I understand you undertook graduate study at Harvard in order to study with Whitehead in the late twenties.

Weiss: Yes, I did. I had just read Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which I found very exciting. I was struggling with the ideas of extensive abstraction, which I couldn’t understand, and there was no one who could explain it to me there.

Ford: What was it like to hear Whitehead in the flesh?

Weiss: I sat right in the front row and couldn’t understand a single word. Years later I spoke to Whitehead and told him this. He laughed and said, "I couldn’t understand a single word you said when you spoke." Our syllabifications or emphases were so radically distinct that we couldn’t understand one another. Later on, of course, when I understood just how he was speaking, I found him remarkably lucid and his expressions very clear and could understand every single word.

At that time Harvard had the system of having graduates and undergraduates together. The graduate students sat in the first two or three rows, and back of us were the undergraduates. Whitehead more or less lectured, not in a coherent fashion, sometimes losing his place. After many hesitations, all would suddenly come together. He would often say exceptionally brilliant things -- very exciting to me, anyway -- so that I would think about them all day and even far into the night. I don’t think the undergraduates understood him, but they were aware that they were confronting a distinguished man. Among the graduate students, I remember George Burch, who used to make very critical remarks occasionally. Whitehead would say ". . . uh . . . uh and look at the board and say, "Quite right, Mr. Burch, quite right." It was all beyond me. I couldn’t see the point, but he would happily acknowledge criticisms. For the most part, he did not know who the students were. He taught a class of about twenty graduate students at the most and about thirty, forty undergraduates (but that could be checked). At the graduate level, there were smaller classes. When I began teaching Whitehead at Bryn Mawr toward the end of my time there, I think I had more students in my course than Whitehead had in his own.

At Harvard some of the students spoke of Whitehead to his colleagues. They, however, would not face the criticisms or answer our questions. Apparently they treated him or thought of him more like old Mr. Pickwick -- which in some ways he did resemble.

Ford: Is this true of all his colleagues?

Weiss: Yes. I think they hired him originally with the idea that he would give them logic.

Ford: And philosophy of science?

Weiss: And philosophy of science. But primarily the logic. Don’t forget that Lewis and Sheffer were outstanding logicians. They were then very influential. Whitehead, though, decided to go off completely on his own tangent into new territory. He wasn’t altogether familiar with the history of thought the way they were, he wasn’t an expert on any historic figure, and was certainly not a teacher. The man he admired was Woods, who was a Platonic scholar. But I don’t think he had much contact with, and certainly no philosophical discussions with anybody else that I can think of.

Ford: I thought he had some joint seminars with Hocking.

Weiss: He may have done a seminar with Hocking before my time,² but I know from the way he spoke that he didn’t get very much from him. You notice that there’s no reference to Hocking in Religion in the Making. I don’t think that he found very much in Hocking. He gave a course with Ralph Eaton. I don’t think he liked to work with others.

We have to remember that Whitehead had a remarkable manner in speaking about people. He never criticized them directly; always had kind things to say. It was easy to be lulled into thinking that he had said something praiseworthy when what he really was doing was saying something polite. You had to know him pretty well to know that he was exceptionally charming, and that he kept fundamental opinions to himself. He expressed exactly what he thought only, if at all, to his intimates.

Ford: Did he discuss other philosophers in his courses?

Weiss: Yes!

Ford: I mean contemporary philosophers.

Weiss: No, except in his very pleasant way, Whitehead would say, "John Dewey is one of America’s greatest philosophers" or he would make a number of incisive remarks, such as "if you believed in C. E. Moore’s philosophic outlook, philosophy would be at an end" -- that sort of thing. You would be led through no detailed, careful examinations of the views of other philosophers, but be given only summary attitudes and statements about what they were like.

Ford: What years were these exactly?

Weiss: I came in February, 1927, and got my Ph.D. in June, 1929. I went abroad fora year, came back and taught from 1930 to 1931. Then I taught at Bryn Mawr from 1931 until 1945. Every year I think I went to Cambridge, sometimes during term time. In the summers my family and I spent weeks with him and Evelyn (Mrs. Whitehead) at Billerica, with the Pickman’s where the Whitehead’s stayed. The Pickmans asked the Whiteheads whom they’d like to have come, and the Whiteheads said they’d like us with them. We’d see the Whiteheads in the afternoon, and we’d spend every evening talking in a quasiphilosophical, intelligent, civilized way. I think the Whitehead I know is probably better represented by Adventures of Ideas than by any other book. Process and Reality is not typical of the Whitehead -- the person of genius -- I knew then. Adventures of Ideas or Science and the Modern World were more like him.

Ford: Now Lucien Price recalls Whitehead as saying that Process and Reality is the book he most wanted to write.

Weiss: Lucien Price’s book came out when I was abroad; someone said that I was mentioned in it, or referred to. So I read the whole book through, though I was bored all the time! Finally I found somebody I could identify as me, but it wasn’t really me. When I came back to this country, I visited Evelyn Whitehead, to whom I dedicated my first book. I wondered what I was going to say to her; there she was, over 70 years of age. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with this book which I thought was so terrible. As I walked into the room, she said to me, "Paul, what do you think of that terrible book of Lucien Price?" I was able to express my views, and we agreed completely. Other friends who knew Whitehead well all had the same opinion.

How was it possible for Mr. Price to say that he had a very good memory and that as soon as he spoke to Whitehead he went back to his home and wrote down exactly what Whitehead had said? From my point of view and that of Whitehead’s other friends, Price’s Whitehead is not Whitehead. My conclusion is that Price was a stupid man. When he heard Whitehead speak about important things in a way more profound than any answer to the question you were asking could possibly be, Price said to himself: "The old man is off his rocker; he’s getting senile. I’ll skip all that nonsense." As soon as Whitehead said, "Gee, I think it will rain," Price thought: "Ah, I’m hearing Whitehead, the profound thinker." He therefore set down all the dull observations, the stupidities, and things of no importance.

Yet I have a very perceptive friend at Yale, Richard Sewall, Professor of English. He said that when he read that biography, he had a feeling that Whitehead was a genius. But I never found anyone who knew Whitehead well who thought that was a good book or represented him anywhere fairly.

Ford: Getting back to Process and Reality, can you say anything about how he wrote the book? How he came to do it?

Weiss: I got the book when I was abroad and spent a lot of time going over the American edition. I found it filled with typographical errors and with all kinds of awkwardness. I wrote a six or seven page letter which I sent to the Whiteheads; I’m sorry to say that they did not take it in good spirit. I think Evelyn told me she destroyed it. Don’t forget that Whitehead was a Victorian in his attitude towards the young, women, blacks, Indians -- quite conservative. I don’t think that he understood this way of criticizing, which I was just doing, I thought, to be helpful and friendly. The book seemed to me a book written in a great hurry.

Ford: Why do you suppose he wrote Process and Reality in such a hurry? Was he afraid that he wouldn’t be able to finish it?

Weiss: Yes, I think he had a feeling that now was the time to harvest the thoughts he had for all those years. Don’t forget that he and his wife read theology; there was a time they were thinking of becoming Roman Catholics, and a time that he was reading Buddhism. I think he said to himself on the occasion of giving the Gifford lectures: "It’s about time I brought it all together in a basic, systematic way." Though we know that he had a gift of style, he didn’t give himself time to write with style. I think he would have been astonished to know that it is that book of his which is the book that people study today and that they neglect the others.

Ford: Do you think he was most satisfied with Adventures of Ideas?

Weiss: It wasn’t like Whitehead to be satisfied with what he had done. But the title of that book expresses his spirit: he was adventuring with ideas. I remember writing a paper criticizing the theory of types in Principia Mathematica and showing it to him. I was a graduate student; he was the author of Principia Mathematica. He looked at it, began to laugh, and said, "I always thought there was something wrong with the theory of types." This is more typical of Whitehead than almost anything else. He did not urge his views; but they were more openings up, adventures in imagination, insights into the nature of things. And if criticisms came, he was just as ready to take them as anybody -- unless perhaps if they were by letter from a student.

Ford: His books Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making show a transition from the position that he held in the earlier works, such as The Concept of Nature, and the position that comes to be his in Process and Reality. I wonder if you have a feeling of how the ideas developed from his classes? Did he discuss his own ideas in the course of his lectures? Or were they more like the material in Science and the Modern World?

Weiss: His classes were rather strange. If you had a book of pedagogy before you and checked off all the things that such a book would say a man should do: know names of the students, tell some jokes, talk relevantly to the text, answer questions fully and well -- he would fail miserably on every single count. Nevertheless, I think he was great and exciting. He would be set off by your questions in a direction which was not very clear, but eventually by a process of trial and error would come to answers that were, I thought, exceptionally profound and revealing and would throw the whole discussion in a new light. I took a course called Logic -- I still have the notes on it. There is nothing in it that had anything to do with the logic even of Principia Mathematica or the logic of C. I. Lewis or Sheffer or Langford or Wittgenstein or Russell. It is close to what’s in Process and Reality under the heading "Proposition." He gave you no way of moving from one position to another. He would just say, "This is a course in logic," and then talk about "propositions." There would be no discussion, no orientation, no way of tying in, even with the Principia. You would never know from being in his class that he was an author of Principia Mathematica. He never referred to it.

Ford: Did you take work in cosmology or the philosophy of religion with Whitehead?

Weiss: I’ve forgotten the names of the courses. But it didn’t really make much difference. They were roughly the same. The graduate/ undergraduate course was a little more popular to begin with. He started off when talking about extensive abstraction by referring us to C. D. Broad’s -- what he called "simple-minded" -- exposition of it and then went on. He would assign papers on special topics. I wrote a paper, I think, on the nature of space, a topic which had not been assigned. It didn’t make much difference to him. No matter what his topic, you could write on almost anything you wanted, and he would mark it very generously. I think the lowest mark I’ve heard him give was somewhere around B or B --. His marks usually ran B +, A, A+, A+ +. The highest I know of was A+ + +, given not to me, but to Everett Nelson.

I may have been the first, and certainly one of the very few, who wrote their doctoral dissertations with him. He was not a good dissertation director. My conferences with him had a single same pattern. I would come in with the dissertation, and he would make some general remarks. He was quite amiable and friendly, but he never gave me any really sharp criticisms. When I presented my thesis, I thought I had his approval. The department turned it down. I hadn’t realized that he hadn’t altogether thought it was a good thing. Anyway, after it was turned down, he picked up a bit and said: "Well, I think we can fix it up all right. Include your paper on the theory of types (which I had already published) and rearrange this and that." I had no further problem. I submitted it, and it went by. He could show one how to drop a chapter here, expand there, with more or less pleasant comments, but with no discussion of the ideas.

When I began teaching some of his works, I’d come up to Cam bridge to discuss the crucial issues with him. He used to put aside a couple of hours and talk to me. I would have questions right before me -- questions 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of two hours or so, although I know he was trying, I don’t think I got a clear answer to any of them. He wasn’t a direct, confrontational person, but someone whom you would prompt to think according to his own leanings.

Ford: Do you have any indication of places where he changed his mind, in the course of the years? Where he was groping through ideas -- ?

Weiss: I would say he was always groping through ideas and always changing his mind. I don’t think that there was a definite doctrine that he was maintaining. Everytime he thought, he thought afresh.

Ford: I take it he wasn’t interested in defending a doctrine.

Weiss: That’s right. And I would notice that when students would say to him, "But Mr. Whitehead, on page 47 you say this, and on page 96 you say that," he would manage to turn the conversation off in another direction, usually toward politics. You could not get him to answer, not because he couldn’t reconcile such difficulties, I suppose, but because he wasn’t interested in that way of thinking. He was already away from it.

Ford: Now Hartshorne was already there when you came?

Weiss: Hartshorne is about four years older than I. He already had his Ph.D. and was working on the Peirce papers. Whitehead had come, I think in 1924, and Hartshorne hadn’t really studied under him.

Ford: That is, he hadn’t really studied with him before you came in 1927?

Weiss: I think he was primarily a student of Hocking’s, not of Whitehead’s, although he appreciated Whitehead a great deal. But I don’t think that he was as close to the family as I became.

Ford: Was he much interested in Whitehead’s thought?

Weiss: Not at the time that I was there.

Ford: Was he working more with Peirce?

Weiss: He was working with Peirce, but Hartshorne, who in spirit is closer to Whitehead than any other person I know, was attracted to Whitehead’s way of thinking. He saw similarities in Peirce and Whitehead that I myself, also working on the Peirce papers, did not see. I think that Hartshorne, at that time, was far in advance of me philosophically, in maturity of philosophical knowledge, and in appreciation of philosophic thought. I was very much excited, not by Whitehead’s views but by the series of asides that were provoked of him by questions and remarks of others.

Ford: One particular thing I’ve been pursuing in the development of Hartshorne’s thinking concerns the distinction between the abstract and concrete natures of God. As William Ladd Sessions shows, this distinction was not made in Hartshorne’s dissertation (TPP 10-34). Do you know when or how Hartshorne developed the notion of God’s having both an abstract nature and a concrete nature? Was this influenced by Whitehead’s shift to a primordial and consequent nature for God?

Weiss: I doubt whether Hartshorne shifted because of Whitehead’s distinction between the primordial and consequent nature. I think that Hartshorne started as an idealist. The more he became interested in cosmology, the more he became aware that that God has to be involved in the world. On the other hand, Hartshorne also was a panpsychist very early. Panpsychism requires some kind of mutual involvement. I remember Hartshorne speaking about God’s love and concern for suffering; this inevitably drove him to pay attention to God as concerned with the world in contradistinction with that eternal essence which he later thought could be reached by the ontological argument.

Ford: But his doctoral thesis actually argues for a concrete universal.

Weiss: Wouldn’t you say that perhaps analysis of the concrete universal would eventually dissolve it into two dimensions, the abstract universal and the particular? That’s what Hartshorne eventually ended with. I think he began with the concrete universal and found it dissolved before him. And I don’t think he got it out of Whitehead. On the other hand, I think Whitehead, though not very well read in philosophy, did discuss many things with McTaggart, and I would suppose there was a very strong idealistic influence on Whitehead that was perhaps partly inchoate. And you might say that the dissolution is also present in some way in Whitehead. But certainly he never held idealism in a doctrinal way, the way Hartshorne did.

Ford: It seems to me that the problem that has always faced idealists is the matter of internal relatedness. What Whitehead did and what Hartshorne saw in Whitehead was the idea that a relation could be internal to one pole and external to the other. This is the character of a prehension.

Weiss: Well, I think that Hartshorne got that idea more from an examination of what he thought was a logical situation. And if you look at Hartshorne’s early references to this, you’ll see it’s done in logical terms. I don’t think it was done in concrete metaphysical terms.

Ford: What would be the earliest reference?

Weiss: Exactly where it would be I don’t know. But quite early, Hartshorne was arguing in logical terms. He was much taken by logic. Not being a logician, he was more impressed with it than Whitehead was. No one who’s worked hard in logic takes logical conclusions with the kind of earnestness I think that Charles does. And so he built a lot on that.

Ford: Who were some of the people who knew Whitehead well?

Weiss: Some were young men, such as George Morgan, who wrote a book on Dilthey and Nietzsche. Edward and Hester Pickman used to have the Whiteheads every summer at their place in Billerica, outside Lexington, Massachusetts. Mrs. Pickman is the daughter of a very distinguished convert to Catholicism who wrote a book called Roman Spring. She is a very devout Catholic, although her husband did not convert. They had a very spacious, gracious home in Billerica to which people from Harvard used to come.

Ralph Eaton was an instructor in the Harvard philosophy department. Whitehead gave a joint course in philosophy with him, I think, the year before I arrived in 1926. Eaton lived on the floor below the Whiteheads on Memorial Drive, and they saw one another quite frequently. Eaton committed suicide a year or two after I left Harvard, somewhere in the early 30’s.

Raphael Demos also knew Whitehead quite well. Professor and Mrs. Henry Osbourn Taylor, Professor and Mrs. James Woods, and Felix Frankfurter were frequently at his house, and he would talk over the whole range of subjects with them. Philosophically, there was nobody with whom he discussed. To be sure, when he had his Sunday evenings, if a number of his young people were about, he might. Or if there were a little philosophical group, he would talk about various thinkers. But there would never be any concerted, technical discussion of their views. He would cover the whole range of topics from poetry to politics to the philosophic outlook, the academic world, business, and so on.

Bernard Bandler knew Whitehead right from the start, as did Scott Buchanan. Bandler was a Harvard undergraduate who went on to do some graduate work with Whitehead and used to go to the Whiteheads’ Sunday evening gatherings quite frequently. He was a wealthy young man, with wide cultural interests, who used to ask the Whiteheads about their acquaintances with such figures as Yeats and others who used to visit them in Cambridge, England. Bandler became a psychiatrist, in Cambridge, Mass. Perhaps he hasn’t thought about philosophy for years, but I think he would be a fine source of information about the Whiteheads in England, since he would know, or at least have second hand knowledge from what Mrs. Whitehead said.

Ford: How did you find Mrs. Whitehead?

Weiss: She was more concerned with people, and particularly young people, than he was. The Whiteheads had lost one of their sons in the war, and I think she was -- partly for that reason, but partly natively -- very much interested in young men. She went out of her way to help them. I, particularly. I was poor and had no connections of any kind. She took me under her wing and helped me in all sorts of ways both personal and spiritual.

Ford: What were her interests?

Weiss: She was primarily interested in human beings, aesthetic matters, literature. She was a good conversationalist, somewhat on the sprightly side. Brought up in a French convent, she spoke French fluently; when Gilson came, she would talk to him in French. She had no particular philosophical knowledge, though I think she did go over many of her husband’s books and make comments on them, particularly those in connection with religion, or which were quasiliterary. I never discussed philosophical issues with her except so far as they come into a general conversation. I remember vividly a conversation that my wife, Evelyn, Altie (as she used to call Whitehead), and myself had about a tree. Altie insisted that a tree was a democracy [MT 33, 38], while all three of us objected very much, saying that a tree had an organic nature and a kind of distinctive individuality. That’s the only philosophical conversation I remember, where we were all involved. Most conversations were personal, on persons, or on political matters, or on the general issues of the day.

Ford: On history?

Weiss: On history, too. That reminds me of an anecdote. The Whiteheads used to put themselves to sleep by reading detective stories. They used to read the end of the detective story first because that allowed them to sleep at any time that they felt they were tired, after having read a certain amount in the story. They would not discuss the detective story, but they would discuss historical questions. Mrs. Whitehead, by the way, read quite widely, largely in literary and historical subjects. Whitehead, of course, was very much interested in history and would often make historical allusions.

Ford: I remember a friend of mine saying that he was quite impressed that Whitehead was using a history of the Council of Trent as his bed book, until he realized he had insomnia.

Weiss: He would read that. There was a period, you know, when the Whiteheads thought seriously of converting to Catholicism. This is what Evelyn told me. She said that it was only the question of the infallibility of the Pope that stood most in their way.

Ford: How early in their married life was this?

Weiss: I cannot tell you that. But there was a time she said they were seriously thinking of it. I would have a hunch, without any knowledge, that this may have occurred after the death of their son.

Ford: My guess would be that it is more likely the decade from 1890 to about 1900

Weiss: You may be right.

Ford: Because during that time Whitehead did a lot of reading in theology.

Weiss: I see.

Ford: And Russell reports that he was quite emphatically agnostic when they collaborated on the Principia Mathematica.

Weiss: I’ve never inquired further into it.

Ford: Russell says that Whitehead had a shrewd element to his character and would make a good administrator.

Weiss: I think this is very unlikely. Whitehead, at least at the time I knew him, was not a well-organized person; he showed no executive abilities, in any way that I could see. Of course, Russell is talking about a number of decades earlier.

Ford: But he had been Dean of Science.

Weiss: Yes. But if you were to look it up, I don’t think you would find that he was very effective. That was really more or less a made job.

Ford: Russell said that Whitehead had one major defect as administrator, and that was an inability to answer letters.

Weiss: I have some letters from Whitehead, which I gave to Victor Lowe. I think he wrote in longhand. I suppose that meant a limited amount of letter writing.

Ford: Can you remember any of these aphoristic comments that Whitehead made. Some that would be perhaps better than those we have from Lucien Price?

Weiss: That’s very hard -- sometimes they occur to me. I couldn’t think of them off hand, though. Occasionally I think of an aside of Whitehead’s, but as an aphorism. His remarks were for me essentially stimulants, provoking me to thought; I didn’t pay particular attention exactly to what the words were or how he put it. I was merely just prompted by what he said to excite thoughts in areas I had not expected to go.

Ford: What would be some that provoked your thinking?

Weiss: Well, it could be of any kind. He might say, "The music is a kind of veil, or decoration, over the entire room." That would make me begin to think about nature, music, how it related to the room in fact -- that sort of thing. His whole approach was not academic in a traditional sense. He didn’t approach philosophical questions or illustrations within the same rubrics that his colleagues did. He would come at them indirectly. You might even say, if I can use that kind of language, with a sophisticated innocence. There was a freshness to his illustrations that threw the issues in a new light.

Ford: I’ve heard some of the asides that Whitehead made.

Weiss: Such as?

Ford: Well, one was when he was introducing Russell to his colleagues; he said, "Bertie thinks I’m muddleheaded, but then I think he’s simple-minded."

Weiss: He said at the end of Russell’s series of addresses at Harvard, somewhere in the 30’s, that it was interesting to learn from Russell how ethical principles are reducible to the way in which a dog salivates. He wanted to thank Bertrand Russell for having made the darkness clearer. Now that’s more a typical remark of Whitehead -- having a subtle possible double meaning, the full intent of which you weren’t altogether sure.

Whitehead had the most wicked wink I’ve ever seen in any man. You had to watch him closely, and even then you weren’t altogether sure whether the wink occurred or not. In the middle of some conversation when he was talking to somebody, he’d look at you, and the eyelid would go down the tiniest fraction; if you weren’t alert to it, you would miss it; if you were alert to it, you weren’t altogether confident that it had occurred. I think that he then also revealed another side of himself -- letting you in on something but not in an obtrusive way, and even in such a way that perhaps it wasn’t important to bring you all the way in. I thought of Whitehead as having a kind of public naivete, and a very strong, tough, steel-like interior. If you ever broke through the upper crust, which I did occasionally by some sharp criticism, you could elicit very sharp answers from him. But this happened rarely. Usually he had marvelous control, and you could never discover what he really thought.

Ford: Before, you mentioned that Process and Reality was written in a great hurry.

Weiss: So it seemed to me.

Ford: Now, I just want to be clear on the reason. Do you think that he was afraid that his health or his vitality of thought might give out?

Weiss: That was the impression that I got from it. Don’t forget that Whitehead was then, sixty-eight?

Ford: Yes.

Weiss: He was not a vigorous-looking man, despite the fact that he had played cricket as a boy and despite the fact that he lived on into his eighties. He was hunched over and walked like an elderly man. The image I always had of him was a man of considerable age. Though his cheeks were red, his eyes clear, and his mind vigorous, the way he carried himself gave you the impression of an elderly man. I know that he did suffer from insomnia and sometimes seemed to have bouts of illness, and it’s quite possible that in order to present this result of long years of reflection, he thought he had to do it quite rapidly, to get it all down. On the other hand, I would say anybody writing a systematic book tries to get it all down quickly and then spends much time in revision. The major defect would be not the fact that he wrote it in a hurry, if he did, but that he didn’t have, or didn’t take time to revise it, improve it, and work on it more than he did.

Ford: Why do you suppose that was so?

Weiss: It may have been his desire to get it out of the way; it may have been his inability to spend much time at it. I just don’t know. I know that he didn’t like to discuss the book.

Ford: Now one thing he mentions in the preface is: "In these lectures I have endeavored to compress the material derived from years of meditation.

Weiss: Right

Ford: So it was a book that was the harvest of his ideas. But it’s also my contention that the book needed a catalyst, something which would focus the ideas together. I think this was found in the epochal theory of becoming. As a result of this, he shifted from extensive relations, as in The Concept of Nature, to prehensive relations; he became concerned with the intrinsic reality of an event, and therefore the whole thesis of feelings and of subjectivity arises, which are dimensions absent from the earlier books.

Weiss: Yes, I think that if one wanted to understand Process and Reality and see where its basic ideas came from, the wise move would be to see the gradual changes that his philosophical books underwent prior to Process and Reality. He was struggling, obviously, in his earlier books, The Concept of Nature and the like, to get a series of fundamental notions -- and he gradually expanded and subtilized them as time went on. This book is a result. I don’t know of any particular individual or point of view, though, that made a difference to him. I would guess that most of the changes are a result of his own reflections and self-criticisms rather than anybody else’s. He was more or less working alone. I mean, he had a few students, but that is about all.

He was aware of Bergson, Santayana, and Dewey, of course -- these contemporaries he knew. He had conversations with McTaggart, Moore, and he belonged to the Aristotelian Society. He often spoke well of Wildon Carr, but I think that was because Wildon Carr gave so much of his time and perhaps money to the development of the Society, rather than because of the ideas he had. On the whole, if you’re looking for a clue to the development of Whitehead’s ideas, your suggestion is a good one, of going through the books in order and seeing how the ideas that they had might have been modified.

By the way, you know that Whitehead read the Timaeus with great care? It was one of the books he studied thoroughly. I think a good deal of his philosophical grasp and interest and ideas can be traced back to his reflections on the fundamental issues stated by Plato in the Timaeus.

Ford: If I’m not mistaken, the Timaeus speaks of time as "perpetual perishing." It is surprising that Whitehead attributes this to Locke. I find Locke’s remarks on time very prosiac.

Weiss: He often said that Locke is the English Platonist, or the English Plato, though I would say that most of those ideas go back to the Timaeus. Don’t forget, as I said earlier, Whitehead was very generous in his attributions and not necessarily accurate.

Ford: Could we not say that your Modes of Being in some sense is a return to a more full-fledged Whiteheadian position with all four dimensions rather than just one dimension of actuality? That is, I would correlate your actuality with actual occasions, ideality with eternal objects, and existence with creativity.

Weiss: I cannot honestly say that it is a return to a Whiteheadian position. The fact that I never gave up the idea that actualities were substantial entities prevented me from ever going back to a view with an exaggerated (to my way of thinking) emphasis on becoming. The recognition of possibility came about not by thinking of Whitehead’s eternal objects, but by reflecting on the problems of ethics and the nature of obligation. The acknowledgement of existence came about because of the necessity of trying to deal with the common space and time of all the different actualities. This was partly for me a reflection on the difficulties of Leibniz’s Monadology and his need to invoke the doctrine of preestablished harmony.

My view of God, I think, could be said to be influenced by Whitehead. First of all, he made me see clearly that God was not only a special object of religious men, but had a metaphysical import. That view I could adjust to Aristotle’s, who also had a God which did not necessarily have religious import. I think I also benefited from Hartshorne’s views about God. So if there were any way of my going back to Whitehead, I would say it would have to be via the doctrine of God rather than any other way. But I cannot say that I have a good, clear, masterly understanding of what influenced me. I never resisted any influence in the sense that if I thought that someone said it, I’d want to say the negative. Whitehead was my teacher, and I admired him. I thought he stood far out, far above all his colleagues, a fact which would have shocked his colleagues if they heard me say this.

Ford: What was his opinion of your first book, Reality?

Weiss: He was not very favorable. He thought it was obscure and thought that perhaps I ought not to publish it. Then, of course, I did revise it, and he was happy that I dedicated it to Evelyn. But he himself found very little to commend in the book itself. As I look back, I think it’s a stronger book than he allowed it to be. I grant that it is quite obscure.

Ford: He did not give you any response on the issue of the substantiality of actualities?

Weiss: No. As I said earlier, it was not his inclination to discuss philosophic problems. When he went to class, he presented his views as a kind of likely story, the result of ruminations and reflections, and not as a kind of doctrine that he wanted people to accept -- though what he did teach was his own view.

Ford: I take it this would be a reason why the book tends to have so little argument in it.

Weiss: Right, right! He was not a dialectical person. He was trying to present a point of view. You must not forget that he was brought up in an England which philosophically was quite arid. He was trying to get a point of view. I was certainly influenced by him in recognizing that full-fledged systematic thinking is really what should be done. One knew that, of course, from Aristotle and Hegel, but to have a living person whom one admired holding such a view was certainly what encouraged me to continue, particularly when in this country we had the same kind of atmosphere -- perhaps even worse with the positivists -- than he encountered in England.

As you know, his book Process and Reality did not get good reviews in England. Susan Stebbing’s review in Mind is a disgraceful piece of work for somebody who thought of herself as having been his student. It was quite negative. I remember being shocked at its incompetence.

I remember as a graduate student looking in indices of books and being dumbfounded and annoyed that there were so many references to Russell and none to Whitehead. I thought Whitehead as being far superior as a philosopher to Russell. That’s an opinion I still hold.

References

TPP -- Lewis S. Ford, ed. Two Process Philosophers (American Academy of Religion: Studies in Religion, No. 5) for William Lad Sessions, "Hartshorne’s Early Philosophy."

Notes:

1 I wish to thank Professor Weiss for suggesting and cooperating in these two interviews (January 30 and February 18, 1974) while he was Guest Professor at Pennsylvania State University during the winter quarter; Professor Donald W. Sherburne for arranging for the transcription of our taped interviews; and especially Professor Mark Coppenger, now of Wheaton College. Wheaton. Illinois. who did the primary work of transcription.

2Actually the joint seminar with Hocking came much later, in the spring of 1934 and again in the spring of 1935.

This inquiry seeks to answer several questions. One is this: Does the revelation in Christ, when rightly understood, expose the one and only being that can bring my whole self into action to the measure I commit myself to it? Is this true not only for me but also for every human person? Am I only a fragment of myself, to the measure that I do not give myself wholly to what is revealed in Christ? And is this also true for every other human being?

Do all the constructive potentialities of human existence depend for their actualization on commitment to what is revealed in Christ? Do I and everyone else become self destructive to the measure that we do not thus commit ourselves? And does this also apply to all societies, to all civilizations, and to human history itself, namely, that these all, along with each human person, become self destructive to the measure that each is not committed to what is revealed in Christ?

These questions can be translated into the popular jargon of the existentialists by asking the same in different words thus: Do I become my authentic self only when committed to what is revealed in Christ? And is Christ the end and meaning of history? If so, what interpretation of this revelation can show this to be so?

In asking these questions it must be emphasized throughout that we are not here concerned with the name, that is the label, Jesus Christ. It is the reality, not the label, that operates with power to save when required conditions are present; and this reality is accessible to all persons when required conditions are present.

These are the presuppositions on which this inquiry is conducted. There is a further presupposition.

The measure of intelligence that one can exercise in the conduct of his life always depends in great part on how much understanding he has of his own ruling purpose. If a man’s governing purpose is to live under the guidance of the revelation of God in Christ, the amount of intelligence he can exercise in doing so will depend on his understanding of this revelation. On this account we believe it is a matter of first importance that we seek intellectual comprehension, to the measure of our ability, of what is involved in the event which is called revelation. It is not possible to achieve complete understanding of any event that deeply involves the complexities of human existence, because the human mind is neither omniscient nor infallible. All the complexities of human existence are involved in the event called revelation. But resources for inquiry into these complexities have greatly increased with the advent of psychiatry, clinical psychology, some of the social sciences, historiography, and some branches of philosophy. Consequently some further advance in our understanding of complex human events should be possible. With this hope we undertake the present venture.

It is my conviction that the commonly accepted interpretations of the event called revelation do not enable us to release the full powers of intelligence in service of our devotion. By full powers of intelligence I mean especially all the sciences and scientific technology. Until we can interpret the purpose of our lives in Christ in such a way as to bring all the sciences, theoretical and applied, into this service, it will be impossible for faith in Christ to exercise control over the conduct of life in an age dominated and controlled by science and scientific technology.

This age into which we are moving has been called post-Christian, meaning that the Christian faith has lost control over the conduct of life. The reason for this is not the rising power of sin; the reason is our failure to show how the rising powers of science can be applied to the purpose of human existence when this purpose is found in Christ. The blame does not rest on the evil of scientific civilization; the blame rests on those of us who have responsibility for interpreting the revelation in such a way that the powers of civilization can be brought into its service. This we have not done.

To say that science can be brought into the service of Christ does not mean that Christian living can ever be a science. The management of industry is not science even though industry has learned how to formulate many of its problems so that science can help solve them. Government can never be a science although government is learning to formulate many of its problems so that science can help solve them. Rearing children and education can never be sciences although we are learning to formulate some of the problems in a way that science can work on them. The same is true of religious living. It can never be a form of science, but science might be made to serve it.

Before we can begin to study this problem we must state the meaning we attach to certain key words, such as "revelation." Many different meanings have been given to this expression. Only confusion will result if we do not make plain which of these meanings will be given to this word in the following discussion.

First of all we shall understand that revelation is not a set of propositions about God but is the living presence of God unveiled and operating in the flesh, that is, in the bodies of persons, in their social relations and in history, in this world of time and space. Otherwise stated, the revelation is the actual, operating power of God unto salvation and not merely statements about this power. Therefore if kerygma means merely a message about God, and not the actual uncovered presence of God operating in human life, it is a fatal confusion and misunderstanding to identify the revelation merely with the kerygma. Of course it all depends on how one interprets this Greek word. If one means the actual, operative presence of God, then it can be identified with the revelation; but if it means only the message about the manifest presence of God in human life, it cannot be so identified.

This is the first distinction we make in our understanding of the word "revelation of God." This distinction is important because Rudolf Bultmann has brought the word kerygma to the front of theological discussion in dealing with revelation and there has been some confusion concerning what he means. I am not now debating the question about what Bultmann means nor about what the word should mean. I am only saying that the revelation of God, as I am here considering it, cannot be identified with propositions about God. The revelation is the actual presence of God in human life made manifest by the saving power of this presence. I only want to make clear the distinction between message about, and the actual revelation itself.

A second distinction is of equal importance. Revelation in Christ does not mean that God first begins to operate in human life when the revelation occurs. If God was not always present to create, sustain, and bring to greater good, there could be no human life. Human life exists only because of the actual and continuous operation of the divine presence. Therefore God is in human life continuously from the time it first began to be human; and this divine creativity will be with us so long as there is any human life at all. This is so because human life can be sustained in no other way. Therefore revelation in Jesus Christ cannot mean the first entry of God into human existence. On the contrary, the revelation is the disclosure of this presence. The presence has been here all the time. The revelation is the unveiling of it so that we can be aware of it. The revelation is not the first initiation of God in human life.

Let us now turn back again to the first distinction we made, that the revelation is not any set of propositions about God but is the actual presence of the saving and sustaining power. This being the case, the teaching of the New Testament writers about the revelation should not be identified with the revelation itself. The New Testament writers used the concepts available to them at the time to explain what happened; but the revelation is what happened, namely the actual event. It was not their teaching about it. What is written in the New Testament testifies to what happened; but what is there written is not a correct description of what happened. Certainly the New Testament writers sincerely tried to explain the creative transformation that occurred in their lives. But the revelation is the actual occurrence of it, not their attempts to explain it.

This difference between actual events and the unfitness of prevailing concepts to describe or explain them applies not only to the event of the revelation. It applies to many other events also. For example, people at that time went insane, but there was no psychology of insanity. Hence it could neither be described nor explained correctly. Also people at that time on occasion rose to the heights of genius. This we do not deny although we do deny that they correctly explained the psychology of genius or the social conditions required for its occurrence. People in those days recovered from sickness even as they do today, but we do not explain the recovery as they did. So we might go on with all manner of occurrences in human life, including the event of the revelation. This event actually occurred. The record and the testimony of the writers make this plain. We know it occurred because we observe it occurring today and we can compare their reports with our own observations. Only we use very different concepts to explain it. If the revelation did not occur today we would not have any revelation. We would only have concepts about it and that, we have seen, is not the revelation. Therefore the revelation must be something that occurs today even as it occurred in the time of Jesus and his disciples; otherwise, we would have no revelation to discuss.

So far we have not said what the revelation of God is. We have only tried to clear the ground of confusions and misunderstandings and get the problem clearly before us. The problem is to distinguish that kind of event that was the revelation, that is the revelation, and that forever continues to be the revelation of God in Christ.

Let us now look at the event wherein, according to the New Testament, the revelation occurred. First of all it occurred in the fellowship of the disciples with Jesus. Here was the beginning of the transformation of their lives that released their energies into powerful constructive channels. Obviously what did this was a kind of interchange between Jesus and his disciples. If anyone disputes that, I would like him to tell me what could have happened if it was not some kind of interchange. Yet this interchange was not merely a set of propositions about God, or about anything else, because propositions have no such transforming power. Furthermore, we have seen that the revelation was not a set of propositions. What, then, was this kind of interchange that had in it the power to transform the lives of the disciples and, I think we must say, also transformed the man Jesus?

Here we have the clue to the understanding of the revelation of God in Christ. The great religious conversions of history display this same pattern. St. Paul was transformed by the kind of interchange he had with the disciples whom he persecuted, plus an internal integration in his own personality of what he got from the disciples, plus his access to the creativity working through history that accumulates meanings gathered from the great prophets and delivers them with transforming power to the fellowship of Jesus and on to St. Paul. This is what transformed Saul of Tarsus into St. Paul, delivering him from inner conflicts that wasted his energy and directing this energy into "conflict free" channels that changed the course of history.

The same thing happened in the conversion of St. Augustine. Here again there was interchange with Christians; here again was the internal integration of what he got from his mother and others; and here again was his access to the creativity that works through history to accumulate meanings and deliver them with transforming power into his own life and on to other lives. The same is true of Luther as set forth by the leading psychiatrist of our time, Erik Erikson, in his account of Young Luther.

This creative transformation of human life is the revelation of God that occurred in the fellowship of Jesus and continues to occur in the lives of persons when required conditions are present. It operates in the form of a kind of interchange between individuals that opens wide and deep the channels of communion between them as individuals, and in so doing also opens them to the meaning of past events that occurred in their history.

The crucifixion and resurrection were further parts of the event called revelation. The crucifixion opened even more profoundly the hearts and minds of the disciples to all they had experienced with Jesus. This often happens to people when someone dies whom they have loved and lived with, especially if the death expresses profound devotion and sacrifice. Also the death of Jesus made them more responsive to the tremendous import of Hebrew history.

After the crucifixion came the resurrection. The resurrection was an experience the disciples had three days after the terrible shock of Jesus’ death on the cross. It took that long for the numbness of the shock to wear away so that they could again respond to one another and to the past in the way that they had done in the living fellowship with Jesus. So vivid and so powerful was this recovery of the kind of interchange with one another that they had had when Jesus was alive with them that it produced the feeling of his actual presence with them in bodily form. Many have had this experience after the death of someone deeply involved in their lives. Either they had this psychological illusion, which would be very natural, or, what is more likely, when they tried to tell of their experience the only way they could tell it was in words that led others to think they were speaking of the bodily presence. This would be most likely to happen after the story had passed through many mouths in an age that believed bodies rose from the dead. In any case, even if the body did come back from the grave, the important thing was not the presence of the body. The important thing was, and is, the creative and transforming power of communion that was in the fellowship of Jesus and that rose from the dead to possess the lives of the disciples.

This communion that rose from the dead, so to speak, was not only with one another. It was, I repeat, a communion that opened their hearts and minds to the meaning, hence to the transforming power, of past events, not only in the life of Jesus but also in Hebrew history. All deep communion between individuals has this quality of gathering up into itself the profound meaning of past events.

This interpretation I am offering of the revelation in Christ is, of course, not complete and final. The great creative events of human history involve depths and complexities which our powers of inquiry have never yet penetrated. This uncomprehended depth and complexity is, nevertheless, involved in our lives. It is with us now even as it was with Jesus and his disciples. If it is not with us now there can be no revelation for us here and now. What we cannot comprehend and explain in it we bring to consciousness by means of myths and non-cognitive symbols. But it is our responsibility to try to understand as fully as is possible so that we can apply our intelligence to the service of Christ.

Perhaps the nature of this revelation can be further explained if we look at Judas Iscariot and his reaction to it. I am indebted to professor Bernard Loomer for this suggestion about Judas, although I take full responsibility for my development of the suggestion. Also in this understanding of Judas I must read into the story much that we do not know about Judas; but what I say about Judas is, I hold, true to life, even if it is not true historically of that particular man.

According to my interpretation, Judas was the strongest, the most determined and the most intelligent of the disciples. He joined the fellowship of Jesus thinking that here he would find a great leader to inspire and perpetuate the Jewish faith. But in time he discovered that Jesus was a revolutionary, a corrupter and betrayer of the true faith as Judas understood it. If Jesus continued he would lead the people astray with disastrous consequences. Perhaps Judas and Jesus had several private talks together, man to man. Finally they came to the conclusion that there was not room on earth for two such powerful and determined personalities with opposing views of the way of life that man must go to be saved. Therefore one of the two must be killed and the other the killer. Jesus decided to be the one killed and Judas the killer. Of course Judas did not kill with his own hands. Superior and intelligent men do not do that. They get others to do the killing for them. So it was with Judas.

But after the crucifixion Judas could not cast out of his life that profound communion and deep understanding of one another that he had in the fellowship with Jesus. It would not let him go, try as he did to cast it out. Such a torment it became that his only escape was to kill himself, as you know he did according to the record.

Saul of Tarsus who became St. Paul was a similar character, powerful, determined, highly intelligent. The disciples of Jesus were spreading a gospel that corrupted the faith of the Jews. They must be destroyed before the poison spread beyond control. So he committed his life to that undertaking. But the kind of communion, the kind of understanding, the kind of love, that he felt reaching out to him from these disciples of Jesus got hold of him, and he could not cast it out. Slowly, largely subconsciously, the great Jewish tradition and the teaching of the prophets underwent a reinterpretation in his mind when the sense of this communion got hold of him.

It exposed a new way of life that possessed him with such power that he could not cast it off. Perhaps at moments he was tempted to kill himself as Judas did when the conflict raged in him. But the new way of life finally won over the old way, and Paul becomes a new man. Now for the first time his whole self came into action, his authentic self, with all its constructive powers.

Something of the same sort happened with St. Augustine, who was a man of similar kind, powerful, determined, profoundly intellectual.

Here are two ways of life, fighting for supremacy throughout human history. One is the exercise of power to dominate, control, and shape men and things to conform to a predetermined way of life. The other is to undergo creative transformation expanding the range and depth of what can be appreciated as good and distinguished as evil. The transforming power of this second way operates in the form of deep communion which I call creative interchange between individuals and peoples. This second way of life is the revelation of God in Christ.

This brings us to a second question. Can the revelation of Cod in Christ thus interpreted be called the meaning of history? If so, in what sense?

To answer that question we must again be very careful in defining our terms. The word "meaning" as I use it in this context, does not refer to some purpose to be consummated beyond history. Neither does it refer to any supernatural power or transcendent being allegedly directing the course of history in some mysterious way. Neither do I mean to suggest that history itself has a kind of mind with a meaning or purpose of its own. Neither do I mean to suggest that there is some final outcome that the course of world history is predetermined to attain.

When I ask the question, What is the meaning of history? I am only asking if, amid all the diverse and conflicting processes and meaningless events that occur in history, there is some one process that, when required conditions are present, progressively creates something of supreme importance for human beings?

The innumerable events that occur in human history cannot be fitted into any comprehensive pattern. This I understand to be the view of the most competent historians, and I accept their judgment. It would be folly for me to dispute it. What I do ask is this. Is there one continuous thread of development throughout human history -- sometimes reduced to a trickle, at other times increasing in volume -- that shapes the destiny of man for good or evil? My answer to that question is in the affirmative.

History in the sense of greatest concern to man is not past events. Neither is it merely what historians tell us about past events. History is the accumulation of the resources for human living gathered through a long sequence of generations and delivered to the present to make us what we are. This accumulation and transmission of resources is accomplished by a kind of interchange between individuals. For each individual it begins with infancy. It is the kind of interchange by which the individual from infancy on acquires what we call the culture of his time and place. But this culture is precisely the accumulation of resources for living that has been gathered through a long sequence of generations.

How full and deep is this volume of accumulated resources transmitted from generation to generation, and whether the volume is made deeper with values more profound, or made shallow with values more superficial, depends on how full and deep is the communion between parent and child, between man and man, between diverse divisions of society and of humanity. When the communion is wide and deep, the appreciative consciousness of man becomes wide and deep, and the great values emerge, both tragic and triumphant.

This gives us the answer to our question, What is the meaning of history? The meaning of history is the creation of the human level of existence when human level means that level where there can be indefinite increase in range and depth of values appreciated and evils distinguished; indefinite increase in range and depth of what can be known and controlled; indefinite increase in the depth and complexity of man’s subjectivity, both conscious and unconscious. This threefold development is the human level, and it is created by history, that is, by the transmission of the consequences of past events to the newborn infant so that he progressively assimilates them in a way that creates his own mind and personality. The newborn infant has none of all this at birth. How far this creativity can go in creating the human level in the case of any one individual depends partly upon his innate capacity but most of all upon two other features: (1) how wide and deep is the volume of history that reaches him, that is, how abundant and coherent are the values that have been accumulated in the history he inherits and (2) how deep is the communion he is able to have with other persons who embody these meanings accumulated through a long sequence of generations.

The key to this whole creativity of history is communion. Communion means two things: (1) how profoundly and completely does one individual acquire from the other all that the other can appreciate as good and distinguish as evil; (2) how completely can each individual integrate into his own subjectivity and make his own what he thus acquires from the other.

This communion is the creativity of history. This is the way the human level of existence is created in each generation beginning with the newborn infant. This is the way the human level of existence has been progressively created through a sequence of generations reaching back for a million years. Therefore this communion is the meaning of history when "meaning of history" refers to something that is going on in history which is of supreme importance for the human level of existence. It is of supreme importance for us because it creates the humanness of us. Since this communion is the revelation of God in the form of Christ, Christ is the meaning of history.

Let us recapitulate the argument since this is a complicated subject. Amid all the conflict and confusion and meaningless happenings that occur in human history there is one continuous thread of development that is always present, beginning with every newborn infant. This continuous thread of development is the creation of the human level of existence. With many ups and down the human level has been progressively created during the past million years.

To make this plain, however, we must state what we mean by the human level of existence, analyzing the human level in a somewhat different way than we did before. First of all is the biological organism with its big brain, its upright posture, its hand and opposed thumb, its vocal organs making possible enormous variety in vocalization so that language and other symbols can develop to expand indefinitely the range of meaning, entering into human life.

The second distinctive characteristic of the human level is that, despite periods of recession, successive generations add something to the diversity and range of meanings which language and other symbols can carry.

The third distinctive characteristic is a complex and profound subjectivity, both conscious and unconscious, acquired after infancy by the individual absorbing the complexity of responses and meanings of a culture that has been created through many generations accumulating the resources for human living.

The fourth distinctive characteristic is a biological organism that cannot survive unless sustained by the resources of a complex culture, therefore an organism that has evolved not like other organisms by eliminating the unfit in the struggle with the physical environment, but by eliminating those organisms unfit to absorb and sustain the complexities of a culture progressively accumulated through the sequence of many generations.

With this understanding of what distinguishes the human level of existence it is plain that man has been progressively created by a process of history. This creative process began something like a million years ago with an organism and way of life much the same as that of the other subhuman animals. The development of an organism fit to embody a culture of growing complexity seems to have been completed about 50,000 years ago. Since then what has been progressively developed is not the organism but two things preeminently: (1) knowledge and power of control, (2) the depth and complexity of man’s subjectivity.

If this is what has been and is being created, we ask: What amid all the other processes going on in history is the one process that does this creating and will here be called the creativity in history, so called because it does progressively create the human level of existence when required conditions are present.

There are two candidates for this basic creativity in history. One is the process that expands the range of knowledge and power of control now today reaching its highest attainment in modern science and scientific technology. The other candidate is the process that creates depth and complexity of man’s subjectivity. Here we have two kinds of meaning; one can be called objective meaning, the other subjective meaning. Whenever individuals communicate with one another both kinds of meaning are generally involved although one of the two may greatly dominate over the other. Objective meaning refers to what is going on in the world round about, either past, present or future. This objective meaning is our knowledge and our power of control. Subjective meaning is what the communication reveals concerning what is going on in the personality that speaks. For example, if I say, The weather is stormy, reference to the weather is objective meaning. But if my tone of voice, facial expression, and other forms of expressiveness indicate that I am anxious because of the weather, or elated or otherwise concerned, what is thus expressed in the communication is the subjective meaning. What any communication reveals, not about the world, but about the person who speaks, is subjective meaning. In deep communion subjective meaning is dominantly what is communicated from one to the other. Also it is this kind of creative communion that creates depth and complexity of the subjectivity of the individual. The individual acquires more subjectivity in a form free from inner conflict to the measure that he experiences deep communion with others. To the measure that he does not, his subjectivity is shallow and addicted to inner conflicts that are now being studied by clinical psychology and psychiatry.

There is not time here for any elaborate analysis, but I think it can be shown that a man’s subjectivity is the most distinctive characteristic of the human level of existence. Certainly to be human one must have knowledge about the world and technology to control it. But the knowledge and the technology are the tools created by the subjectivity for its own satisfaction. Also machines can get knowledge and exercise the control of technology but they do not have any subjectivity. Hence the subjectivity is what makes us distinctly human.

If this analysis is correct, we again approach the answer to the question, What is the meaning of history? Is it to create the knowledge and power of a Judas Iscariot to impose a predetermined order upon men and things? Or is to create depth of subjectivity created in that kind of interchange between individuals of one another, a kind of interchange that can be called communion or fellowship or love.

If we accept the second of these two, it becomes apparent that what is revealed in Jesus Christ is the meaning of history because in that fellowship we find this kind of interchange brought to such a high level of dominance over counterprocesses that it has stood before all subsequent Western history as the revelation of this way of life. It is also the revelation of what creates the human level of existence, sustains it in being, saves it from its self-destructive propensities and, when required conditions are present, progressively creates it toward the greatest good that man can ever attain when "greatest good" means the widest range, diversity, depth, and integration of all values.

Again to revert to the barbaric jargon of present-day theology, what is revealed in Jesus Christ is the eschatological event. Whenever this same kind of communion that is revealed in the fellowship of Jesus Christ rises to dominance over all other processes in human life, we have recurring the eschatological event, to use the language of Rudolf Bultmann.

I shall now endeavor to defend this understanding of revelation by showing that it is implicit in the teaching of three leading theologians of our time, even when it is not acknowledged by them. By name the three are Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann.

According to Tillich, man’s ultimate concern points to being itself which cannot be limited by any distinguishing characteristic whatsoever. As soon as you distinguish anything whatsoever you have a kind of being, that is, a being alongside other beings. Tillich repeatedly denies that any such distinguishable being can be identified with God except by way of idolatry. To be sure some distinguishable kind of being can be used as a symbol pointing to the unconditioned being that is beyond all characterization. But it is the unconditioned, which is to say being itself beyond all distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, that alone is man’s ultimate concern and that alone can be given the name of God when this word refers not to a symbol pointing on to God but to what is very God and not a symbol.

Now against this background let us see what Tillich says about the revelation of God in Christ. First of all, he says, that when we look for the revelation, the man Jesus as an actual, historical figure fades out. What we find in place of the man is what Tillich calls the "picture" of the man presented in the New Testament. This picture is not like a photograph, giving us a portrayal of the man as he was in actual existence. Rather it is like a painting, giving us the experience which the disciples had in interchange with this man and with one another in the fellowship that formed around him and that continued after his death.

Now what does this mean? Tillich does not seem to draw one obvious conclusion from all this; but the conclusion is plain. It means that the writings of the New Testament depict the transforming power of that kind of interchange which occurred in the fellowship of Jesus. I know that is not what Tillich says about the revelation, but it is inevitably involved when he says that the New Testament is a picture which, like a work of art, interprets in depth the experience of the disciples in their fellowship with Jesus.

Let us turn now to what Tillich explicitly states is the revelation of God in Christ. As said before, when we look for the revelation, according to Tillich, the man Jesus with all his human limitations fades away so that we see not the man but the power of being for which and in which and by which he lived. Thus the revelation is not anything in the man nor in the fellowship but in the transparency of the man through which we see on beyond him and his life. Through this transparency we see not a loving Father, as tradition has asserted, but the awful mystery of being. His suffering, his rejection, his crucifixion, the apparent futility of all his striving, combined with his unwavering devotion, as pictured in the New Testament, obliterate the significance of the man except as a transparent medium through which we become aware of the mystery of being. In this way Jesus reveals not himself, and not any distinguishable kind of being that might be called God, but rather the mystery of the power of being. What is revealed is not anything knowable; what is revealed is the ultimate mystery.

Here we have two interpretations of that event which is called the revelation of God in Christ. Furthermore, both these interpretations are true in the sense that both can be truly found in that event. According to one interpretation there is the mystery of being, as Tillich says. That is not disputed. But also revealed is the kind of interchange which transforms the lives of men in deep communion. The question at issue is not which of these two is revealed. Both are revealed. The question at issue is rather this: Which of these two revelations has the power to transform the lives of men to save them from self-destruction and bring them to the fullest actualization of the constructive potentialities of human existence? I claim that the communion revealed in the fellowship of the disciples with Jesus is what has the power to do this and not the mystery of being. Therefore the correct interpretation of the revelation of God in Christ is this creative interchange. Furthermore, as I have indicated, this is implicit in what Tillich says about the revelation, although he identifies the revelation with the mystery of being and not with the communion.

Now we turn to Karl Barth. Barth says that the revelation comes to us through the Bible. But he insists on a qualification which is of utmost significance. He insists that the Word of God in the Bible is "inaccessible and inconceivable" to the natural powers of the human mind. Only when God has chosen the individual to receive divine grace, can he receive the revelation. Then Barth goes on to make a further point of crucial significance. He says that the Bible cannot be correctly interpreted even by one who has received God’s grace because "we carry this treasure in earthen vessels." For this reason, says Barth, the individual should discuss with others who have received God’s grace what the Bible reveals. The church is made up of those who have received God’s grace. So, says Barth, members of this fellowship of the church should criticize and correct, suggest and instruct one another concerning what is spoken in God’s Word. Outsiders cannot participate, because they have not the grace to believe and know and hence to learn by this interchange with one another. But in the church this communion transforms the otherwise ordinary words of the Bible into the Word of God. The structure of the human mind must be transformed, says Barth, before the revelation can be received. But how is this transformation accomplished? The answer to that question is implicit in what Barth says. The transformation enabling us to receive the revelation is accomplished by a kind of interchange occurring in a special kind of fellowship, namely, that found in the Church of Christ. So here again, we find implicit the truth about the revelation even though, like Tillich, Barth overlooks the truth involved in what he says. He overlooks it because, like Tillich, his attention is directed to something else. Both men have an obsession that will not let them recognize the truth they inadvertently expose when they discuss the revelation of God in Christ. Barth’s attention is so focussed on certain traditional dogmatic concepts, Tillich’s on his ontology, that both look away from the truth that is implicit in what they say.

In the theology of Karl Barth the communion in it, whereby alone the Bible can be the word of God, is not an incidental reference. It is basic to his entire teaching. Everything he says about divine revelation points to the church as the medium through which it must occur. Yet he does not seem to recognize that this can only mean one thing: The revelation of God in Christ must come to you and me by way of a kind of interchange between individuals in deep communion, whereby the meaning of past events can possess our minds and transform our lives, even as it did in the fellowship that formed around Jesus.

Barth disagrees radically with Tillich. For Barth, God revealed in Christ is a definite, knowable person. The man of flesh and blood in the actual time and place of his personal existence is the revelation of God. The eternal dwelt in this man under all the limitations of his existence, temporal, spatial, cultural. According to Tillich this is nonsense and unbelievable. But according to Barth this only shows that Tillich has not received the grace from God whereby he would be free to believe what the Word of God truly teaches, that in this man Jesus God truly dwelt.

Here we have the irreconcilable conflicts between the leading theologians of our time. But underneath their conflicts is a basic truth common to them all, if only they would recognize it as implicit in their teaching. This basic truth they have in common is the revelation of God in Christ to be found in the communion of his fellowship. Their disputes are on matters that do not pertain to the revelation even when they think otherwise. They all agree implicitly that the communion which occurred in the fellowship of Jesus was and is the event necessarily involved in the revelation. But they fail to see that it is the very revelation itself. Thus they fight over issues that are irrelevant to the revelation while unintentionally agreeing on what the revelation truly is. In Tillich and Barth the truth about the revelation is inadvertently conceded, although apparently unacknowledged.

We turn now to Rudolf Bultmann. We find in him also that this same implicit truth is involved in his teaching about the saving event of the revelation of God in Christ. In Bultmann, however, it stands out even more clearly in what he calls the eschatological event.

Man’s ultimate concern is with Being, says Heidegger, but our sin gives to Being the appearance of nothingness. Hence our anxiety and our despair. Now, says Bultmann, out of the void of nothingness comes the Word of God spoken through Christ, telling us that we are forgiven for our sin if we acknowledge our condition and accept the message. If we make the decision to commit ourselves wholly to this message, and stake our all upon it, the void of Nothingness is no longer a void. It comes to us in love and mercy, in the form of the Word of God spoken in Christ.

The kerygma , says Bultmann, otherwise called the gospel message, must be accepted in its purity, free of the distortions of mythology and free of the falsifications imposed on it when it is confused with scientific knowledge about the natural world. Also it must be freed from philosophical speculation about what lies beyond the reach of scientific testing. All this human construction must be wiped away, so that the Word of God can reach us with its true and full meaning, thus enabling us to accept it with a decision of the total self. This decisiveness and completeness of acceptance is prevented when we become entangled with questions about how it is related to scientific knowledge and philosophical speculations.

When a man thus accepts the gospel message with the total self, he exemplifies the eschatological event, which for Bultmann means the culminating point of history. To bring about such a decision is the goal of history, says Bultmann. For this reason and in this sense when a man makes this decision, it can be said that the end of history is attained, otherwise called the culminating point of history or the meaning and purpose of history. When such a decision is made, says Bultmann, eternity breaks into time. This seems to be a paradoxical way of saying that the end (the goal) of history is reached to the measure that men live committed to, and sustained by, the kind of fellowship that Jesus had with his disciples.

Bultmann goes on to say that this decision is made in Christ when it is made in response to preaching of the gospel. It cannot be made in any other way because Christ reaches us only in our response to preaching.

If "preaching," as Bultmann is using the word, merely means standing in a pulpit and expounding the Bible, then it is not true that the decision of freedom and the authentic self occurs only when one is listening to a preacher. But the statement takes on truth when "preaching" means the kind of interchange creating the kind of fellowship Jesus had with his disciples. I believe that a careful study of Bultmann will show that this is implicit in what he means by "preaching." Otherwise preaching could not be identified with what happened in the fellowship of Jesus since that fellowship most certainly was not limited to pulpit and pew nor to any preaching from the New Testament. The latter did not exist at the time Jesus lived.

It remains to explain what Bultmann means by "the presence of eternity" in his book by that title. This again is paradoxical language, unnecessarily confusing. On page 153 of this book he quotes Erich Frank as stating what Bultmann himself wants to say’ "to the Christians the advent of Christ was not an event, in that temporal process which we mean by history today. It was an event in the history of salvation, in the realm of eternity . . . , in an analogous way, history comes to an end in the religious experience of any Christian ‘who is in Christ’. . . For although the advent of Christ is an historical event which happened ‘once’ in the past, it is, at the same time, an eternal event which occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian."

Now if "eternal" used in this quotation meant "not temporal," the expression "eternal event" would be not merely paradoxical but a flat contradiction of terms like "round square," because events are necessarily temporal. But if we interpret the expression by its context and are charitable, "eternal event" in Christ can be understood to be an event having two characteristics. First it is a kind of event that occurred not only in the fellowship of Jesus but recurs again and again in later history where individuals are gathered in the same kind of fellowship. No event can occur more than once because time is irreversible. But in the common idiom it is proper to say that the same event occurs again and again when we mean that such events display characteristics that are much the same. For example, the event of spring occurs every year. The event of spring is never the same event that occurred in previous years, but we call it the same event because all the events of spring have the common characteristic of life springing anew into abundance. So it can be said that the event that occurred with Jesus and the disciples occurs again and again because this event always displays the characteristic of life springing anew into abundance.

This event has a second characteristic according to the quotation we are examining. There it is said that the event is "not an event in that temporal process which we mean by history today." This statement also calls for interpretation. That temporal process which we mean by history today is a sequence in which one event follows another without that kind of creative transformation which we have seen occurs in the fellowship of Jesus. In deep communion there is a transcendence of time and history in one sense, namely, the past takes on a new character relative to the present. This new past creates a new future for the participant individuals.

So here again we find implicit in Bultmann the teaching that the revelation is the creative and transforming communion that occurred in the fellowship of Jesus, although Bultmann covers this over with obscure and paradoxical statements apparently in the endeavor to serve the church by making preaching the one way in which this revelation is transmitted to us. But in his endeavor to do this he falls into inconsistencies that have been exposed by several writers, most recently by Schubert Ogden in his book Christ and Mythus.

This completes our survey of the three theologians. All Christian theology has been largely devoted to seeking an answer to this question: When Christ is distinguished from the man Jesus as the divine being associated with the man, what is Christ and how associated with the man? Most diverse and conflicting answers have been given to this question, thereby showing that no answer so far can be accepted as final and complete. Rather this diversity and contradiction shows that the question has not been answered. The answer to the question, what is Christ, as distinguished from the man Jesus? Most especially what is the living Christ, with us now and always with human beings? are questions we have tried to answer by drawing upon resources of inquiry now available that were not accessible in other times.

The man Jesus was not Christ nor was he the agent that brought creative communion to such dominance that it has become for us the revelation of God in human life. What has made the fellowship of Jesus the revelation of God is not the man. What has made it the revelation of God are two things: (1) The social, psychological, historical conditions at that time made possible this rise to high dominance of creative communion when the right individuals were brought together. (2) Subsequent developments in history have lifted this fellowship to a mountain peak where it can be seen by all of Western culture, thus revealing to us the saving power of this kind of communion.

One last word needs to be said about the relation of metaphysical systems and ontologies to the revelation of God in Christ. It is a perversion of the Christian faith to identify it with any metaphysical system or with any ontology. This is so whether the system be naive supernaturalism or that of Hegel or Whitehead or Hartshorne or Paul Weiss or Paul Tillich or any other. These systems come and go, depending on the prevailing form of culture and epoch in history. To tie Christian faith to any of them is to take your stand on a sinking ship. Deep communion goes on regardless of the prevailing metaphysica. To quote a passage from Thomas Hardy: "A maid and her swain go whispering by. Earth’s empires will fall into night e’er their story shall die."

The point of that quotation is not sex although sex is involved. The point is rather this: This kind of whispering is the communion in which individuals find that profound appreciative understanding that saves from deadly loneliness and self-destructive anxiety. Substitute for "earth’s empires" the words "metaphysical systems and ontologies," and the truth of the statement is even more apparent.

Every metaphysical system must be rejected when it offers itself as the foundation of religious faith. Each metaphysical system is a transitory perspective that an individual has attained. It is the most comprehensive vision he can achieve; but beyond the bounds of every such vision hovers the dark mystery of unexplored being. As creativity operates through history new metaphysical systems will arise. Some of them may be more profound and comprehensive than any we have today. But none will be omniscient, none will be infallible; each one in time will be cast off by the creativity of history as it creates further visions reaching farther into the depths and heights of being.

Man’s faith must be commitment to this creativity and not to any one of the transitory visions that it brings forth in the minds of men. These visions are precious when each is the most honest, profound, and comprehensive vision the individual can attain. But life in Christ is life committed to the creativity that creates in each of us an appreciative understanding of the vision of the other person and the other people and integrates these into a more comprehensive vision.

While it was always an error to identify faith in Christ with some metaphysical system, whether of Plato or Aristotle or Hegel or Whitehead, or some other, it was not a fatal error until now. But now we have reached a period in history when this false identification becomes suicidal for the Christian faith. The reason for this can be briefly stated. We have come to a time when all the diverse cultures, systems, and peoples must live together in intimate association one with the other. Also we have come to a time when science is continuously revolutionizing our view of the world. For these two reasons we must live in the power and keeping of the creative transformation that expands our vision and not identify our faith with any one vision that happens to be most popular at the time.