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"Openness to the New" is a very general pattern of response, and yet one which is not easy to understand. In this article we shall be looking for some structures of response which can be facilitated by apocalyptic and by process thought respectively, and which can illuminate our own situation and what it is to recognize the new and respond to it adequately. The "new" will be taken to include both the new which encounters us and the new actions which, as active subjects, we contribute to the process of life.

There are two ways of coming at the problem. One can ask: what kind of self is resilient enough to confront the new successfully? Or one can ask: what kind of vision of the world is likely to be able to incorporate the new into it? Clearly, these two approaches must converge, since self and world mutually constitute each other. Yet in short-run practical terms, these two lines of inquiry may go in quite conflicting directions. I shall comment briefly on this problem in conclusion, but the present paper will leave the question of the self aside and consider the sort of vision of the world which may be fruitfully open to the new.

The thesis is a simple one: there is an old way of perceiving the world which is sharply challenged today but which still remains the most fruitful and, I believe, the most hopeful option. The world-vision which can receive, and within which we can respond to the new, and ourselves create and work for novelty, is some sort of "narrative vision," in which we see ourselves in the world as part of a story. If we can see the new as, so to speak, an unexpected surprise in the plot of the story, or see our own work as making the story go in a new way, we can be open to it -- even though our anticipations are constantly challenged and transformed by the actual unfolding course of events.

What makes the narrative so fruitful as a vehicle for a world-vision is that a narrative vision can be something which we do not simply observe or listen to. We see ourselves as actors in a story; the "view" is not simply something which happens to us, but is also what we do, how we put our impress on the progressing story.

Now, narrative vision or seeing the world in the form of a story is out of fashion in our world. In fiction and drama and film the traditional forms of plot are being pressured out of shape in a way that has never happened since people began to tell stories. In theology, the narrative form of sacred history, as in Lucan theology, is under attack. There are good reasons for these attacks on traditional narrative vision. Nevertheless, we need to give fresh attention to this way of composing reality, for a new formulation of it is necessary if we are to be open to the new. Some attention to the story form in apocalyptic can show us some of the reasons why the narrative form is in trouble, while process theology has some fundamentally useful hints about how we may re-imagine the story, or grasp a new narrative vision of the world, which will enable us to set the new into a meaningful framework and respond to it with hope.

In the story or narrative the past, present, and future are held together in some kind of sequential connection. The heart of narrative is the power of memory to penetrate the future. That is, events still to come are correlated "as if" remembered. It is precisely this ability of narrative not merely to order the past but to run ahead of the present, to give us an expectation, which is the presupposition for the new to be recognized as new, as the surprise that changes the plot, or what Aristotle called the peripety, the unexpected change in fortune. It is only because we expected something else that we recognize the new as new. In a narrative world-vision, then, the future can be something in which there is room for anticipation and spontaneity. In narrative the future does not have to become an object to be manipulated, but rather is an arena for further outreach and participation.

Such a narrative vision can be contrasted with two other options which are much more popular theologically. One of these is the quest for being. Here, the matter of time and sequence recedes into the background, and one learns to be attentive to being, to why there is something rather than nothing. One thinks of Tillich in whom this motif was in tension with a more temporal perception of ultimate concern, and of Heidegger who has done so much to provide categories for modem theology. Suggestive as this way is, it does not by itself open an avenue to the new or to hope but rather to a world in which the difference between the new and old is irrelevant. The other world-vision which contrasts with narrative vision is that of the moment as carrying the total weight of meaning. Such a vision may indeed be open to the future, but it strongly discounts sequential or developmental tracts of experience, since it claims that the effort to relate moments to each other makes them objects which one strives to control.

A genuine narrative vision transcends this dichotomy of freedom in the moment on the one hand, and objectification and striving to control the future on the other. A story sustains the precariousness and openness of the situation until it reaches its end, and does so by virtue of that power of imagination, or what I called memory that penetrates the future, to envisage a stretch of time as both sequentially related and also developing through human opportunity, intention, decision, and being acted upon.

The problems of narrative form and narrative imagination have not received much attention from philosophers or theologians. Hans Frei is at work upon a book showing how both German idealism and British empiricism turned away from the story form, which has always been so important for Christian faith, to think about other ways of seeing reality. The new linguistic and phenomenological methods of interpretation do deal with narrative, but so far they have not done much to clarify the major narrative visions which are relevant for theology. Thus we shall have to venture some rather broad generalizations. Nevertheless, apocalyptic can show us what some of the roots of the problem are, and process theology can offer some hope for a new grasp of narrative form.

There are many kinds of stories, but for our purpose we need to consider just two. I will call them the little story and the big story. Fundamental to the narrative vision is the "story of my life," the life story or the little story. Despite the chaos and absurdity into which the story has fallen in fiction, we all try to make sense of our lives by seeing them as stories. Men have done this as far back as we can see, and they still do it today, however precariously. But the early forms of the life story or the little story were not open to the new. Quite to the contrary, as Mircea Eliade has so skillfully shown us, a major effort of the archaic narrative vision was precisely to exclude the new from the story. A principle function of archaic religion was to wash out or forgive all aberrant new things that happen in the life stories of archaic men, and to make their lives conform to one story or perhaps to a bundle of stories which cover all the situations that are recognized. Eliade has also documented the extreme persistence of this style of ordering life into a story which is not open to the new, in the rural cultures of Europe right down to the time of his own youth, and not only so, but he brilliantly predicted the resurgence of this kind of life story in the counterculture in a book which he wrote as long ago as the 1940’s.²

Another aspect of Eliade’s work points to the heart of our thesis: he shows the correlation which exists between the life story or the little story, and the cosmogonic story, the big story. In archaic religion each man finds meaning by repeating the creation, or to put it the other way about, he finds meaning by projecting the pattern of his own little story into the great story which explains not only his own little life but how things are. This correlation between little story and big story, between life story and the story of the universe, is fundamental to the whole storytelling enterprise as a way of giving meaning to man’s life.

For the Western world, the main alternative to the pattern of repetition of the foundation-story in the individual life story developed in the Hebrew and Christian vision of sequential, successive time, a time of historical struggle and openness, a time which did not wash out the unique, unrepeatable event, but dignified it by giving it its own place in the unrolling process. Without trying to unravel the complexities of this vision, we can turn again to Eliade who has seen the importance of apocalyptic for our topic. The narrative vision in which unique, unrepeatable things do take place is a difficult vision; its power of dignifying the unique event is threatened by the frequent inability of the community which shares this vision to correlate their actual historical experiences with the pattern of meaning provided by the vision. The apocalyptic literature represents just such a crisis of narrative vision. On the one hand, the great Jewish and Christian apocalypses retain the form of dramatic narrative. They recognize the "new" and in particular the future is awaited as the coming of the new. On the other hand, the hope for the end is a confession that the occurrence of new things cannot be tolerated indefinitely.

Thus, ancient apocalyptic brings into focus some of the issues that a narrative vision struggles with today. To see our existence as some kind of coherent story, we have to be able to relate it to a larger story -- our "little story" has to be fitted into a "big story" just as archaic men and ancient apocalyptists both saw. It is almost inevitable that the big story should, to some extent, be a mirror of the little story. But this is precisely the central point of the current crisis in narrative vision. The archaic vision offers a fairly clear parallel between microcosm and macrocosm, between the little story of my life and the overall foundational story on which "my" existence as an archaic man rested. But, once the story form is broken open to the new, the parallel between the little story and the big story is thrown into question. Apocalyptic is very instructive for us because it is so strongly torn at this point. The symbol of the end, on the one hand, opens up the life that lives in this vision toward the new, breaking away from repetition. The unique person and moment can be seen as unique because the story does not have to return to a certain point; but on the other hand, the end symbolizes closure, the cessation of the intolerable new, and the little story of the believer’s life is subjected to these same tensions that appear in the overall story.

Another way of getting at what is at issue is to say that apocalyptic narrative is instructive for us because it shows the difficulty of working both God and man into the same story. The apocalyptic story breaks man’s life open to the new, but it does not do this for God. The determinism of so many apocalyptic narratives serves to assure the believer that, despite all appearance to the contrary, all these new things that are happening are not out of God’s hand. God is still in control, and the new that finally occurs will be fulfillment rather than destruction. But this confident faith that God is in control may serve to stultify or weaken precisely that openness to the new which we called at the start the ability to respond to and interact with the new. Apocalyptic has often stimulated quietism though it can also be the impetus to intense activity. Clearly there is a large sociological component in the choice between these alternatives. But another aspect is precisely the question of how God and man can fit into the same story. When God’s infinity or totality swallows up man’s spontaneity, apocalyptic adopts a passive, waiting stance toward the future. This literature comes from people who find life nearly intolerable. Insofar as apocalyptic is open to the new, it is not because its authors "liked" the new, but because they could not tolerate the existing world. The inherited models by which men saw their lives as meaningful were breaking down simply because their lives were not fitting those patterns. The hope for the near end arose among those who were outsiders in society, among those subject to discrimination and persecution. In these circumstances, the eye of apocalyptic faith perhaps paradoxically does not look for a compromise or partial resolution, but looks forward to a total resolution of the conflict. Our imagination requires that stories come to an end, but normally in order that, with the resolution of one particular series of events, the way be cleared for the beginning of a new story. With respect to the life story, this is most obviously the case as one generation follows another. But the projection of this pattern of resolution in an end into the great historical and cosmic story serves the purpose of magnifying the incommensurability of God. The big story, despite its obvious dramatic aspects in the great apocalypses, tends to become, at least in its ending, wholly the story of God, who becomes the all-absorbing totality. God will be all in all, as Paul puts it, the one who brings the story to an end.

Thus the apocalyptic story, with its vision of an all-encompassing end, tends to shift the new from being a surprise in the plot to being a final cessation of new occurrence at all. When the present is almost totally alienated, the narrative vision, it seems, can be endured only temporarily. It is only a short step from this to the breakdown of narrative vision altogether, which happens in gnosticism. In this kind of faith stories will still be told. Gnosticism is full of stories, but these stories have lost the significance of the unique and irreversible event, and instead look, in what happens, for a step-by-step approach to reabsorption in totality. The question of narrative in gnosticism is complex. Instead of analyzing ancient gnosticism, let me quote from a term paper which was submitted recently. In it a girl named Mary envisages an indefinitely large number of worlds in each of which there exists a Mary. She says:

"For each decision I have to make, some other Mary on another earth makes an opposite choice. At the end of our corporate lives all the Marys fuse into their energy sources, the great X out of which everything comes. At that time all the Marys will fuse into one being (not physical) who is complete in every way because she has done all, seen all, known all." In this modern vision, as in ancient gnosticism, the decline of real narrative has gone hand in hand with a blurring of the dialogical or event-character of man’s existence and of the relation between God and Man. The end becomes a totality, an infinite inclusiveness, and anticipation of the end blurs the uniqueness of each new occurrence; for everything she does another Mary does the opposite. The great apocalyptic narratives do not go this far, although they prepare the way for this breakdown of narrative by their announcement of the end. Anticipation of the end in which God will be the sole actor discounts the participation of man in the present which makes it possible to recognize the present moment as unique. The result is that men cannot be satisfied with finite occurrences and long to lose themselves in the infinite.

The ancient apocalyptic story thus shows a real tension in its narrative vision. On the one hand, it strives to hold things together in a story in which there is dramatic encounter and human participation be-cause the end has not yet been reached. The future is not just a repetition of the past (despite the large element of repetition and return to the origin in apocalyptic stories). The most striking instance of the concrete new taken into an apocalyptic story so that it becomes the peripety or surprise in the plot would be the adaptation of the apocalyptic story by the early Christians to the new which they saw in Christ. They reversed the trend of apocalyptic narrative: instead of thrusting the decisive change out of the plot into the consummation, they brought the symbols of the end into the midst of the crisis of the story by applying them to Jesus. The result was that the early Christians themselves were released for a vigorous participation in the story they found themselves in. But this would not be the only example, for apocalyptic also served to stimulate the revolutionary action of the Zealots. Both early Christian apocalyptic and Zealot apocalyptic drew on the openness of this form of world-vision to the new, to make possible a meaningful participation of the believer in the "big story" to which he found that he was contributing as it moved forward to its end. This power to enable participation, so that the new is not only what comes to us but a new reality which we ourselves make as we express our own creativity and purpose, is one of the great functions of narrative vision, and it must be an aspect of any future-oriented vision which is really open to the new.

At the same time, the struggle to avert chaos in ancient apocalyptic pushed it also in the direction of devaluing the concrete new event by absorbing the whole into the final totality. Thus the end threatened to be no more than a reenactment of the primordial, unformed beginning. Apocalyptic was, indeed, one of the principal ways in which a preoccupation with totality or infinity was opened for Western consciousness, and as this preoccupation with infinity developed, its gnostic and mystical forms have been singularly unfriendly to the new and, also, to the narrative or story vision of existence, a point well illustrated by the citation from the term paper quoted above.

Thus the narrative vision, which in archaic religion located men in a stable and unchanging story which their little story could repeat, came to be open to the new and unique events and situations in which men struggled with their creativity and their God -- a shift particularly clear in the Jewish and Christian visions of existence. But in apocalyptic the effort to affirm God’s power in the face of chaotic and unresolved experience threatened the dramatic, narrative view both by the determinism of apocalyptic stories and more especially by the way in which the infinity of God tended to swallow up all differentiation in the final consummation, a trend which came to be all the more prominent in gnosticism.

The modern crisis of narrative vision has much in common with the apocalyptic crisis. In both cases there are important sociological aspects, which we bypass to concentrate on possibilities of understanding. The modern crisis of narrative is very different from the ancient one in that we are here dealing with artful stories, with "literature." Without trying to clarify this difference, we will proceed at once to show that the tension between concrete event as unique and a decisive bearer of meaning and the infinity in which the definite is overwhelmed is very much an issue today. We could illustrate from stories like Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins that are apocalyptic in the narrow sense; these would raise the question, as old as Hebrew prophecy, of the paradoxical tension between threat of inevitable destruction and summons to new, creative action. But even more fundamental for our purposes are writers who are not explicitly concerned with a narrative of the end, but who express the collapse of narrative form. Kafka, for instance, in whose works the characters struggle vainly through some kind of never-understood hindrance for some end which they never reach. Beckett carries this mode of presentation to what are perhaps its limits, in long narratives in which nothing ever happens. A writer more concerned with surface structure, like Robbe-Grillet, makes the same point. The surface detail is almost unbearably complex, but there is no conventional plot. In all of these writers we find, as we read in Beckett’s Watt, "incidents of great formal brilliance and of indeterminate purport."’ In all of them, multiplication of detail is the essence of their style. New elements which are infinitely rich and sharp in profile are constantly introduced, but they do not add up.⁴

All of these writers are found in modern discussions of the apocalyptic theme, and with good reason. Ancient apocalyptic represented a crisis in which it was a question whether the narrative vision could survive, and now, in the world of imaginative writing, it is equally or even more questionable whether narrative vision can survive. The collapse of what I called the big story has raised the question whether there is any sense in talking about the span of man’s life as a little story, and with the collapse of the little story it is a severe question whether the new does not become noise rather than information. The superabundance of the new has destroyed its original meaning, and all the detail, if it has a religious meaning, represents not the weight of the definite event, but to the contrary, the reemergence of the indefinite infinite, the infinite field in which everything is the same, which commands the imagination in a directionless time. There is no longer any significance to any particular concrete new thing, but there is significance in the fact that there is so much quantity of the new. The very unmanageableness of the quantity of new things happening or described is the only frame of reference left. Much has happened between the emergence of the sequential narrative vision running through a history which offered genuinely new occasions, and the situation of the writers we have so briefly described. These writers react not only to the political-social breakup of a world, as did the ancient apocalyptists, but also to the intellectual reduction of reality in modern thought. Still, the comparison has weight, since in both cases the loss of narrative vision is a form of loss of anchorage in the world. But in both cases a hard-won and precarious narrative vision is threatened because it is an oversimplification and because it promises more than people can experience in it, and in both cases the loss or threatened loss of narrative vision exposes and brings to the surface an archaic vision, an unformed totality which offers itself instead of the sequential story-like vision.

Let us now consider what light process thought can cast on this situation. Process thought tells us that the fundamental unit of reality is the experience. This insight opens the way to a fresh look at that harsh separation of the world into an outer world in which objects interact inexorably by cause and effect, and an inner world in which we experience ourselves as active agents. Each moment of experience in the process way of viewing it, as it comes into being, has its freedom (within limits) to create itself. It is genuinely indetermined, within the limits set by the past. Once it has come into being, it becomes a fixed datum, an object, a cause for the events to follow.

Thus in process theology, the fundamental unit is not the story but the occasion. Reality is atomic. The occasions of experience are the ultimately real units. But these infinitely recurring moments of experience are given direction and form; they are not just random. In large part the form is dictated by the past, but God, as the lure to more intense and massive experience, offers each occasion an aim at its highest potential. The occasion, in turn, may modify this lure to achievement given it by God.

First we note three blind alleys. One might think that one way to rehabilitate the story would be to regard each unit of experience, each occasion, as a microscopic story. But this will not do. Though we virtually have to use narrative language, the language of sequential time, to analyze what we mean by an occasion, we must recognize that the basic unit of experience is not a story which can be analyzed into separate sub-events, but a solid unit in its own right, a droplet of time which does not admit further dissection into a story line. Whatever else a narrative is, it is, so to speak, strung together from the separate beads or droplets, the occasions which make it up.

Furthermore, the particular kind of sequential enrichment of experience which is so central for our narrative vision is not necessarily a fundamental characteristic of reality as such. There are occasions which are not sequentially related in any significant way, and although Whitehead did not believe that in the reality we know these occasions could achieve significant intensity, none the less they exist. Though sequential ordering is a prerequisite for the main way of building up significance in the cosmos as we know it, it is not ontologically necessary that things be that way.

In the third place, the final end, and with it the total unified meaning of the whole of experience, that has played so large a role in apocalyptic symbolization, does not have any place in a process system. Though Pannenberg and Teilhard de Chardin, for instance, make much of this aspect of New Testament apocalyptic, the weight and mystery associated with the final end will have to be reinterpreted in a process system. A return to narrative vision via process theology will not give us an end to the "big story" which will, in a process vision, have to be without beginning and end.

What these qualifications mean is that process theology does not open the way of reestablishing one single, unified and to-be-completed story as the framework of existence. Nevertheless, process has been singularly aware of the requirement of being open to the new, and it does offer several important possibilities for a new narrative vision.

In the first place, and I believe that from the point of view of a religious interpretation of narrative this is exceedingly important, process thinking opens the way for a new grasp of infinity or totality as a religious concept. We have seen that in ancient apocalyptic the pressure of the "all" threatened to swallow up the concrete new. Against this infinite field nothing significantly new can happen, as infinity is experienced in many religious forms. But, this does not have to be the way we are grasped by the totality or the infinity that was associated with God. There is, indeed, an infinity of possibilities but it does not have to be confronted all at once. Quite to the contrary, the very infinity of possibility provides the inexhaustible source for an unending supply of new possibilities, once we grant that these possibilities are offered to us in some kind of structured way. And the infinite unification of reality, which the apocalyptist longs for in the end, can be recognized as real, in a limited way, in each moment’s limited unification in its relevant data, and as an object of religious awe in God’s recurrent unification of reality in his experience. But this unification in God is never finished; rather it is constantly enriched by the actual experience of the world.⁵

Viewed this way, the infinite is, so to speak, separated into two parts: on the one hand, the infinity of possibility which offers an inexhaustible supply of the new, bit by bit, and on the other, God’s infinite unification of experience moment by moment. This way of being open to infinity or totality ceases to be threatening to the new and to hope.

This is an infinite which expresses itself in a narrative vision, not a predetermined narrative nor one which intends to include only a particular kind of people or a particular reality, but a story which is much more open than the old story used to be -- a story, indeed, with many strands rather than with one, and a story which is not going to any predetermined place but which is constantly open to the best possibility that is relevant for it. Also, we must add, a many-stranded story which includes the loss, frustration, and tragedy which actually take place and which includes them not only as our experience but as experience shared by God.

In the second place process thinking opens the way to a re-actualization in our imagination of man’s freedom. The correlative of the fact that there is no predetermined end is that there is real freedom, limited though it is, and limited as the choices are which we are able to make, they are really free and open. Sociological conditions may indeed limit or even often virtually exclude the effective exercise of freedom, but nevertheless it is a constant possibility -- contrary to what many think today; thus the "new" can be not only something we encounter but something to which we contribute. This conviction indeed can be powerfully liberating and can contribute to the actualization of possibilities of the exercise of freedom which otherwise would be ignored.

Times of pressure bring to clarity the quest for the infinite grounding of human existence. Much of the current interpretation of apocalyptic, though not often cast in those terms, appropriates it positively precisely because it does expose the believer to the infinite. This interpretation joins in that positive appropriation, but calls for a renewal and reshaping of the forms in which we make imaginative contact with the infinite. Apocalyptic is only a step from, and points toward, forms of perception in which the indefinite infinite swallows up the concrete act or person. Much of the modern imagination comes close to such a vision, though in consciously secular terms and often without quite knowing it. Further, the way of coping with the new which concentrates on building a self with sufficient strength and resiliency to face the new often moves in the same direction, for the techniques of meditation which are widely practiced today often function in this way.

Much process thinking has been carried out without much interaction with this field of imaginative exploration. This paper holds that the process perspective may serve to renew and reshape what we take to be imaginative possibilities, so that we may refresh our vision of life as dramatic encounter and story. The new story will be more open and will renounce the powerful image of complete unification as the goal. But the process vision of the "big story" can provide a setting within which the widespread new interest in "my story" can honestly develop in the conviction that my story is not just a private exploration but resonates with the reality within which we find ourselves. Thus the new, both as what we expect and as what we set for a goal, will not have to be thought of as either illusory or ephemeral. The people who have gotten things done have almost always had a narrative vision of self-understanding. Process thought can undergird such a vision even in the complexities and uncertainties of today.

Notes

1An earlier version of this article was given as the Ernest Cadman Colwell lecture at the School of Theology at Claremont, California, in March, 1972. The author expresses his appreciation to the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota, for providing the setting and stimulation within which it was revised.

2 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959. The French version appeared in 1949.

3 Samuel Beckett, Watt, New York: Grove Press, 1959, p. 74.

4 On the apocalyptic motifs in contemporary literature, see Frank Kermode. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

5 I have explored this theme in another setting in William A. Beardslee, A House for Hope, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972.

In a recent article two nontheists, Peter H. Hare and Edward H. Madden, chide process theists for failing to understand that "a certain amount of coercive power is morally required" (PS 2:45). They strongly disagree with John Cobb when he writes, "The only power capable of any worthwhile result is the power of persuasion" (GW 90).

In this paper I hope to clarify some important differences between persuasive power and coercive power as encountered in our daily social experiences and then see how the differences apply in metaphysical discourse. Coercive power has often been described as "external force." But psychoanalysis regards this as misleading because welling up "inside" the individual seem to be all sorts of forces which are greatly coercive. One way of dealing with this problem of the "external" and the "internal" has been to let the boundaries of the "self" float, as it were, so that when a coercive force is sufficiently identified, it can be viewed as "external" to the self. For example, if previously strong sexual urges were considered to be ingredient to the self, they may now be regarded as outside the self.

But clearly this will not do because it merely presupposes a resolution of the problem at stake; the problem is that of determining when power becomes coercive. We would not know whether to "place" strong sexual urges outside or inside the self until we first determine whether they are coercive to the individual or not. I will return to this point later.

According to B. F. Skinner in his recent work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, (2:83-99) "persuasive control," so beloved by Professor Cobb, appears to be merely another word for ineffective and haphazard control. It may be that Plato’s Demiurge uses "persuasion" because he lacks the more effective power. F. M. Cornford states the matter bluntly: "Reason has need to persuade her [i.e., Necessity], not having unlimited power to compel." An omnipotent deity, however, would not have to resort to persuasion because it would not itself be forced to be "working in certain materials, or under certain conditions" (1:36).

Now we seem to have been brought to a dilemma which prevents us from respecting either persuasive power (because we see it as incompetence) or coercive power. It is time to ask what is so repulsive about coercive power. Indeed, when is power coercive? Is persuasion weakness, whereas coercion is strength and success? This would seem to suggest that persuasive power is simply would-be coercive power.

My point is that, contrary to Cobb, persuasive power (to move oneself and others) may not be in itself good. But neither is it evil per se. The test would seem to lie in what the power is accomplishing and what its numerous impacts are. However, Cobb has very legitimate grounds for suspecting coercive power, and I wish to throw some light on this suspicion. When we respond negatively to power, we do so for a very simple reason. It goes contrary to our wants and desires!

This simple point helps to reveal an ambiguous use of the word "coercive": (1) Sometimes the speaker seems to be saying or implying that coercive power is that power which is successful, strong, efficient, and competent. (2) Almost always "coercive power" is used to refer to that power which thwarts certain wants and desires in various degrees and ways. In order to justify the use of coercion on people (and perhaps on other organisms) the speaker will tend to divide a person’s wants into "real" wants and "illusory" wants (or higher and lower wants). Presumably it is the so-called illusory or lower wants that are to be frustrated (coerced) in order that the so-called "real," "true," "genuine," or "higher" wants may be fulfilled. To be sure, the illusory wants are wants in the sense that they do exist, but they are judged as not having measured up to whatever standard the speaker has in mind.

So-called "realistic politics" seems to take as an article of faith that control though coercion (in the sense of overriding people’s desires, wants, and aims) is a more successful, strong, efficient, and competent form of power or control. Persuasion is seen by these "realists" as ineffective control at best. But this article of faith is not warranted. It generalizes too easily from the less sensitive levels of organic life to the more sensitive levels. (Indeed, some of our ecological crises may be the result of not having a more sophisticated line of continuum between hard-core coercion and respectful persuasion.) No one is more outspoken than B. F. Skinner in denouncing "negative reinforcement" as well as direct punishment of organisms. He favors "positive reinforcement" because it builds up less resentment and obtains better long-term results. In short, he finds coercion to be inefficient in dealing with animal organisms.

It is a mistake, therefore, to think of persuasion as necessarily less effective than coercion. Indeed, like coercion, persuasion may be either effective and competent, on the one hand, or pathetically unsuccessful, on the other hand. There are many cases in which persuasion is a far more effective and abiding form of control than is coercion. There is some truth in Skinner’s claim that certain humanists, in their resentment against coercive power, have given their support to ineffective controls rather than to effective control for good. But ineffectiveness and persuasion are not necessarily wed together. Naturally, the more effective and efficient a power is in preventing us from satisfying our wants and desires, the more we resent it. The less successful it is (Or we think it is) in interfering with our freedom (i.e., satisfaction of our wants), the less we resent it. Unfortunately, like the humanists whom Skinner criticizes, we sometimes confuse the strength and efficiency of a power with its undesired effects on us. (A bureaucracy is bad if it effectively controls our behavior against our desires; but it is also bad if we count on it to get us what we want and it fails to do so.) What is often forgotten is that if we are to enhance our freedom, we must have power that is efficient and strong. Confusing weakness of power with freedom is close to substituting neglect for freedom, and I think that Hare and Madden see the God of process theism as either incompetent or neglectful. It is in this light that we can perhaps better understand their assertion that "a certain amount of coercive power is morally required" (PS 2:45).

Now, in calling for more coercive power, are Hare and Madden actually demanding that the deity frustrate more of the wants and desires of finite entities in order that certain goals may be attained? This is not an easy question to answer, for presumably the aim or ideal which these writers have in mind is the increased satisfaction (not frustration) of finite desires. I suggest that what Hare and Madden are emphasizing is not the frustration of desires in order to attain an ideal but rather the more effective, efficient, and successful use of power to approximate the ideal. And this is not necessarily in conflict with Cobb’s emphasis on "persuasive power" which respects desires and wants of individuals (humans and other forms of actuality in his complex pan-psychistic universe). Hare and Madden seem to be confused about Cobb on this point, and Cobb is perhaps partly responsible for the confusion.

A tragic dilemma seems to confront us at this point. Our ideal is the maximizing of the satisfaction (in intensity and duration at least) of desires. Yet in order to do this, some desires must be either repressed or eliminated. To be sure, the "harmony and intensity" of feeling or satisfaction is a vision of richness and inclusiveness. But every vision must inevitably exclude somewhat.

I suggest that the problem of theodicy confronting process theism focuses considerably on the question of God’s "design" for bringing into being new aims, desires, and wants. There is indeed a certain moral irresponsibility in "allowing" new desires to emerge if the possibilities of their being greatly frustrated are high. Presumably Hare and Madden are in reality advocating a kind of quasi-coercive power which would not so much frustrate the desires of finite entities that already are in the scheme of things as prevent new desires and aims from coming into being if they do not stand a very strung chance of gaining satisfaction or if they greatly disrupt the harmony and rhythm by which desires are guaranteed a better chance of satisfaction.

Of course, it is debatable as to how much control the deity of process theism has over the fountainhead of new desires and wants. If this control is too weak, it will be virtually impossible for God to ever "catch up" in his persuasive control.

To be sure, persuasion cannot be persuasion unless it respects the claims of the desires and wants to enjoy satisfaction. Here Calvin’s God appears to be most limited. Such a God is strong on coercion and weak in terms of persuasion. But of course the "vision" of orthodox Calvinists is greatly different from that of process theists, although Karl Barth’s new Calvinism seems to have been enticed by a kind of inclusive "universalism" which prompted Brunner and Berkouwer to show signs of concern over Barth’s long-run eschatology.

The kind of control exerted is considerably determined by the "raw material" being controlled. It may be said now that Cobb’s emphasis on persuasive control represents a sensitivity to the multiple levels of actuality of the "raw material." On the other hand, the emphasis on coercive control which Hare and Madden exemplify may be taken as reflecting the realization that, after all, not all desires are of the same intensity, etc. Hence, what Hare and Madden seem to expect from a loving God is a more direct and bold use of coercion on his part in controlling certain low-level aims and desires in the interest of the higher level. In effect Hare and Madden are saying that if there were a God of love, he would have to face up to the tragedy of the universe and would have to exert responsible coercive power against certain aims and desires. Otherwise divine love would be nothing more than a version of cosmic indifference indistinguishable from the atheism to which Hare and Madden subscribe. In short, a loving God would have to take sides and fight for certain ends and against certain other ends. An uninvolved and indifferent God is no God at all -- or at least is not a loving God.

But the process theists tend to see God as something of a wise statesman who refuses to be bought off by any lobby or bloc. Yet even this comparison has limitations, for the God of process theism has desires of his own. Nevertheless, his desires are regarded as the hope for harmony in the universe. It is as if God desires through the world of actual entities. The world’s desires grow out of him, and yet by their impact on him, God himself both takes on and qualifies new actual desires in his own life. This "give and take" between God and the world -- this mutual sharing and generating of desires -- is a flow of two-way persuasion.

To change the desires of another being is not necessarily to override him or to coerce him. We might say that persuasion travels on the waterways of desires. It moves from desire to desire. Like effective and respectful therapy, persuasion brings about new wants and aims, but it does so, not by coercion or by frustrating desires, but by opening new possibilities, which is the result of divine "creativity." To be sure, this world of desires and means is not neat, and some coercion is inevitable. It is a question of degree, a question of where we live along the line of continuum between coercion and persuasion. In some cases, coercion is the only responsible alternative in order to maintain the ideal of maximum intensity and harmony of feeling and satisfaction. But of course this grand ideal must not be unresponsive to the actual world, otherwise it could not be an ideal which allows for mutual persuasion. The past generates coercive limits, yet it also produces new aims. And when these aims are afforded the opportunity, mutually to support one another, then persuasion is more likely.

In drawing from the reservoir of his primordial function the God of process theism provides for the greater possibility of persuasive interchange. This God persuades because his aims often "blend" with the aims of the world; he is the very ground of persuasion.

When a more highly developed finite organism becomes conscious of mutually supportive aims and desires, then he more readily moves in their direction. In this sense the vision of harmonized aims appeals to and controls him. The vision moves him; motivates him. But he moves willingly; he wants to be so moved. He "decides" to be carried along; for he finds in the rising current a compelling force that is not coercive. It appeals and is persuasive.

The conclusion that grows out of a rational presentation of evidence and argument may be both coercive and persuasive. Insofar as the individual agent desires to have his intellectual curiosity satisfied, he gains a measure of freedom in confronting the conclusion. But the agent may have other desires to which the conclusion may be a threat. One’s "mind" may be persuaded by the argument and its conclusion. But certain of one’s desires which are not reducible to the passion for knowledge may find the new knowledge to be frustrating. As therapists know, "insight" is often not a sufficient condition for "wholeness and healing." Partial persuasion is a common personal and social experience for all of us, and apparently the persuasive interchange between God and the world is not without great lapses and a measure of outright failure.

It is no easy matter to determine how much success among humans (at least) is required before we can say that God is successful in exerting power and control for freedom, beauty, happiness, and intensity and harmony of feeling. Much depends on how high our ideals are. Indeed, our ideals may shoot up, and that process is sometimes described as the product of "divine discontent." Is this, then, the persuasive power of deity in the sense that reason is informed by new desire and imagination? Perhaps it is the fate of theistic religion always to be raising the standards and thereby guaranteeing that it will always be hounded by the problems of theodicy.

References

GW -- John Cobb. God and the World. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969.

1. Francis M. Cornford. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957.

2. B. F. Skinner. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hare and Madden make five major criticisms of process thinkers’ use of the concept of divine persuasive power to explain the presence of excess evil in the world (PS 2/1, 44-48). (1) If there were a good and powerful God, he would in some respects allow freedom using only persuasive power; but if he were good and powerful, he would use more coercive power to prevent destructive evil than is apparently being used in the world. (2) Even where only persuasive power is appropriate, evidence indicates that the persuasion being used is not worthy of a good and powerful God because it is not effective enough successfully to produce the goal envisaged in the persuasion. (3) If these criticisms are answered by saying that God aims his persuasion to produce freedom and creativity more than good acts and experiences, then the restrictions on freedom and creativity in the world show that such persuasion also is not worthy of a good and powerful God. (4) In the absence of an explanation why God does not use more coercive power and is not more effective in his persuasion we may as reasonably conclude that there is a great evil persuasive power behind phenomena in the world as that there is a great power persuading toward the good. (5) The concept of "persuasive divine power is not used coherently by process theists.

I find myself in fundamental agreement with Cobb that the really worthwhile power that God should exercise is persuasive, and I would meet the first criticism by saying that God should not use more coercive power than is apparently being exercised in the world. in agreement with Ford it seems to me that the massive evil present in the world is "compatible with unlimited persuasive power" (PPCT 289), and therefore in answer to the second criticism there is no evidence that the persuasion being used is not worthy of a good and powerful God. If these two positions can be established, they go a long way toward meeting the other criticisms.

There are several different ways to understand freedom, coercive power, and persuasive power. It seems to me that in this discussion some confusion results because there is a use of one of these understandings at one point in the argument and another understanding at another point without an awareness of the shift. There appear to be three sets of correlative meanings for these terms which are in special need of clarification.

I. Persuasion as Final Cause

In one case the terms freedom, coercion and persuasion refer to the distinction between efficient and final cause. Whitehead contrasts "deterministic efficient causation" with persuasive spontaneity that occurs in final cause (PR 374, cf. 75). Efficient causation refers to the determined transition from the total physical actuality of the past world into the physical basis for a becoming actual occasion. In one aspect of final causation the origination of corrective and developmental ideal forms of definiteness aims to free an occasion from damaging aspects of determination by the physical past. The total physical world exercises coercive power through efficient causation. The ideal aim exercises persuasive power through final causation. An event in which ideal forms of definiteness free an occasion from destructive aspects of efficient causation is an event of freedom. In this set of meanings coercive power is efficient causation, persuasive power is final causation, and freedom is realized conceptual innovation.

Whitehead refers to the freedom of conceptual origination as "spontaneity of thought" (AI 59), "appetition" (FR 72) which shows the "germ of a free imagination" (PR 48), "flashes of free thought" (AI 62) and as "this autonomous conceptual element" (PR 374). He says that "wherever ideas are effective, there is freedom" (AI 83). By the onto-logical principle novel forms of definiteness cannot emerge into actuality out of nowhere. The possibility of the emergence of novel forms of definiteness which are relevant to a given actual world is grounded in the "primordial nature of God" (PR 48). That aspect of creativity which consists in the origination of relevant corrective and developmental forms of definiteness in the initial aim comes primarily from God (PR 287, 343, 374, 522). The source of the persuasive power in the initial ideal aim is God. There is a sense in which the world is responsible for coercive power, and God responsible for the persuasive power of conceptual origination. This suggests that God is the primary actor in the freedom which is conceptual origination.

Some of the dualisms of the past almost identify the coercive power of efficient cause with evil because it was seen to be so destructive. There are several valuable constructive functions of efficient cause in the cosmological scheme of Whitehead. First, the physicality of efficient cause is essential for real actualization (PR 229, 321; MT 163). The physical feelings of the datum supply the occasion with the basic ingredients which compose the actualized good. Efficient cause is constructive of the really real processive good. In contrast Greek thought puts the really real in a set of static forms, and processive physical events are less than real. For Whitehead there is nothing more real than a processive actual occasion (PR 27). Second, the reproduction of the past in the present through efficient cause is an important element in the regularities described in laws which are so important for science, technology, methodology, scholarship, and speculation (AI 139). Human purpose would be futile if efficient causation did not maintain stable patterns of predictability in the world. Third, efficient causation dependably passes on novelties introduced so that human purpose involving vast reaches of time and space may be expressed. Nerves, muscles, machines, and even social institutions carry out the purposes of man because there is dependable efficient causation. According to the principle of relativity, every physical actuality of the past has an effect on each becoming occasion (PR 33, 101). Whitehead’s dipolar conceptuality provides for dependable continuity with the past in the efficiently caused physical pole and openness to novelty in the mental pole. The coercive power of efficient causation is necessary for actualization, provides for dependable generalizations which may guide human purpose, and furnishes a matrix of relativity in which the purpose may be expressed. Without coercive efficient causation human purpose would be meaningless.

The results of efficient causation are not all beneficial. Over a long period of time there is mutual cancellation of physical feelings which results in a gradual decay of matter. Apart from the corrective and developmental persuasive power of ideality there is a "slow decay of physical nature" (FR v). Without the persuasive power of God the effect of efficient causation would tend toward "a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility" (PR 377). While there is much evidence for physical decay, Whitehead also finds evidence for a trend toward "order" (AI 147) and increasing complexity (FR 4). He explains the trend toward complex order with the divine persuasive power of final cause.

Common usage of "coercion" and "persuasion" might suggest that coercive power could not be rejected. It is not true that a becoming occasion cannot eliminate coercive factors but can eliminate persuasive factors. Elimination of some coercive factors is essential. If every becoming occasion experienced common past occasions with equal prominence every occasion would be nearly identical to every other. Furthermore, the presence of mutually opposing factors would so nearly cancel each other out that each of these occasions would be hardly distinguishable from nothing. "The mere fusion of all that there is would be the nonentity of indefiniteness" (SMW 137). In order for an occasion to be something definite most of the physical data from the actual world must be eliminated. "There is a transition from the initial data to the objective datum effected by the elimination" (PR 338, cf. 225, 321, 346, 353, 483, 517). In efficient causation contrary factors repel and compatible factors attract in mutual determination (PR 224f, 227, 232, 321). Just as there is mutual determination between physical feelings in efficient causation, there is mutual interaction between the coercive and the persuasive, between the physical pole and the mental pole (PR 343, 470). In this interaction some of the factors of the persuasive initial ideal from God are eliminated, becoming the persuasive subjective aim of the occasion which is its final cause (PR 227, 323, 342). Factors can be eliminated and modified in both the coercive power of efficient causation and the persuasive power of final causation. Elimination of factors from the divinely initiated idea] aim reduces the realization of the freedom of conceptual innovation.

This discussion includes two different types of freedom. There is the freedom of conceptual innovation in which novel corrective and developmental forms of definiteness emerge in the mental pole as potentiality for final causation, and there is autonomous self-causation in which a mutually determined synthesis of the physical pole and the mental pole modifies the initial ideal aim to become the subjective aim, which is the final cause. The second type of freedom may be called the freedom of synthesis or whole response. The autonomy of whole response is free in the sense that both the physical and the mental pole may be modified and the outcome is internally determined by the unique developing self-hood of the occasion. Some of the data of efficient cause may be eliminated (PR 248) and some of the potentiality in the initial ideal aim may be eliminated (PR 342). The autonomy of whole response is determined in the sense that which physical data and which potentialities of the initial aim are eliminated is internally determined by the interacting synthesis of the whole. The determined character of the synthesis insures that any novelty which is actualized will be integrally connected with real conditions in the world and provides the continuity necessary for generalizations to be used in science, technology, and culture.

Just as contrary to common expectation some factors in coercive efficient cause may be rejected in the autonomous becoming of an occasion, there are some factors in the persuasive power of final cause which can-not be autonomously rejected. Whitehead refers to men as being "driven by their thoughts as well as by the molecules in their bodies, by intelligence and by senseless forces" (AI 58). He mentions the "compulsion of the truth" (AI 86) and describes the "potentialities" in the final cause as "dictating the form of composition which produce the issue" (MT 128f). He refers to the "overpowering rationality" of God’s "conceptual harmonization" (PR 526). The most dramatic example illustrating unavoidable persuasion is vibration observed in physics. Whitehead explains "vibration and rhythm" as "due to the origination of reversions in the mental pole" (PR 423, cf. 285). The variation in vibration is produced by persuasive power in that it originates in the mental pole as final cause, but it is coercive in the sense that it is not possible for autonomous activity to reject what is initiated. Spectrographic evidence from light sources billions of light years away would seem to indicate that the persuasive power which maintains these regular patterns of predictability cannot be avoided by autonomous activity in the occasions involved even over long periods of time.

In the first set of meanings the difference between coercive power and persuasive power has to do with the physicality of the coercive power and the ideality of the persuasive power. Freedom consists in the realization of developmental and corrective forms of definiteness.

II. Persuasion as Autonomously Avoidable Moral Ideal

In the second set of meanings freedom consists in the autonomy of moral responsibility. This freedom is different from the freedom of conceptual innovation as well as the freedom of whole response. In this context coercive power is power which is not subject to morally responsible acceptance or rejection, and persuasive power is subject to morally responsible acceptance or rejection. The persuasive power of conceptual innovation in the vibration of an elementary particle is not subject to morally responsible rejection by the particle and is therefore coercive in this second sense. The persuasive power of some conceptual innovation in a highly complex human occasion is subject to morally responsible rejection and is therefore persuasive in this second sense as well.

It becomes important to discuss some conditions necessary for a morally responsible free choice. An elementary particle is not morally responsible for its vibration because it is neither conscious of a morally better or worse alternative nor capable of choosing either alternative. One condition of a morally responsible choice is consciousness of better or worse alternatives (AI 21; CNT 92, 97). Another condition is the ability to choose either of at least two alternatives with all causal conditions the same up to the choice (LP 188f, 231). This means that an occasion must be able to choose either the better or the worse alternative with a given set of initial data mediated by efficient causation with a certain initial ideal aim. A mutually determined resultant of determinants could have only one outcome with a given set of initial data and a given initial aims so the freedom of synthesis or whole response would not provide for this ability to choose either the better or the worse alternative. If in the course of a synthesis there were consciousness of better or worse alternatives and the ability to choose either, that aspect of the choice would be a morally responsible free choice.

It seems clear that Whitehead intended to provide for morally responsible free choice. He says that the "final decision of the immediate subject-superject, constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction" (PR 74). He provides for the consciousness of better and worse alternatives when he describes the common practice of man. "He assumes alternatives in contrast to the immediate fact. He conceives an ideal, to be attained or to be missed. He conceives such ideals as effective in proportion as they are entertained. He praises and he blames by reason of this belief" (AI 292). The ability to choose either the better or the worse alternative is clearly inferred in the worthiness of praise or blame. Murphy concludes that "Whitehead attributes freedom of libertarianism to some actual entities and he is therefore justified in maintaining that such actual entities are morally responsible for their actions" (PMR 134).

The question arises why morally responsible freedom is valuable. It is not valuable because it encourages the emergence of more complex and creative novel definiteness. The initial ideal aim as envisaged by God is the "best for that impasse" (PR 373). The maximum complex creativity desirable is already present in potentiality in the freedom of conceptual innovation provided for in the initial ideal aim. Morally responsible freedom accepts this best alternative or something less creative.

Morally responsible freedom is valuable because it makes possible self-transcending voluntary love (SCE 125-36). When a person is loved by the instinctive actualization of the conceptual innovation in the ideal aim of his dog, it does not have the same experienced value as when he is voluntarily loved by another human being. Even God values voluntary human love more than love instinctively caused or motivated by self-interest (EGL 113,159,308-10).

The possibility for self-transcending morally responsible love is also the possibility for great extremes of evil. "The finest achievements of man and his most hideous crimes" (SCE 123, cf. 125; GW 135, 95) arise out of the possibility for voluntary love. If the scope of morally responsible freedom were reduced so that a free wrong choice would not be very damaging, its value as voluntary love would be correspondingly reduced. If the only free alternatives were of such limited magnitude as whether one kissed his wife on the right cheek or the left, the experienced value of the voluntary quality would be insignificant. If man’s loving worship of God were as autonomously unavoidable as the conceptual innovation in the vibration of an elementary particle, it would not have the same experienced value for God as if it were voluntary love. Voluntary love of great value requires the possibility of equally great extremes of destructive evil.

The conceptual innovation in the ideal aim of a human being for which he is morally responsible is persuasive in both senses. It is persuasive in the sense that it has the character of ideality and of final causation in contrast to the coercive quality of efficient causation. It is also persuasive in the sense that it is autonomously avoidable with moral responsibility in contrast to that conceptual innovation which is not autonomously avoidable.

III. Persuasion as Information about Natural Consequences

There is one further way in which Whitehead sometimes uses the words persuasion and coercion that should be mentioned. This usage is similar to the kind of persuasion and coercion which Hare and Madden hold that God should exercise. They use an analogy to show that the manifestation of God’s power should not be "solely persuasive." "It would not do to excuse a mother for the grossly evil habits of her child by appealing to her use of persuasion only, when sometimes there have been Situations in which some coercion was morally required" (PS 2/1, 45). They argue that as a mother should occasionally use coercion to secure beneficial behavior, so God should use coercion.

Whitehead does recognize that coercion of the type mentioned in the analogy must be exercised. Families use a mixture" of "persuasion, and compulsion" (AI 87). Young children cannot be subjected to the "vagaries of individual teachers" if a social group is to survive. There must, therefore, be some coercive limitation to the "freedom of teaching" (AI 78). Since a social group may profitably organize itself around more than one set of ideals (AI 356f), it becomes necessary to use a certain amount of "compulsory dominion of men over men" in order to secure "the coordination of behavior necessary for social welfare" (AI 108f, cf. 218). "A few men in the whole caste of their character, and most men in some of their actions, are anti-social in respect to the peculiar type of any society possible in their time. There can be no evasion of the plain fact that compulsion is necessary and that compulsion is the restriction of liberty" (AI 71). It would be safe to conclude that Whitehead recognizes that in these types of situations the sole use of persuasion is unsatisfactory and that coercion is morally required.

Precise description of the nature of coercion in this third sense is very difficult. It is of interest that all of these instances where coercion is recommended involve human beings dealing with other human beings. None of these examples consists in one human being’s moving the other person’s hand to make him act, moving his legs to make him walk, or holding him down so that he remains seated. Analysis shows that coercion in the punishment of a child, in firing a teacher, or in government enforcement of socially adopted laws consists in withholding rewards or applying penalties.

In this third set of meanings coercion refers to the inducement by an agent of behavior in another person through rewards for desired behavior and/or penalties for rejected behavior. The rewards and penalties are produced by manipulation of corpuscular societies and structured societies so as to change the strength of beauty (very roughly, the measure of pleasure or pain) experienced by the person who is being coerced. Persuasion in this sense consists in communicating information about the advantages of a certain course of action to gain strength of beauty from natural consequences unmanipulated by the voluntary action of other people. Freedom exists in a situation in which there is only persuasion being used by the agents involved with no application of the coercion of rewards and penalties produced by voluntary manipulation of the environment. Freedom is the absence of extrinsic motivation.

A mother whose only effort to keep her child from playing in the street is verbal explanation about how badly it would hurt to be hit by a car; a school board which only explains why a teacher should teach responsibly; and a government which only explains to industry the need to control prices: these are only using persuasion. A mother who threatens and spanks a child if he runs into the street, a board which threatens and fires a teacher if he teaches irresponsibly, and a government which fines an industry that does not control prices are all using coercion. Coercion is the inducement of behavior through extrinsic motivation. A child Is free to play in the street if he is never punished. A teacher is free to teach however he pleases if no sanctions are exercised. An industry is free to regulate prices if no controls are exercised. Freedom consists in the absence of extrinsic motivation. A person feels free, even where penalties are threatened, if he has no desire to engage in the proscribed behavior. It is possible for a person to respond with his responsible freedom to the persuasion in a situation even though coercive penalties are also promised.

An illustration from history which risks oversimplification may clarify some relationships between the three types of freedom. The church-state establishment in medieval Europe used extrinsic motivation to enforce many good laws as well as to require assent, among other things, to one concept of questionable validity, namely, that the earth is the center of the universe. Copernicus experienced the freedom of conceptual innovation originating from God in which he became conscious that the earth is not the center of the universe. With responsible freedom he decided to act on this new idea and rather inconspicuously made the information available. Bruno acquired this freedom of conceptual innovation secondhand and then used responsible freedom to make public his assent to the new idea. The church-state establishment threatened penalties if he did not recant this, along with several other "errors." Thus they removed his freedom from extrinsic motivation. He used responsible freedom to refuse to recant and suffered the consequence of death. Galileo also experienced the freedom of conceptual innovation mediated through a human source and at first used responsible freedom to accept and act on the new idea. When the establishment threatened to penalize him, he used his responsible freedom to pretend to recant.

No coercion of the type that one man can apply to another short of extinction can remove the second man’s responsible freedom. A man can use responsible freedom to murder even when he is certain of receiving the extrinsic consequence of the death penalty. Martyrs of all ages and all faiths have demonstrated that a man can use his responsible freedom to choose to act in a way contrary to the maximum coercion that can be applied with penalties and rewards.

The question may be asked whether God uses a mixture of persuasion and coercion in the sense of penalties and rewards extrinsically applied. Cobb notes that the New Testament makes use of threats and promises, but he includes these threats as an element in persuasion (GW 90). Man as an agent relates to nature differently from God as an agent relating to nature. Man as an agent is dependent on enduring patterns of natural law which continue long enough to bring about the consequences intended when he exercises his responsible freedom to initiate an action. Man as an agent is external to nature and is dependent upon constancy in nature in order to accomplish his agency. God as an agent is constantly initiating new patterns of order which overcome evil and tend toward greater strength of beauty. God’s action as agent is intrinsic to nature. One aspect of God is a nonderivative order of eternal objects which is the basis of the order of nature (PR 522, 527; RM 94; MT 68; AI 214). There is not just one order (PR 128) which is statically "built in’ to nature. God is constantly acting to initiate novel order in nature (PR 135, 377). The physical pole of each occasion maintains continuity with the past by a determined response to every actual entity of the past. The mental pole includes developmental and corrective novel order initiated by God. Information about the probable course of nature then must be derived from "two distinct elements in the universe" (PR 306). Scientific study is able to present statistical information about what may be expected from the determined action of efficient cause. Whitehead also speaks about the possibility of deriving "an intuition of the probability respecting the origination of some novelty" from the "graduated order of appetitions constituting the primordial nature of God" (PR 315). What is intrinsic to nature cannot be limited to efficient causation. Nature is dependent upon final causation operating in the mental pole as manifest, for example, in vibration. A satisfactory cosmology must show that efficient and final causation are "interwoven and required, each by the other" (FR 23). It can be seen, then, that information about the type of novel action God will take if a wrong responsible free choice is made, even when it is expressed as a threat, is persuasive in the sense that it is a description of the way in which nature will operate in the absence of manipulation extrinsic to nature. The inclusion of God’s action as intrinsic to nature for the purpose of deciding what is intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is not meant to suggest that God is not transcendent of nature. The normal ongoingness of nature cannot occur without the action of a transcendent God.

In this third set of meanings coercion refers to the inducement of behavior through the application of extrinsic motivation, and persuasion refers to the communication of information about the natural consequences which will occur with various alternative behaviors. Freedom consists in the absence of extrinsic motivation.

IV. Divine Persuasive Power

With these three sets of meanings for the terms persuasion, coercion, and freedom it is now possible to make some clarifying distinctions in the discussion of the criticisms made by Hare and Madden. In some cases a subscript number is added after one of these words to show whether it is to be understood in the sense used in the first, second, or third, section of this paper.

(1) Hare and Madden use the analogy of a parent and child and argue that just as a parent is morally required to use enough extrinsic motivation on his child to protect the child and society so God should use coercive power to prevent excess evil. They specifically attack Cobb’s statement that the only worthwhile power is persuasive.

Confusion occurs in this criticism because Hare and Madden use meanings for terms that fit a different metaphysical system. Their concepts of coercion and persuasion are closer to the meanings given in section III whereas God’s persuasion and coercion are better described with the meanings in sections I and II. They seem to assume that nature is something that can operate autonomously, that morally responsible freedom can emerge out of and function in a material base, and then they suggest that if there is a God he should occasionally intervene when things get too bad. They hold that a God who is limited to persuasion is too weak to do what needs to be done.

Whitehead describes a metaphysical situation in which God’s action is solely persuasive. Cobb is right in limiting God’s power to persuasive power. God’s action in the world is limited to the persuasion of the conceptual innovation of final cause. God cannot act coercively in the sense of counteracting evil with brute efficient causation. "God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization" (PR 525f).

God’s action in the world must be limited to persuasive final causation, or there will not be a matrix of efficiently caused relativity in which responsible freedom can be expressed. Coercive efficient causation sustains the expression of responsible freedom, and persuasive final causation defines and constitutes a thrust tending toward the emergence of good. A metaphysical situation with static laws of nature could not account for the rise of the good which we experience. Whitehead shows that materialism cannot account for the emergence of the good (SMW 156f; FR 4f). A materialistic nature with static properties could not provide for the expression of responsible freedom. Whitehead also shows that mechanistic materialism cannot account for the accountability which a responsible person has for his bodily actions (SMW 113-17).

For a person to be responsible for the actions of his body, the molecules in the body must be able to respond differently depending on how he chooses. The expression of responsible freedom requires some system in which the internal unitary character of units of reality is relative to all conditions in the causal past. In materialism the units are static and only change external relations. Whitehead’s principle of relativity in the philosophy of organism provides that each unit of reality includes a response to all of the causal past. The possibility of responsible freedom is dependent on a metaphysical situation which provides a real medium which is sufficiently plastic to be manipulated by responsibly free agents. The efficiently caused physical pole of each actual occasion uninterrupted by divine action provides the medium for the expression of responsible freedom.

Because God’s action is limited to the persuasive action of the conceptual origination of final cause, God overcomes evil in an equitable way without cutting off the expression of responsible freedom. Madden and Hare suggest that "God could mitigate a particularly terrible result in a stop-gap fashion by a miraculous intervention" (ECG 75). Such stop-gap intervention is bound to produce inequities of the type illustrated when a farmer growing corn prays for rain and a farmer next door growing grapes prays for clear weather. God does not intervene in a stop-gap manner. He intervenes in every actual occasion with the best persuasive corrective and developmental novelty for that impasse (PR 373). Without such constant intervention the universal relativity expressed in the efficiently caused physical pole would make everything run down to a dead level of nondifferentiation in which every unit of reality would be just like every other unit of reality (PR 377; FR 28; AI 147, 368; RM 104; MT 12). Most of God’s persuasive intervention is coercive. Like the conceptual innovation resulting in the vibration of an elementary particle, it is autonomously unavoidable. Even this coercive, persuasion does not cut off the expression of past responsible freedom carried by determined efficient cause. The final outcome in a becoming occasion is a combination of the factors in the efficiently caused datum and the finally caused ideal aim.

Whitehead’s God whose action is limited to persuasion, is more powerful than a God who omnipotently determines every event that happens. Cobb points out that every child has the power to lead a troop of tin soldiers but only a few men have the power to lead men who wield power of their own (GW 89). By acting only with conceptual origination in the mental poles of occasions, God overcomes the entropic running down effect of universal relativity; he overcomes much evil in the world; and he maintains a matrix of occasions whose relativity makes them open to the expression of responsible freedom. That God’s persuasion successfully overcomes the evil of entropy is shown by the fact of the existent universe. We are real and really engaged in searching for that type of thinking which would be most effective in cooperating with the upward trend.

(2) Hare and Madden complain that the extent of evil in the world indicates that the persuasive power used by God must be very weak since so few are persuaded.

This criticism seems to imply that persuasion is a partial cause and that the outcome will be proportional to the strength of the persuasion. This is partly true for persuasion,. That part of God’s conceptual innovation which is not subject to morally responsible free rejection is always proportionally effective. The success in maintaining dependable regularity in elementary particles over a long time is such an example.

The outcome is not proportional to the strength of persuasion. Persuasion, as conceptual innovation is coercive to the extent that it cannot be rejected and persuasive to the extent that it can be rejected by morally responsible freedom. An increase in the proportion of conceptual innovation which is persuasive, also increases the possible tragic evil if a wrong choice is made. Removal of this excess evil by increasing the proportion of conceptual innovation that is coercive, would reduce the value of responsible freedom by reducing the possibility of voluntary love.

If there is real morally responsible freedom, no amount of coercion, could secure desired results. The fact that many martyrs used their moral freedom to act on what they thought was God’s ideal aim, even at the cost of their lives, shows that no coercion as the voluntary application of extrinsic motivation can insure a certain outcome for a morally responsible free choice. Even God could not apply enough coercion as extrinsic motivation to secure a right choice if it were a morally responsible free choice. Ford is right in saying that unlimited persuasive power appropriate for a God is compatible with any tragic evil resulting from a wrong choice rejecting that persuasion.

(3) The third criticism says that the failure of persuasion to produce good acts and experiences cannot be explained by saying that divine persuasion seeks freedom and creativity more than good acts since such persuasion is not successful in producing freedom and creativity either.

There seems to be a confusion of the various types of freedom in this statement. If God’s persuasion, as producing the freedom of conceptual innovation were very successful and his persuasion, in terms of moral ideals had a wide scope so that many individuals were able freely to reject some of that conceptual innovation, then there would be more need in society to reduce the freedom, of the absence of extrinsic motivation so as to coordinate society. Maximum morally responsible freedom, could coexist with the freedom, of absence of extrinsic motivation without massive evil if morally responsible freedom, were determined by God. Yet Hare and Madden agree that "it is ‘double talk’ to say that ‘God decided my decisions . . . yet they are truly mine"’ (PS 2/1, 45). If God were to give more of the freedom, of conceptual innovation coercively, the possibility of valuable voluntary love would be reduced.

God could successfully produce freedom, of conceptual innovation and freedom, of moral responsibility, and then some men could use their autonomous ability to reject conceptual innovation by subjecting their fellows to unjust coercion. This would in turn require the rest of society to apply just coercion, to prevent them from harming their fellows. The just presence of someone in jail does not say that God is not successful in producing freedom, if by freedom we mean the freedom of moral responsibility.

(4) The fourth criticism suggests that it is just as possible that the good in the world is free resistance to an evil persuasive power as that the evil is free resistance to a good persuasive power. I have no desire to deny the existence of a supreme evil persuasive power, but I do think that Whitehead’s arguments for the existence of a good persuasive power are convincing. If there were no good persuasive power to furnish novel positive forms of definiteness, there would be no way to overcome the running down effect of universal relativity. That the running down effect is being overcome is apparent from the upward tendency in the universe.

(5) In the fifth criticism there is a protest against any attempt to affirm the existence of God which ignores the fact of massive excess evil in the world. The charge is that the concept of persuasive power in God’s relation to evil is incoherent with the massive amount of excess evil in the world.

This protest seems to be aimed at Hartshorne’s argument for the existence of God which is immune to any empirical evidence that could occur in any world. Among the many advantages of Whitehead’s solution to the problem of evil is his recommendation that the factuality of real evil be included in the assemblage of data which form the basis of philosophical investigation (MT 70f, 109f). There is no attempt to evade empirical evidence. In fact, there is an exhortation not to ignore any evidence, especially the fact of massive excess evil.

Another important strength of Whitehead’s solution to the problem of evil is that he provides a coherent explanation of the nature of good and evil and accounts for their production. Materialism cannot account for the rise of the good. Monistic and idealistic systems cannot account for the rise of evil. Traditional theology which describes God as omnipotent in the sense that he determines every event makes God responsible for all evil. Whitehead shows how excess evil arises without making God responsible. Support for these statements deserves more extended treatment.

The God described by Whitehead is more powerful than the God of traditional omnipotence who produces and determines every event. He can permit and persuasively overcome real opposition. He actively innovates and sustains a matrix of relativity in which responsible freedom can be expressed. He is active in the production of a situation in which real opposition can be carried out. He, then, persuasively, and not coercively, overcomes that opposition. The love which a society of responsibly free persons has for God is enhanced by their knowledge that God overcomes their rebellion solely with the use of persuasion. Hare and Madden complain that the inability to measure God’s power calls in question the reality of that power (PS 2/1, 48). Every existent thing that can be measured in the universe is evidence of the persuasive power of God.

The argument that a solely persuasive God is more powerful than the traditional coercive God is in some tension with the explanation that God does not intervene coercively to prevent excess evil because he does not have the power. To explain that God is still a good God even though he does not intervene coercively because he does not have the power to do so implies that if he had the power he ought to intervene. This, in turn, suggests that God would be a better God if he had the power and did occasionally intervene to remove excess evil.

I would like to suggest for the critical evaluation of process thinkers four reasons why God would not coercively, intervene to remove excess evil even if he had the power. First, intervention with anything but persuasive, power to remove excess evil would cut off and remove the expression of responsible freedom. If there is no neutral matrix of efficient cause in which to express responsible freedom, there is no responsible freedom. Maintenance of a plastic matrix in which responsible freedom can be expressed requires that God not arbitrarily interrupt the far-reaching outcome of free wrong choices in that medium.

Second, Whitehead recognizes a valid use for pragmatic considerations in the evaluation of the validity of perception, ideals, and philosophy (PR 275, 411, 512; FR 64f; MT 144; 5 31). The ease with which socially induced conventions can be confused with intuitions of God’s ideal aim points to the need for pragmatic criteria for differentiation. Sometimes the full evil character of a choice is not manifest for some time in the future. Arbitrary intervention would distort the evaluation that is based on pragmatic evidence.

Third, man’s agency is dependent on sufficient continuity in the order of nature so that he can make inductions on the probable course of nature and then act with some confidence that a consequence remote in time will occur. Arbitrary and unpredictable "stop-gap" intervention on the part of God would destroy the continuity which is needed in science, technology, and human cooperation in civilization. Pollution, population, and the energy crisis are examples of situations demanding responsible free choice expecting consequences remote in time.

Fourth, occasional intervention with coercive efficient causation to counteract excess evil is not as equitable to all occasions in the world as the constant intervention in every occasion with final cause tending to overcome evil. Such intervention can be regular and predictable on the basis of intuitions of the order of eternal objects in the primordial nature of God and can, therefore, be taken into account in the planning and responsible free choosing of men.

The concept of divine persuasive power in Whitehead is coherent with the massive excess evil evident in the world. He is right when he says that materialism cannot explain the rise of the good, that monistic and idealistic schemes cannot explain the rise of evil, and that traditional concepts of God’s power make God the despotic cause of all evil. Whitehead’s conceptuality explains the rise of good and the rise of evil without making God responsible for any evil which cannot be justified.

References

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

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

EGL -- John Hick. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

GW -- John B. Cobb, Jr. God and the World. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969.

LP -- Charles Hartshorne. The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1962.

PMR -- Frances Harder Murphy. "The Place of Moral Responsibility in the Philosophies of Whitehead and Peirce." Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Brown University, September, 1940.

PPCT -- Lewis S. Ford. "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," in Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (eds.), Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

SCE -- John B. Cobb, Jr. The Structure of Christian Existence. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967.

In recent discussions of induction it has been fashionable to distinguish at least two problems of induction. A distinction which seems to me to be quite valuable is one made by Professor Mary Hesse. She distinguishes (I) the "problem of validation of induction which Hume found to be insoluble" and (II) the problems of the "explication of the concept of ‘valid induction’" (2:232).

In what follows I wish to argue that this distinction is one with which Whitehead would have been in agreement and that a discussion of Whitehead’s ideas about induction in terms of this distinction is very much needed. It is needed for the following reasons. First, it is not generally recognized that Whitehead had a theory about (II). Second, it will show that Gary Gutting’s critique of metaphysical validations of induction in general and the Whiteheadian justification in particular is cogent in virtue of the fact that he requires the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations to perform tasks Whitehead never intended it to perform (PS 1:171-78). Third, the discussion will enable clarification of how the doctrine of internal relations is related to (II).

I

The attempt to elucidate ‘valid induction’ closest to that Whitehead suggested is that of Mary Hesse. (I am not at all suggesting, however, that Hesse owes any of her ideas to Whitehead.) Since her theory is the more fully worked out, it will be helpful to summarize certain aspects of it prior to considering Whitehead’s discussion in PR.

Hesse explains what she means by an explication of ‘valid induction:

In a less technical sense she means the explication of "inductive inferences of a kind generally regarded as justifiable" -- inductive inferences to theories and to predictions (3:164).

Hesse’s explication of ‘valid induction’ is developed from criticisms of attempts to develop the logic of confirmation. In an early work, Carl Hempel suggested "conditions of adequacy for any definition of confirmation." These included the following:

Hesse argues that a problem arises if both C₁ and C₂ are accepted. It arises for the special case when a theory t is equivalent to the conjunction of two sets of observational reports, e₁ and e₂. In this case t entails e₁ and e₂. Hence by C₂, e₁ confirms t; by C₁, e₁ confirms e₂. However, the latter conclusion is unacceptable because e, may be unrelated to e₁. "If t is produced just by arbitrarily conjoining any other statement e₂ to e₁, we should certainly not want a confirmation theory in general to allow e₁ to confirm e₂. Some further conditions must be imposed upon admissible e₁ and e₂ and either C₁ or C₂ must be modified" (3:166).

In view of this difficulty, Hempel first rejected C₂, but later rejected C₁ in favor of C₂. The consequences of rejecting C₁ were made clear by H. Putnam’s critique of Carnap’s theory of confirmation (see 6). If a theory t entails e₁ and e₂, e, is not more probable in virtue of the common deducibility of e₂, and e₂ from t than on the basis of e₁ alone. It would seem, then, that ‘valid inductive inferences’ are from particulars to particulars; theories are "redundant" (2:234).

On the other hand, this conclusion seems to run counter to the scientist’s notion of ‘valid induction’. On the whole, e. is considered to be better confirmed when there is theoretical evidence for it than when such evidence is lacking (2:233). In 3:165 and 2:233f Hesse cites Putnam’s example of the prediction of the explosion of the first atomic bomb. From e₁ (physical and chemical evidence) the prediction e₂ (the explosion) was warranted to the scientist’s mind because of the mediation of nuclear theory. It would seem, then, that a possible construal of valid induction’ (inferences to predictions and theories scientists find to be good inductions) might be the following inference pattern.

Hesse argues, however, that inference pattern (1) is inadequate because it suggests that e₂ is more probable in virtue of its relation to e₁ via t than on the basis of e₁ alone. Yet this is not the case. "No probabilistic confirmation theory of any type yet developed will allow us to infer with greater than prior confirmation from e₁ to e₂ merely in virtue of the fact that both are deductive consequences of some theory" (3:165). Hesse’s point is that t does not add to the probability of e₂ because the probability of t is derived from e₁ and e₂. "Theories cannot be pulled up by their own boot straps, but only by support from external models" (3:175). In general, the inference from e₁ to e₂ is not justified unless there is a ‘probabilistic dependence’ between e₁ and e₂ ‘independent’ of their deductibility from t (3:166).

The probabilistic relation which suffices to justify the inference from e₁ to e₂ which Hesse takes to be the clue to an adequate inference pattern is that of analogy. Her schematic inference pattern is the following (3:174):

Here the inductive inference involved is an analogical one from t^_ to t based upon an analogy between e_ and e₁; t deductively entails e₂. There is no questionable generalization from evidence to theory. The inference, rather, is from particulars to particulars (2:244). But theories are not redundant. On Hesse’s view theories are not to be conceived as arranged in layers such that higher levels are generalizations from lower ones and allow predictions on the lower levels to be deduced. However, theories do have a role to play. Her "tentative suggestion" is that "the function of the theory is the indication and systematic extraction (or abstraction) of analogies between a number of empirical systems" (2:243). Hence her view is able to explicate inferences of a kind scientists find justifiable. (In 2:242f she discusses the prediction of the explosion of the first atomic bomb in terms of her theory.)

These notions constitute an elaboration of Hesse’s view that theoretical inference always takes place by way of a model or analogy for which laws are already known (4:115).

II

I wish to suggest that Whitehead held a theory about the "explication of the concept of ‘valid induction’" quite similar to (2). The language is strikingly different because he was writing about generic ‘valid inductions’ rather than what has come to be a technical problem in the logic of confirmation.

Whitehead clearly maintained the basis of ‘valid inductions’ to be analogy.

Whitehead includes in this discussion a passage from SMW which he calls a ‘summary’ of the first passage quoted above.

These passages suffice to show that Whitehead did not accept inference pattern (1); clearly, ‘valid inductions’ do not essentially involve inferences of increasing generality.

What kind of inference can be abstracted from these passages? I take the following to be a close approximation to Whitehead’s notion of valid induction.

There is an analogical inference from environment E_ to environment E based on an analogical relation between the actualities of evidence ae₁_ and ae₂. Since laws of nature are abstractions from an environmental order, one can deduce predictions as to behavior and properties of the actualities of ae₂; the actualities of ae₂ will conform to the laws expressing the dominant order of environment E.

Clearly inference pattern (2.1) bears a resemblance to (2). The closeness of the resemblance, however, can only be decided after a clarification of the Whiteheadian notion of ‘environment’. Such a clarification will show that (2.1) as it stands is only a close approximation to a ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern for Whitehead.

III

The term ‘environment’ refers to the order obtaining in a finite spatiotemporal region. The region is necessarily finite because, for Whitehead, ‘order’ is conceived as a correlative of ‘disorder’; order is never complete, merely dominant in some region (PR 127f). An environmental order is necessary for the existence of any particular entity or structure of order for which it is the environment (SMW 155f; PR 138f). The entities of ae₂º cannot exist without the environmental order provided by E_ and those of ae₁ cannot exist without that provided by E. It is because of this condition for the existence of entities that analogy between the entities of the two environments warrants an inference to be made as to the analogical relationship between the two environments. And, since laws of nature are abstractions from environmental order, the inference provides a context for inferring predictions about entities in the environment E as well.

We can now see how the doctrine of internal relations is involved for Whitehead, in a ‘valid inductive inference’. The relationship between any entity and its environment is an internal one, and the inductive inference is ‘valid’ ultimately in virtue of this internal relation between entity and environment:¹

In brief, the internal relationship between an entity and its environment is a necessary condition for a ‘valid inductive inference’. It is not, however, a sufficient condition. But I do not think it can be argued that Whitehead meant the doctrine of internal relations to be a sufficient condition for the validation of inductive inferences. In PS 1/3 (Fall, 1971), 174, Gutting has asked this metaphysical doctrine to provide a measure of similarity, or positive analogy. Of course it cannot. Clearly Whitehead is suggesting this when he brings up the point that analogy leaves a "margin of uncertainty" (PR 312).

The ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern (2.1) -- abstracted from the passages prior to the passage mentioning the uncertainty of analogy -- suggests that Whitehead’s meaning was simply that if there is analogy, a further condition for making the inference is still required, viz., the internal relationships between entities and environments. But this is not sufficient. It still remains to determine whether or not there is sufficient positive analogy. At this point Whitehead goes on to add the further assumptions which Gutting has shown to amount to the Keynesian principle of the limitation of independent variety (PS 1:177). These additional assumptions are necessary for determining whether or not there is sufficient similarity to warrant the inference from one environment to another. But the inference from one environment to another is also grounded in the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations, and this grounding is the prior one. The completed Whiteheadian ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern thus requires that we specify an internal relatedness between ae₁ º and Eº, and between ae₁ and E, in our diagram (2.1).

The denial of the necessity of the doctrine of internal relations leaves one with Hume’s problem, which is indeed insoluble: "The question, as to what will happen to an unspecified entity in an unspecified environment, has no answer" (PR 312). The presupposition of internal relations is not sufficient to specify the entity. But in virtue of the doctrine of internal relations, if the entity is specified, so are some aspects of its environment.

Let us now return to assess the resemblance of the inference patterns (2) and (2.1) as specified in terms of internal relatedness. In both patterns, the induction is essentially "from particular to particular" and is founded on analogy -- the analogy between the entities constituting the evidence and that between systematizations of order relevant to these entities (‘theories or environments’). Both are claiming that an analogy between two sets of evidence warrants an analogy between the two systems of order bound up with the respective evidence; and the S stem of order to which the inference is made deductively entails certain predictions. That is, an analogy between e₁º (ae₁º) and e₁ (ae₁), and an analogical inference from tº (Eº ) to t (E), and the fact that t ------> e₂ (E------> ae₂ ) warrants the conclusion e₂ (ae₂) with higher than prior confirmation. Both insist that theoretical inference takes place by way of a model whose order is already known (‘theory’ or ‘environment’); t (Eº) is a model for the elucidation of t (E).

However, in inference pattern (2) no explicit claim is made about metaphysical doctrines of any kind. Indeed Hesse eschews metaphysical justifications of induction (4:105). But in what sense can this be done? Is inference pattern (2) a ‘valid inductive inference’ if the doctrine of internal relations is not an implicit necessary condition? I do not think that it is. The Whiteheadian argument seems quite general; it is about generic valid inductions. Let us reconsider this argument in face of the claim that such postulates as the Keynesian principle of limitation of independent variety constitute adequate grounding for ‘valid inductive inference’.

IV

The Whiteheadian argument, as we have seen, is that ‘valid inductive inference’ requires that the existence of any entity (and thereby the behavior and properties of that entity) be bound up with an environmental order. This is an assertion of internal relatedness. The entities of an environment contribute to the environmental order and, at the same time, the entities cannot exist without that environmental order. The alternative to recognizing the internal relatedness of entity and environment is to assert that an entity does not require a particular environmental order to exist. In this case, it seems quite clear that inference pattern (2) is not a ‘valid inductive inference’ because the analogies between entities cannot be a ground for analogies between systems of order. Entities could exist under any alternative orders and inductive inference, it seems, could never be justified.

The Keynesian argument, however, seems to be at odds with the Whiteheadian one. Keynes maintains that a ‘valid inductive inference’ requires that the "universe of phenomena . . . present those peculiar characteristics of atomism and limited variety which appear more and more clearly as the ultimate result to which material science is tending" (5:427). These two assumptions are not "formally equivalent" but are tantamount to the same thing (5:260). Atomic uniformity is a thesis about the relationship of parts to complexes into which they enter (or organize) (5:249). The limitation of independent variety is an assumption to insure that the number of properties relevant to the behavior of any object is not infinite (5:258). This assumption guarantees that the probability of finding a particular set of properties in unobserved cases when they have already been observed together will be increased (see 5:260, 4:105).

Keynes’s argument as to why these two assumptions are required for ‘valid inductive inference’ is crucial for resolving the conflict about the role of the doctrine of internal relations. Consider the following passages.

In these passages Keynes is maintaining that one must make an assumption to guarantee the limitation of independent variety. If laws for complexes were not expressible in terms of laws governing the parts of complexes, then different complexes into which the same parts enter could be governed by quite different laws (indeed, incompatible ones). That is, knowledge of the behavior of parts in one complex could never warrant knowledge of the behavior of the same parts in another complex. Hence predictions would not be possible, and no explication could be given of ‘valid inductive inference’. What is required, then, is that the laws governing the behavior of parts in one complex be related to laws governing those parts in other complexes.

It seems to me that the Keynesian necessary condition for the limitation of independent variety is an affirmation of the Whiteheadian claim that "survival requires order."

It may seem as if Keynes is maintaining a "reductionist" conception of the relationship of parts and complexes which contradicts the organic conception. However, the two views are not incompatible: in order for the reductionist conception to make sense at all, the "laws governing parts" must include implicit reference to the behavior of these parts with respect to any complex into which the parts may enter. This is in agreement with the organic view of the relation of parts and complexes, as I have shown elsewhere.’

Both Whitehead and Keynes are maintaining the following: If [a₁, . . . , a (n)] organize complex C^° and [a~ a (r)] organize complex C, then the laws governing a~ must include a description of the behavior of a+ in both C_ and C -- behavior which we empirically know is rarely the same. But this amounts to saying that what a₁ is depends upon the orders which it forms; a complete description of a₁ cannot be given without reference to its potential to behave differently in different complexes. Clearly this constitutes a rejection of what Whitehead terms the "Cartesian ‘substance-philosophy’." Such a rejection is necessary if predictions are to be made and ‘valid inductions’ explicated. To repeat: "For if a substance requires nothing but itself in order to exist, its survival can tell no tale as to the survival of order in its environment. Thus no conclusion can be drawn respecting the external relationships of the surviving substance to its future environment" (PR 311).

Thus it seems that any explication of ‘valid inductive inference’ requires as a necessary condition the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations. This doctrine is a necessary condition for the limitation of independent variety, which is, in turn, a necessary condition for ‘valid inductive inference’ to predictions and to theories.

The intent of this paper has not been to provide a metaphysical justification of induction but, rather, to attempt the very limited task of elucidating what seems to be a necessary condition of ‘valid inductive inference’ patterns and to insist that metaphysical doctrines are not irrelevant to the understanding of ‘valid inductive inference’. Certain necessary conditions for ‘valid inductive inference’ (the limitation of independent variety) are grounded in further necessary conditions (internal relations) which constitute metaphysical presuppositions.

References

1. C. Hempel. "Studies in the Logic of Confirmation," reprinted in Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: The Free Press, 1965. Pp. 3-46.

2. Mary Hesse. "Consilience of Inductions." The Problem of Inductive Logic. Edited by I. Lakatos. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1968. Pp. 232-57.

3. Mary Hesse. "An Inductive Logic of Theories." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, IV. Edited by Radner and Winokur. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Pp. 164-80.

4. Mary Hesse. "Positivism and the Logic of Scientific Theories." The Legacy of Logical Positivism. Edited by Achinstein and Barker. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969. Pp. 85-114.

5. John Maynard Keynes. A Treatise on Probability. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1948.

6. Hilary Putnam. "‘Degree of Confirmation’ and Inductive Logic." The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap. Edited by P. A. Schilpp. La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1963. Pp. 761-83.

Notes

1 The important internal relationship in the valid inductive inference pattern is not the relationship of prehension as Gutting suggests (PS 1:174); rather, the relevant internal relations axe those between entity and environmental order. The entities of an environment contribute to the order and yet cannot exist without that order. The clearest summary of this is, I think, to be found in SMW 215; here, Whitehead says anything is "otherwise than what it would have been if placed elsewhere," i.e., if in a different environment. It would be otherwise because the relations between entities and their environments are internal ones. I do not mean to suggest that environmental order does not depend on prehension for Whitehead. I merely wish to point out that the internal relationship of entity and environment which is required for any ‘valid induction’ may be a doctrine of a metaphysical theory which does not include the doctrine of prehensions. See, e.g., D. Bohm, "Some Remarks on the Notion of Order" and "Further Remarks on Order," in C. H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology. 2, Sketches (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), pp. 18-40 and pp. 41-60, respectively.

2A. Lowry, "Emergence," forthcoming in Mind.

The problem of the subject is a provocative one in the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. In an earlier paper¹ I raised some objections to what I took to be some implications of his process or organic model for self-identity and agency. There I criticized the process model for its inability to provide an abiding self-same subject, able to determine freely its own destiny (within limits) and able to initiate action and respond to the actions of others over time. The burden of my argument rested upon the subject-predicate form of language employed by Whitehead when talking about the unity of an actual occasion even while he avoids the notion that the actual occasion is a subject which exists and then decides what it will be.

Here I would like to push that criticism further by exploring some basic notions regarding being and becoming which inform the process model of the self. I will try to show that the process view has difficulty making sense out of the notion of a subject when the concepts appropriate to a subject are applied only to the becoming which produces a subject.

If it is possible to locate the fundamental issue which divides process from nonprocess models of the self, it would be, I think, the understanding of the relation between change and permanence. Both process and nonprocess thinkers agree that any adequate metaphysics must satisfactorily explain, without recourse to incoherence or dualism, both the self-identity of entities and their alteration in an obviously changing universe. Things clearly change and things remain the same. The problem is to explain the relationship between change and permanence in a single entity without denying the reality of either.

The traditional explanation generally has been some variant of the substance doctrine. Behind, every series of changes an entity undergoes there is assumed to be some unchanging substance which is the subject of the changes. This substance does not itself change, remaining "numerically one amidst the changes of accidental relations and of accidental qualities" (PR 120). The problem with this explanation, according to the process view, is that it "solves" the reconciliation between change and permanence at the price of incoherence, in this case dualism. The substance does not change while its attributes do. But this entails that the substance and its attributes are two different realities, which in turn requires us to explain their relation to each other. We do not solve the problem of reconciling permanence and change; we merely recast it into different terms: substance and attributes. But we still need to explain their relation to each other. And that proves as impossible as explaining the relation of change and permanence.

What the substance thinker is really forced to look for is that subject or entity which stands behind the various "acts of becoming" through which it endures without itself changing or becoming. But if we apply Zeno’s argument to this search for something which becomes, we will discover that there is nothing which becomes. As Whitehead argues:

We cannot, in effect, cut up the acts of becoming so as to reach something which exists behind or prior to them. We cannot divide up becoming in order to reach being, as it were. If we are committed to a substance view, however, it appears to be the case that we must find our substance or being in this way. Since we cannot so find it, we must give up the substance view.

One of the essential problems in the substance view, as revealed by the above dilemma, is its difficulty in claiming that a being (substance) is both a being and also becoming. That is, it wants to hold simultaneously the reality of substance or being which, as Whitehead and process thinkers understand it, connotes determinateness, completeness, concreteness, and the reality of becoming, which connotes indeterminateness, incompleteness, not-yet-concreteness. But how can that which is determinate be still becoming (i.e., indeterminate)?

Now if the problem is put into the language of being and becoming, the impossibility of the substance view is evident, provided that we accept the following assumptions: (1) to be a being is to be determinate, complete, concrete -- i.e., to be an object which is not still changing; (2) to have reached being (note that being is the goal, the outcome of becoming) is to have ceased becoming. A being, to be a being, must no longer be in the process of becoming a being. Being is the completion of becoming, the goal of becoming. The incoherence of the substance view resides in its insistence that a being can still become; that a substance which does not change (accepting the assumption that beings do not change or engage in any further becoming) can be somehow involved in its own further becoming. But if the becoming of a being is real and not just illusory or unessential, then the being is not really yet a being. Either the further becoming is essential, in which case the being which becomes is not yet really a being; or the becoming is not essential, in which case it does not really affect the being and hence there remains the problem of explaining what the relationship is between being and becoming (is the becoming even related to the being if it is nonessential to it?).

The alternative which Whitehead offers to this apparently incoherent substance view accepts the reality of being as determinate, complete, concrete. The process view does not have to account for the further becoming of a completed being because the role such a being plays in the ongoingness of the universe does not depend upon its own further alteration. In fact, the process of the world depends precisely upon completed beings remaining completed or objectified so as to be able to be prehended or available for concrescence. Rather than looking to the further becoming of already completed beings (which would be a contradiction in terms), the process model looks to the becoming which creates or produces these beings.

If one accepts the process view, then there seems to be no longer a problem of explaining how a being can continue to become while remaining a self-same being. For beings, having become beings, simply no longer become. They can participate in the becoming of other beings but they themselves are completed, finished, determinate. If one should object that it certainly seems to be the case that some beings at any rate appear to be still becoming while remaining essentially the same being, it would be replied that what is becoming is either a new being in process or else a society or route of beings, not a single, self-same being.

To the objection that this process view threatens the notion of a subject as a self-same identical entity which is not entirely changeless, process can point to the becoming which produces this subject. This becoming is both creative and integrative as well as unifying in that it is the becoming of this particular subject. The becoming of the subject is accounted for since it is precisely by becoming that it is this subject, and being is accounted for since it is this particular subject which is the goal of the becoming. The subject which affects other subjects, i.e., the subject which acts, is really only the completed subject (or, strictly speaking, the object), the determinate being which is no longer becoming. The subject which is creative, intentional, and deciding is the becoming subject. And the latter is the presupposition for the former.

The crucial assumption behind this process view is that the notion of a being entails the notion of an entity which can no longer become or change. The key concept here is that of determinateness. To be determinate, to be incapable of further change, in short, simply to be, is what constitutes a being. To be indeterminate, to be capable of further alteration, to be processing toward completion, is what constitutes becoming. Thus it follows that once an entity is, or has become, a being it can no longer continue to become a being. Thus the essential implication of the process view is that the fundamental explanation of the universe is through the coming-to-be of beings. And what makes such coming-to-be possible, what provides the necessary realities which constitute the coming-together-to-form-a-being, are already existing (i.e., objectified, determinate) beings, which are then concresced in creative and novel ways to produce new beings.

One immediate advantage of this process view is that it makes it unnecessary to explain how it is that completed beings can continue to change and become. We are asking for something which simply cannot be if we ask how it is that this being can remain this determinate entity and yet still be indeterminate, still capable of becoming what it is not now. Our question is misguided. What we should ask for is an explanation as to how this completed entity can participate in the formation of new beings. Instead of looking for the becoming of completed beings we need to look at the actual process of becoming by which completed beings are produced. If such a process of becoming requires the reality of already completed beings in its past, then we will have satisfactorily accounted for both becoming and being with regard to the same entity, without denying the reality of either.

One of the advantages of assuming that being is equivalent to completeness is that one can claim the endurance through time (the condition for change) of a being without having to explain its further changes (becoming). One of the disadvantages, of course, is that the endurance of objects no longer becoming vitiates language about such objects or beings deciding what they will do, where and how they will act, etc., since as beings they are no longer self-determining (and self-determination would be essential for any conception of self-action). It is important to recognize that the possibility of talking about the self-determination of a being is closed off, as it were, from the point of view of its future as a unified or completed being. Once a being has become this particular being, then it can no longer change. To talk about such a being’s having purposes and the ability to enact them is impossible because change is of the very essence of action: change requires the alteration from one event or condition to another. Unless we would want to maintain that a purposive being is in no essential way affected or changed by the enaction of its intentions, we would have to agree that intentional action entails indetermination of some degree on the part of the agent. Since beings have been defined by the process model, however, as determinate, it seems inescapable that beings cannot be involved as purposive entities in further change. The importance of this point is that it drives the process model to find a satisfactory explanation of self-activity or subjecthood, not in the future activity of the being which has been created by the process but in the activity of the becoming or process itself. For it is only the process of becoming a being which is indeterminate, incomplete, and changing. Because one cannot, as it were, look into the future of beings to explicate their self-activity or subjectivity, one has to look back into their past. It is only by looking at the process of becoming-a-being that one can discover those elements which constitute subjectivity, self-determination, and action.

Now it is precisely at this point of attempting to explain the becoming which produces a being in terms which do not explain away the unity and subjecthood of the subject-in-process that difficulties occur for the process view. The basic question, from a nonprocess viewpoint, is how we can think the unity or subjectivity of that which is not-yet-a-being. If this process of coming-to-be takes time and time is the condition for change, how can we reconcile the becomingness requisite for the completion of being and the beingness requisite for the unity and determinateness of a subject?

As we know, Whitehead can be interpreted as arguing for a non-extensive duration of time within which the process of becoming a being takes place -- a genetic period of time. From the point of view of extensive time, the process of becoming does not "take time." In fact, extensive time is only created by the passage from one completed being to another. Lewis S. Ford has (re)interpreted Whitehead here and has argued that the process of becoming does take place through extensive time although the being produced by the process does not exist as a being at any genetic phase of the process prior to the completion of the act of becoming (PS 1:199-209). While the process of becoming is going on, the being toward which it is aiming does not yet exist as a being. Thus one is not forced to search for that being prior to or behind the various genetic phases through which the process which produces it must pass (a search which is required by those who uphold the traditional substance view).

My objection to the Whiteheadian-Ford attempt to establish a subject prior to the completion of becoming is that it appears to me impossible to talk of a subject without presupposing a fundamental, basic notion of a being and that it is from such a notion that the process view has abstracted the notion of a process of unification aiming at a being. By an abstraction I mean a conceptual notion which has been lifted out from a more basic reality the concept of which must be presupposed by the abstraction. We cannot conceive the notion of justice apart from the more fundamental notion of the basic reality of just deeds. My argument is that the process model has abstracted the notion of the process of becoming a being from the more fundamental notion of the basic reality of beings. Such an abstraction is justified if the process is regarded as the process of a subject (i.e., the subject being conceived as coterminous with and underlying the process). If the process is not so regarded -- if the process is claimed not to presuppose the concomitant and coterminous notion of a being underlying or directing it -- then the only alternative is to regard the process as completely determined or totally random. What I cannot regard as possible is the conception of a process which is both subjective and self-determining and not yet a being because any notion of self or subject already requires the notion of a being.

The process view admits that it is asking us to accept the notion of the subject, not as a being, but as a process of unification aiming at a being. As long as the process of unification is still incomplete, still becoming, it is not yet a being. As soon as completeness is reached, the process is over, the subject has reached determination, and has become an object, a being.

Process attempts to retain the unity of the subject by insisting that the process of unification cannot be such a process unless it terminates in some being that is unified. There is middle ground between being and nothing, it is claimed. The process of becoming is not yet a being but it is aiming at a particular being and can, therefore, legitimately be spoken of as unified in the sense that it is a process which is unifying toward unity (completeness). The process or subject lacks determinate unity in process, but it does not lack unifying "activity." And since each process aims at some particular determinate being, it cannot be said that the process is entirely random. It is this particular process of unification aiming at this particular unity.

My difficulty with this is that it appears to require us to think of becoming as an abstraction from being. Becoming requires the unification of already existing beings into a novel unity and it terminates in being. It is bounded, as it were, by being. What is required conceptually is the ability to think a process between beings which does not presuppose an already existing being underlying the process itself. The problem is whether it is possible to think a process without thinking it as the process of a being, not just the process toward a being.

It would be possible, of course, if we did not ascribe to the process those attributes or characteristics which seem to presuppose the unity and concreteness associated with beings. When we try to talk of the process as in any sense self-determining or self-purposive (as distinct from being totally determined or totally random), we introduce notions which, I believe, cannot be separated from the basic notion of a being having already reached unity and possessing some elemental sense of determinateness. Our whole notion of self is predicated on the assumption that the self is in some sense a determinate being, an object capable of having predicates ascribed to it as it endures over a period of extensive time (the same self is asleep now, was awake yesterday, etc.).

There would be no problem, as I see it, if we regard the process of unification as an abstraction from the acts of unification done by unified beings. It would certainly be possible to imagine a coming-together of various entities to form a new and novel entity. We could imagine a being who is the causal agent bringing the entities together (i.e., determining their concrescence). Or we could imagine a concrescence of entities arising randomly (i.e., not ascribable to the purposive intention of any agents). What I find impossible to imagine is the unification of entities which is neither solely the result of the intention of already existing beings nor entirely random. But what process is asking us to imagine is a unification which is neither random nor the willful action of already existing beings. We are asked, in effect, to imagine a process of unification as having, in effect, subjective unity prior to the achievement of subjective unity. If the unity, however, is really not achieved until the end of the process of unification, it seems illegitimate to smuggle back into the explanation of the process leading to unity the notion of a self or subject helping, in any way whatsoever, to decide or determine the unification because such a notion of self or subject already presupposes a basic idea of at least elemental unity and determinateness.

Of course, once the process is over and being has been achieved it can be claimed that a retrospective view of the unification process legitimates calling it the process of a unified being. But from the point of view of the process of unification itself, it appears to me impossible to say that this is a subject which is unifying itself toward determinate unity. If we want to talk in this way, it would seem necessary for us to abstract from the completed entity, the being, in order to refer to its role in its own creation. It, as this determinate being, was not, strictly speaking, there or active in its own creation except as final cause perhaps, which is also an abstraction of the process in and of itself since it does not exist as such until the process which creates it has reached completion. It is present in this process, therefore, only as goal or anticipation, and we must abstract from the completed being if we want to talk about that being’s presence of existence prior to its complete creation. The necessity for this abstraction is clear, of course, if one wants to avoid saying that the process of unification is either completely determined by some prior being or beings or is completely random. Unless we can talk in some way about the process of unification as being in some sense self-purposive or intentional, then we cannot talk about it as subjective (unless we use the word "subjective" simply as a synonym for incomplete). Subjectivity has always implied some sense of self -- self-determination, action, decision, etc -- which in turn requires some sense of completeness as a being.

This has, of course, been the thrust of much of Edward Pols’s objections to the process view. Lewis S. Ford has argued that the actual occasion not only requires some unifying factor (which could be accounted for simply by saying that there is an instantaneous coming-together-of all sorts of things into a determinate configuration, the unifying factor simply explaining that such a coming-together is possible) but that this unifying factor must control or guide the process of concrescence (1:211; WM 215). That clearly implies that it has some control over which feelings are concresced and which are not. But subjective agency, Pols contends, implies some agent or subject which is the determiner or decider whose active power brings about its own concreteness. The problem, as Pols sees it,

Pols’s argument forces home the point that unless there is some subject or agent actually bringing about, in an active, causal sense, the concrescences whose completion is the subject itself, then we cannot talk about the subject "causing" itself in any degree at all. At the very best the language of self-causation would be metaphorical; at worst, misleading and wrong. The most accurate thing that could be said about the act of becoming is that there is a coming-together in a determinate way and that such coming-together is the formation of this particular being. But to import language, even if seemingly justified by reference to "genetic division," which refers to a subject, or a subjective aim acting like a subject, i.e., enduring throughout the process and controlling it to some degree, is radically misleading.

Ford, it is true, counters this point by arguing that thcre is real unification taking place in the actual occasion and that this real unification "is subjectively felt from the standpoint of the concrescing occasion as a decision in which indeterminations are resolved" (1:220). But Ford admits that "this same process may be objectively viewed as the interplay among the transcendent decisions of all actual entities prehended, progressively modifying one another to eliminate incompatibilities" (1:220, italics mine ) "Objectively viewed," it seems there is no subject doing the modifying. The prehended actual entities modify each other.

Ford tries to get around the problem of the subject’s modifying itself by a distinction of perspectives. Subjectivity is a perspective from within the actual occasion, as it were, of its own concrescing. The objective perspective, on the other hand, views the conscrescing as the determinate coming-together-of actual entities. But Ford’s language about subjectivity manifests a decidedly passive subject. For example, "freedom is precisely the subjective experience of this interplay of physical and conceptual feelings. In a free decision, a given multiplicity of factors is reduced to determinateness by the adjustment of these factors to one another" (1:221, italics mine). But a subjective experience of unification does not necessarily imply that there is a subject doing the unifying, reducing, or adjusting. As Pols points out in his reply to Ford, the actual occasion is, strictly speaking, "unifying activity itself" and not the unifying activity of some causally effective power which unifies (2:148).² Ford admits that from an objective point of view "unification simply happens’ in a purely arbitrary way, if we exclude the process itself from being a reason" (1:225).

It is clear that Ford feels that if the subject’s own point of view is taken into account, there is the feeling of free decision. The strength of Ford’s point depends upon our acceptance of the view that when a subject chooses to do something or decides some course of action that choice or decision has its ultimate explanation in the subject itself and not in some external power or condition. That particular view can well be accepted, but I do not see that it entails or depends upon the additional acceptance of the view that the actual occasion is a subject choosing or deciding. If deciding is what a subject does and if the subject has no being until the process of becoming ends, then the decisions within the process are not the decisions of a subject, but the decisions which produce a subject.

One other result of Ford’s recourse to perspectives is that a new dualism threatens to creep into Whitehead’s coherent metaphysical scheme. If one and the same process can be viewed both determinately and freely, one is tempted to ask which is the way it really is? If the perspectives were truly partial, then the)’ could be reconciled through a more comprehensive perspective which made clear their compatibility. But it seems to be the case that the objective and subjective perspectives both claim to be exhaustively true of the very same process. The problem here is similar to the one about the freedom of man, seen in a somewhat everyday sense. Science, so the unsophisticated argument runs, knows that we are totally determined by all the forces of the universe, including the psychological. We feel that we are free, however, and therefore both freedom and determinism are true depending upon which perspective one takes. But if we are determined by causal forces, then our feeling that we are free is a real feeling but is not a (realistic) true feeling, i.e., it is not truly representative of what is the case. Perspectives can be reconciled with each other only if they do not contradict each other with regard to the same facts. Ford’s perspectives, however, seem to contradict each other in explaining the same reality. The actual occasion may include as one of its feelings the feeling of subjective creativity, but this feeling, though essential as a feeling to the constitution of the actual occasion, may not in fact be accurate or realistic. The feeling of subjective agency in itself does not entail that the actual occasion is in fact free to determine itself. In order to make the case that there is truly a subject determining itself, more than the perspective of subjective feeling-of-self-causation is needed. It will have to be shown that there is, in fact, a subject determining itself, and this is what has been shown, I think, to be lacking in the process model.

The fundamental difficulty which the process model faces is trying to retain language appropriate only to a subject (decision, purpose intention, action) for a process which is not yet a subject but which is becoming a subject. I cannot get away from the conviction that language referring to beings is primordial: it justifies any reference to selves or subjects who intend and do things. If we want to talk about the process which creates those selves or subjects, then we have to abstract conceptually from the latter. One of the implications of such abstraction is that when we refer to the process of becoming, we have to leave out of such reference notions like self-decision, self-determination, self-intention, etc., since they presuppose that which is not yet achieved, a subject or being. The concrete reality is the being: the abstract reality is the process by which it came to be in the sense that conceptually we need the notion of the being before we can think about that which creates it.

It need not, of course, be denied that it is possible to think the abstraction of process. As we have already indicated, it is quite conceivable that a process of concrescence or unification be brought about by some directing (but already existing) subject or that it be brought about randomly (no agent or series of agents intending this particular unification). What is, to me, inconceivable is that a process of unification producing a subject be guided or determined by that same subject prior to its existence as a subject. The process can clearly be conceived as real, but not as the (even partial) self-creation of the very subject which it is producing. The only way in which such a conception is possible is for us to import back into the concept of process toward a being the very notion of a being itself. If I think a process of unification as the process of a particular but already existing being. I have no conceptual difficulty, but I have violated one of the imperatives of the process model.

From a nonprocess point of view it seems impossible to think the reality of anything except as the reality of a being. If we think it as not-yet-a-being, we do not think it as primordial but as abstract. Anything which is not a being is less real, or at least derivatively real as compared to a being. It is also an essential element in the being model that only beings are subjects: only that which has some determinate reality, some unity, some completion is able to act, intend, decide, etc. Thus from the model of being it is impossible to conceive of a process of becoming except as an abstraction from being and as either a process directed by some already existing agent or agents or as a process randomly and unintentionally occurring. If subjects are beings, therefore, we cannot describe the process which creates a being in language appropriate only to a subject, unless we use it metaphorically, abstractly, or in anticipation of what the process will produce. As long as we remain within extensive time and think in terms of before/after, we will have inordinate difficulty, from the being model, in talking coherently about a subject which does not exist as subject (as unified being) until after the process which creates it is over as existing in some sense before itself and as participating self-creatively in its own production. If we want to retain some notion of subjectivity in the process of becoming a subject, it would be far better to understand such subjectivity as one feeling among others waiting to be unified, this particular feeling’s having, as it were, a feeling of indeterminations becoming determinate. Such a feeling, however, need not entail that there is in fact a subject doing the determining unless it be a prior subject, existing before the process.

From the point of view of a being model there are beings who do things. One of the things they may do is to create new beings. The act of creation of a new being can be a process: the new being does not spring out of nowhere. The process by which the new being is created is a real process, but the subjecthood of the new being does not exist until the process of becoming (creation) is over. The process can be said to be determined by a subject (the prior, already existing subject) and to produce a subject (the later, second existing subject). But the subjects are distinct, and the newly created subject does not even begin to be self-creative, self-determining, until the prior subject has brought the process of becoming to a state of being which has enough requisite unity and determinateness to begin being a subject or agent. There would be no problem here with determinism since the determination by the prior agent applies only to the process by which the being is created. Since beings have to exist in order to even begin acting, the determination process which created their being does not imply further external determination of what can be their own self-originated actions. Whatever changes occur to that being through its intended actions occur precisely to a being which has been created with enough unity and determinateness to remain this particular being throughout its further actions. And it is only by use of what seems to be an absolutely basic notion of the distinctness of a being that we can even raise the notions of processes leading to the creation of such beings and the actions and decisions by which such beings further determine themselves.

The notion of being as determinate need only imply that whatever changes or becomes cannot become or change so drastically as to become a totally different being. Beings which become without annihilating the very being which makes becoming possible are the fundamental realities, and it is from them that we need to think all other realities.

My criticism of the process view of the subject can be summarized as follows. It separates being and becoming to the extent that what is still becoming is not yet a being (whether this becoming occurs over extensive or epochal time). A being is that which is unified, determinate. Only beings are complete or concrete enough to be called selves -- to choose, to intend, and to act. It is therefore illegitimate to talk about the process which produces such beings as having the qualities of a subject (such as self-determination or decision) - In order to use notions appropriate to subjects (beings) to describe the process which produces the subject, we must abstract such notions from the completed subject. Therefore, notions assuming self-creativity, self-determination, decision, and intention (since they presuppose rootage in a being) can be applied to the process producing a self only abstractly, i.e., only as lifted out from the completed subject. Before the minimal level of being has been reached, no language rooted in the concept of a being is literally applicable to the development of which such a minimal level of being is reached. From the perspective of the completed being, it may be possible to look back over the process leading to completion and declare that this process has a sufficient degree of unity (since it produced this unified being) to warrant using concepts of the subject to describe it, but it must be remembered that, strictly speaking, such usage is an abstraction from and, therefore, only derivatively real compared to the fundamental reality of the being on which the abstraction is based.

References

WM -- Edward Pols. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.

1. Lewis S. Ford. "Can Whitehead Provide for Real Subjective Agency? A Reply to Edward Pols’s Critique." The Modern Schoolman, 47/2 (January, 1970), 209-25.

2. Edward Pols. "Whitehead on Subjective Agency: A Reply to Lewis S. Ford." The Modern Schoolman, 49/2 (January, 1972), 144-50.

Notes:

1 "Process or Agent;" forthcoming in Thought. See also John B. Bennett; "Process or Agent: A Response." Philosophy of Religion and Theology: 1972 (Working Papers for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, 1972), pp. 146-59.

2 This criticism of causal power does not touch, of course, the power the completed being has upon successive acts of becoming. It has to do only with the power which causes this particular being to become what it is.

In reading The Liberation of Life by Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., I was impressed by the precision of concept of their ecological model and its adequacy to be a guide for science, ethics, and philosophy. I was not so impressed by their characterization of the competing mechanical model. For historical and expository reasons, they chose to present a model of classical mechanism that is based on an outdated image of a machine. In this paper, I shall present a more adequate mechanistic position based on a contemporary image of a machine and attempt to show its relationship to the ecological model of Birch and Cobb.

A mechanistic perspective entails viewing the world in the image of a machine. Birch and Cobb have defined the image of a machine as "of an entity whose internal structure is given and whose behavior follows from this structure" (LL 79). They acknowledge that machines cannot be abstracted altogether from their environment, but they do affirm that "the relevant features of the environment are conceived as limited and controllable" (LL 79). The image that Birch and Cobb are using for mechanism is of a simple machine -- a household or factory machine but not, for example, a modern computer, which can take into account its environment in almost any desired degree of complexity. Their exposition of the philosophy of the mechanical model of explanation is correspondingly oversimplified and, for this reason, suffers unnecessarily by comparison with their ecological model.

1 Turing Machines

I propose that the image of a machine, from which one may abstract a more adequate philosophy of mechanism, should be a Turing machine, and in particular, a universal Turing machine. The reasons for choosing Turing machines are twofold. First, a Turing machine is precisely defined. We know exactly what one is. Second, major recent developments in mathematics, logic, and computer science have shown an exact relationship between certain logical notions and Turing machines. Since the goal of this paper is to describe a mechanistic model of explanation, the connection between these logical notions and Turing machines will allow us to establish the relationship between the explanatory model and the image of the machine. Furthermore, we can establish whether an explanation is ultimately a mechanical one or not. An explanation will be considered mechanical if it can be transformed without loss of information, literally, into a Turing machine. The possibility of such a transformation would identify an explanation as being not just mechanical by analogy but being mechanical by fundamental structure. We can then ask to what extent the ecological model of Birch and Cobb is actually mechanical and to what extent, if any, it is nonmechanical.

Alan Turing invented the Turing machine as an intellectual tool in the 1930’s in order to solve problems in mathematics. He never made an actual machine, and I am not sure whether anyone has ever constructed one as a machine. It is much easier today to build a digital computer which can function as a Turing machine. But clearly a Turing machine can be constructed as a machine, and must be considered as a machine. It conforms exactly to the definition of a machine given by Birch and Cobb. Its internal structure is rigidly given in the form of a table of ordered quadruples. This table specifies exactly the behavior of the machine. The exactly determined behavior of the Turing machine, however, is conditioned upon its environment. Birch and Cobb acknowledge that all machines react in some sense to their environment. They fail to recognize, however, how complex the relationship between a machine and its environment can really be. In a certain technical sense (explained later), there is no limit to the complexity of the interaction of Turing machines with their environment.

A Turing machine in its simplest characterization is a self-contained entity that gives symbolic output information in response to symbolic input information. For the same input information an individual Turing machine always gives the same output information. The symbolic input and output information are normally considered to be words composed of individual symbols that are on the machine s tape, even though a Turing machine can be designed to accept and give information in any standard medium. As normally understood, a classical Turing machine reads one symbol at a time, and in terms of its current state and the symbol read takes an action, which may be to erase, print a new symbol, or move to the right or left one space, after which it goes to a new (or the same) state. The complete action of a Turing machine, in response to its input information, is controlled by the lines in its fixed table each of which has four entries: the current state, the symbol read, the action to be taken, and the new state.

Turing machines differ from automobiles and other kinds of machines in that they are designed specifically to manipulate the symbols of some finite alphabet. They are symbol processing machines. They communicate with their environment through the symbols of their input, and output information. Most ordinary machines can function (in part) as Turing machines if there is some way to identify symbolically their input from the environment and their output to the environment. For example, an automobile may act as a Turing machine as it determines a new direction of travel from the angle of the steering wheel and its current direction. Digital computers act as Turing machines as they determine output digital, normally 1-0 (high-low voltage), information in terms of input digital information. We understand very well the effective, and almost intelligent, power that Turing machines can have through their current use as computers.

The remarkable thing about Turing machines as proposed in their original archaic form is what can be proved about them. Turing himself proved that a single Turing machine can be constructed which can reproduce the action of any Turing machine whatsoever. This universal Turing machine reads as part of its input data the Turing machine table of the duplicated machine and takes whatever action this machine would have taken on its appropriate input data. A modern digital computer is a universal Turing machine. Its program can be considered to correspond to a duplicated Turing machine. Given enough time and storage space, it can perform the actions and accomplish the results of any other computer whatsoever, whether presently existing or to be made in the future.

Turing also established by proof certain ultimate limitations of Turing machines, and hence of all machines including computers. He proved that there cannot exist a Turing machine which can decide in all cases whether an arbitrary Turing machine will halt or not when given an arbitrary input. Turing’s "halting problem" proof is intimately related to (and can be used to prove) other major limitative theorems in logic and mathematics, including Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem for Arithmetic and Church’s Theorem for predicate logic. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem entails that there cannot exist any well defined set of axioms from which all the true theorems of arithmetic can be derived. Church’s Theorem entails that there cannot exist any well defined procedure that can decide in all cases whether or not an arbitrary sentence does or does not logically follow from an arbitrary set of axioms. I shall use these limitative theorems, considered as extensions of Turing’s halting problem, to show the basic limitations of a philosophy of mechanism. These limitations correspond very closely to those expressed by Birch and Cobb.

Aside from the limitations imposed by the halting problem, there are two basic reasons that computers cannot accomplish certain things today -- for example, be programmed to act with human common sense. The first reason is that there may not be enough computer storage space or computer time to solve a problem for which we have an effective procedure. The second, and more likely reason, is that we have not been able to specify as yet the exact procedures which may solve the problem. Most intractable problems are due to conceptual difficulties on our part. They are software problems. The hardware acting as a universal Turing machine is adequate.

2 Church’s Thesis

Contemporary computer scientists, mathematicians, and logicians are very confident that if we can specify exactly the procedures for accomplishing something, we can build a Turing machine, or more practically, program a computer, that will do it according to the procedures. This confidence takes a technical name and is called Church’s thesis or the Church-Turing thesis. Church’s thesis is a metaphysical generalization like the law of conservation of energy in physics and has almost comparable authority to this law in computer science. It is backed by massive evidence and the strictest logical analysis. It is one of the most important results of computer science, logic, and mathematics. It is a thesis (to be assumed) rather than a theorem (which can be proved) because of the essentially intuitive and (formally) imprecise nature of the idea of a general well defined procedure.

Church’s thesis entails that any algorithm (well defined procedure that eventually terminates) may be translated without loss of information into a Turing machine. For example, a set of well defined axioms with appropriate well defined laws of transformation in logic may be considered to be a well defined procedure for deriving consequences from the axioms. There are technical ways of translating the axioms and laws of transformation in logic into a Turing machine that will do the same thing that can be done with the axioms through the logical laws of transformation. What is normally done with a working axiom system? One brings information to the axiom system and asks what this information entails from the axioms. A constructed Turing machine that represents a set of well defined axioms and effective procedures would accept input information (appropriately coded) and give the entailed consequences in its output information -- the same consequences that would be obtained by using the logical procedures on the axioms.

3 Models

Biological models of explanation, such as the DNA model of the gene or the natural selection model of evolution, give pictures of reality that function in practical ways. They may guide new experiments in terms of established, but nonformalized, biological procedures. One may bring experimental information to a picture of a model and ask how the picture clarifies the information. Does the information fit the picture and support the model? If so, how and in what way? What new information is entailed by the interaction of the picture with the experimental data? The processes for deciding the relevance of the experimental information in the light of a picture of a model are not always evident -- but often they are. These procedures are part of the discipline ofbiology and are intimately associated with the model. As the model is clarified and made precise, they must be considered to be part of the model itself. Church’s thesis says that if the model, including its associated procedures, is well defined and the procedures are effective, then the model may be translated into a Turing machine that will accomplish the same thing that the model does. This means that any model, including the natural selection model of evolution or the ecological model of Birch and Cobb, if it is well defined and includes only effective procedures, can be translated into a machine -- and hence deserves to be called mechanical.

Some pictures of models, such as DNA, seem more mechanical than others, such as natural selection. In terms of the images that we have, it is possible to imagine that DNA is in fact a complicated machine, whereas natural selection as a process resists mechanization. We may seek to find and understand certain mechanical elements that form the explanation of the natural selection model (such as DNA), but the model per se is not normally viewed as a machine. The claim, on the authority of Church’s thesis, that we may translate a precise natural selection model into a machine is nonintuitive. We have little idea what such a machine would look like and wonder whether it would have any explanatory function.

The discussion which follows is divided into two subsections:

that which asks whether certain possible machine-like entities, such as DNA or the cell, can be viewed actually as machines; and that which discusses the nature of machines that are translations of nonmachine-like models or theories. We shall find that the distinction is in no way absolute. Machine-like entities have apparently nonmachine-like modes ofexplanation that are part of the models, and nonmachine-like models have parts that are patently mechanical. Both, however, may be interpreted in terms of Turing machines.

4 Is DNA a Machine?

A machine’s "internal structure is given" (LL 79). It is this fixed or static character of machines that is at the heart of all classical mechanism. Birch and Cobb assert that "the ultimate mechanical model involves ‘disecting the organism down to its constituent controlling mechanisms and building it up from these building blocks" (LL 69). For a philosophy of mechanism, these building blocks are assumed to be static either in being or structure (or at least to have static essential parts), and it is from such fixed structure that the mechanist seeks to predict the nature of the whole, normally by the laws of mechanics. Jacques Monod, for example, is listed as a contemporary mechanist who believes that the DNA molecule is the controlling building block of living systems (LL 70). Birch and Cobb object to Monod’s view because of evidence concerning the nature of DNA: it can self replicate, it assists in its own synthesis outside the cell, it is counterentropic, it determines necessary conditions for the development of organisms and not sufficient conditions (LL 8lf.). In short, it is conditioned (in a very complex way) by its environment as well as conditioning its environment.

Birch and Cobb maintain that the ecological model is more adequate than the mechanical model for explaining DNA, the cell, other biological subject matter (as well as subatomic physics), because it holds that living things behave as they do only in interaction with other things which constitute their environment (LL 83) and because "the constituent elements of the structure at each level (of an organism) operate in patterns of interconnectedness which are not mechanical" (LL 83). In response, first, to the issue of interaction with environment, every machine that I know of does interact with its environment. The more complicated the machine, the more complex its potential interaction with the environment. A Turing machine is designed to respond to its environment. It may accept any (finite) magnitude of information, however large, and respond to it. Hence, on this issue, I see no objection to viewing DNA as a type of machine.¹ Furthermore some machines can self-replicate if given the right instructions and materials, they are counterentropic, and they can determine necessary conditions for the development of other machines. I am not claiming here that DNA is a machine, only that there is an image of a machine that can react as complexly with its environment, and in the same ways, as DNA does.

The real reason why Birch and Cobb object to viewing DNA as a machine is that they understand it to have "patterns of interconnectedness which are not mechanical" (LL 83). These patterns are "internal relations" of which human feeling and experience are the ideal exemplification. Birch and Cobb, following Whitehead, generalize this experience to all actual entities. This experience "can be used to include not only human and amoebic experience, conscious or non-conscious as the case may be, but also non-conscious taking account of the environment which characterizes molecular, atomic and quantum events as well" (LL 131).

What would it mean to understand a Turing machine to have such internal relations? First, we would have to understand a Turing machine to be identified not only with its fixed table, but also with its input and output information. (This is an arbitrary distinction. We can decide what is and is not our basic mechanical image.) A Turing machine would then not only include a part of its environment but would be both constituted by its environment as well as constituted by its reaction to its environment. It could be considered a very dynamic entity, becoming what it is as a synthesis of relations (its response) to other events. Second, we would have to understand internal relations as probably high level, and complicated, software constructions of basic patterns of the alphabet of the Turing machine. Human feelings, in Whiteheadian thought, are quite complex. The internal relations of a Turing machine would have to be similarly complex constructs of the basic alphabet and vocabulary of the machine.

Can a human feeling (or idea) be represented by a complicated software construction of symbols? We really do not know. This is a major problem in creating artificial intelligence. A human feeling can probably be represented symbolically only in part. I make this judgment because of limitation theorems on Turing machines (to be discussed) which claim that no actual thing or event can be represented completely. This would mean that an abstract Turing machine defined by us could not have a complete representation of a human feeling. It would not mean that an actual machine, in the physical world, could not have internal relations of the sort of which Birch and Cobb speak.

5 Models Translated into Machines

A model that is well defined by effective procedures may be translated by the authority of Church’s thesis into a Turing machine that captures the structure of the model. What would such a model look like? Would it have simple mechanical parts or actions that would allow us to interpret more complicated ones, as do simple machines on which a classical mechanism is built? Would the machine that models DNA, for example, be picturable in an intuitive mechanical fashion? Probably not, although the answer to this question depends on our perspective. It is the that each line of a Turing machine table, that fixed structure that determines the nature of the Turing machine, can be considered to be a simple mechanical structure or action on which the complex structure of the machine depends. But to attempt to analyze the function of a complex Turing machine by examining each of the individual lines of its table would be extremely difficult. The table would be entirely too long (millions of lines), too detailed, and too "microscopic" for easy comprehension. Examining such a machine through its table, or as it is operating on its table, would be like examining only the electronic activity of a running computer, or of an operating brain, and trying to decide what the computer is accomplishing or the brain is thinking.

The reason that we can understand standard models in biology is that they are already formulated into higher level language and concepts. They are not formulated in the simple actions of a line of a Turing machine table or of the (relatively) simple firing of a brain’s neuron. If however, the higher level concepts are clearly defined by effective procedures, they may then be subdivided into component parts, which parts may also then be subdivided until we finally reach very simple actions that can be described by lines of a Turing machine table. This is one of the insights that tends to confirm Church’s thesis, that well defined procedures may be successively subdivided until the whole can be described in terms of (very complicated) relationships among simple actions -- which have a mechanical counterpart. The human mind, however, finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the whole in terms of the immense complexity of the simple parts. It understands only if the simple actions are grouped successively back towards a higher level language, so that groups of simple actions or instructions may have an intuitive understanding that can be expressed in ordinary language.

A Turing machine that represented a complex theory or model could be understood in a simple mechanical way to the degree that its table is grouped appropriately so that each group of lines in the table stood for a readily understandable intuitive idea. The groups would then have to be organized so that they would relate to each other in a recognizable logical fashion. The overall understanding of the machine would then probably be more logical than mechanical, although the logical structures could be translated into ideas that had a more mechanical feel if desired.

6 The Limitations of Machines

Machines are adequate to represent any effective well defined procedure. This is Church’s thesis. For example, if there exists an effective procedure that can describe adequately the operation of the human brain, a machine can be built to duplicate the procedure, subject, of course, to time and storage constraints. What then are the limitations of machines? Machines cannot solve problems, or represent things or events, for which there can exist no effective well defined procedures for solving or describing them. How much of a limitation is this really? I think that it is a fundamental one. We may show, from extensions of Turing’s proofs regarding the halting problem, that no effective well defined procedure, no precise axiom system, no metaphysical system, or no clear means whatsoever, can ever describe accurately and completely any individual thing or event in the real world. If one cannot describe completely any individual thing, one cannot describe the whole, which contains the individual things.

One way of understanding Turing’s halting problem is in terms of magnitudes of complexity of information. (There are technical ways of assigning numbers to information that express its magnitude of complexity.) The halting problem entails that for any effective scheme that can decide whether Turing machines halt or not, there exists a Turing machine more complex than the scheme -- hence the scheme (or a Turing machine constructed from the scheme) will not necessarily be able to decide its action. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that no axiom system can ever give us all the true theorems of arithmetic. It entails that for any axiom system for arithmetic, there exist theorems in arithmetic more complex than the axiom system, and hence, the axiom system does not contain enough information to present the theorem completely. Church’s theorem states that there exists no well defined procedure that can tell us in all cases whether a conclusion logically follows or not from premises. It entails that for any well defined logical procedure, there exist axiom systems and conclusions more complex than the logical procedure; hence, the logical procedure cannot guarantee us whether the conclusion does or does not logically follow from the premises.

Another way of understanding the limitative theorems is in terms of theories. A theory is a set of sentences that cohere -- in the sense that any sentence which logically follows from sentences in the set is also in the set. How complex can a theory be? The theory of arithmetic (all sentences true about the natural numbers) is so complex, according to Gödel, that no well defined set of arithmetic axioms is sufficient to derive all true theorems. Any set of axioms whatsoever gives only part of the true theorems of arithmetic.

How complex is an actual thing or event in the real world? Can we ever describe or understand it completely? To do so would require not only describing all its constituent parts, down to its subatomic particles, but also its relationships to all other things, that is, its relationship to the whole cosmos. We might well expect, therefore, that a

complete description of any event would be immensely complex. Does an actual thing or event have a complexity comparable to the theory of arithmetic? Is it so complex that no system, scheme, or model can ever describe it completely?

Any thing or event has spatial extension or temporal dimension. We may map the natural numbers of arithmetic into such extension or dimension. To give the fill truth about a thing or event, we would have to give the possible numerical relationships of its constituent temporal or dimensional parts. That is, we would have to be able to determine the full truth of arithmetic theorems. We cannot do this by authority of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Hence, there is no clearly defined method of describing the event or thing including its possible internal and external relationships. Hence, there is no machine -- constructed from such a procedure -- that can reproduce the event or thing. The thing, or event, however, may be a machine. The limitative theorems entail that there is no procedure for understanding completely this machine.

7 Good Models and a New Mechanism

A good model is considered to be one that is clearly defined and for which there are effective procedures for deciding the relevance of information brought to it. Such models have some fixed internal structure. In an axiomatic model, for example, the axioms are given and static. Yet a model also functions dynamically. One brings information to axioms and gets new information from the axioms and the old information. Note the similarity between good models and machines. Both have a fixed structure and act dynamically in terms of this structure. An actual machine, however, as part of the physical world is more complex than any good model. No good model (or other well defined method) can ever describe a machine completely. Any good model, however, can be translated into a Turing machine (by Church’s thesis) whose abstracted structure can represent the model.

A revised philosophy of mechanism, understood from a contemporary image of a machine, must recognize that a good model is the best vehicle for describing nature, rather than old images of machines, which are not complex enough to represent adequately a reaction of a complex entity with its environment. A model is, of necessity, an abstraction from and a limitation of the reality being expressed. Although any good model can be expressed as a machine, it cannot necessarily be expressed completely in traditional mechanical principles. Its expression as a machine will contain both mechanical principles and logical ones. Nevertheless, since the possibilities of grouping the Turing machine’s primitive table into higher level concepts are quite varied, a new philosophy of mechanism would tend to support an organization of software into a higher level language that is intuitively mechanical. The good model understood as a machine has been, and may continue to be, science’s best heuristic tool.

8 A New Mechanism and the Ecological Model

To "trust life," according to Birch and Cobb, "is to allow the challenging and threatening elements in our world to share in constituting our experience." "It is to trust that the outcome of allowing the tension of the old and the new to be felt can be a creative synthesis which cannot be predetermined or planned" (LL 131). This trust in life and the actual experiences which it entails are part of human existence that can be far better explained, as Birch and Cobb affirm, by an ecological model rather than an older mechanical one. A more contemporary mechanism, however, would recognize that since no description of an actual event is ever complete, any actual experience of the event may give novelty, that is, may give an aspect of the event not previously perceived. As Birch and Cobb say, "In every moment there is . . . a new possibility arising out . . . of what is given for that moment" (LL 184). Old structures of existence must give way in creative synthesis to new ones, because, as alive, we experience novelty in the actual world. In my judgment, the ecological model is superior to any present mechanical one, because it integrates this insight into human experience with science, ethics, philosophy, and religion. This does not mean, however, that mechanical philosophies may not be extended to include such integration.

I also think that the ecological model of Birch and Cobb is superior in explanatory power to any present mechanical model because the ecological model accepts human feelings as primary givens. These feelings must be higher level constructs of more elementary structures in any mechanistic philosophy. Process thought does, of course, attempt to describe how such feelings arise out of previous ones, but it resists the temptation to claim that human feelings can be explained exclusively by reducing them to simpler lower level events. Any model which relates the wide range of human feelings to the complex human experiences of science, philosophy, ethics, and religion is very valuable, especially in a day when mechanical philosophies cannot effect this relationship. As new and more powerful scientific models are found, especially in the areas of brain research and artificial intelligence, a new mechanism which can show the relationship between primitive biological and logical concepts to higher level concepts may be able to clarify the nature and constitution of human feelings. As the ecological model itself is clarified and made more nearly into a good model, its potential for actual mechanization is enhanced. At this stage a new mechanism may be a very attractive option.

References

LL -- Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Notes

1Birch and Cobb do recognize that DNA is "analogous to a complex machine designed to respond differentially to diverse inputs" and "may be interpreted as the product of mechanism in the cell" (LL. 81), but in their effort to refute such a view, I see no effective reason given other than the high level of complexity of interactions in the cell. This confirms to me only that they do not appreciate the levels of complexity possible in contemporary machines and in particular in a universal Turing machine.

In Jerusalem, 1964, at the International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Abraham Robinson said: "As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable."¹ In a 1971 expository article "New Models of the Real-Number Line," Lynn Steen commented: "It seems unlikely, however, that within the next few generations mathematicians will be able to agree on whether every mathematical statement that is true is also knowable."² We can see in these two statements the first stages of a new philosophical question concerning the nature of mathematics: whether there are true but unknowable mathematical structures. The question itself is a result of new foundation shaking developments of the last few decades in mathematics.

True but unknowable? How can we talk about the content of mathematics, of all things, as true but unknowable? Robinson and Steen are not questioning whether there are mathematical relationships, theorems, or facts that are presently true but presently unknown. This would mean something that neither accepts, namely, that we presently know all true mathematics. What they are asking is whether there is some mathematical content that is true but which in principle can never be known. We can understand Robinson’s incredulity and Steen’s more cautious skepticism about the existence of such structures, for traditional Western mathematics has operated in almost the opposite direction. The determination of the truth of a mathematical structure, theorem, or fact has been primarily a function of its knowability. We know it to be true because it is known in a certain determinate way.

In this paper I want to examine how this new question of the possibility of true but unknowable mathematics may engage contemporary discussions of a doctrine of God. But first, let us look at how old mathematics, with familiar procedures and assumptions, has affected traditional doctrines of God.

God as Unchanging

Concepts of God change even within religious communities that maintain close continuity with their past. Changes in a Christian doctrine of God have often paralleled changes in an understanding of the nature of the soul. The understanding of both underwent significant change between the end of the New Testament period and the culmination of theology of the early church in Augustine. The change was basically towards emphasizing an understanding of the soul as eternal and of God as unchanging, as contrasted with an understanding of the soul (or spirit) that decays or dissolves at death to be resurrected by the power of God and of a God who is active and involved in the affairs of men and, hence, who changes. Both of these latter positions are nearer Biblical emphases than the former. The God of the Bible is never presented as absolutely immutable and static ontologically. He loves, wills, acts in history, becomes incarnate, changes his mind, and knows particular changing and quite mutable men. If one accepts a real knowledge by God of a changing world, then such understanding would indicate that there is some change, perhaps minor, in God himself.

This movement within Christian theology is generally recognized to have resulted from a contribution of Greek philosophy and religion. The Greek contribution, however, was not seen by the church to be incompatible with scripture or orthodox doctrine. For centuries, theologians have seen the traditional scriptural accounts of creation, of covenant, of historical deliverance, of incarnation and atonement as confirming a doctrine of God who is best understood as absolute and unchanging, while not realizing the anomaly of this doctrine with God’s activity witnessed in each scriptural account.

To see a clear example of the use of mathematics for an argument for an eternal soul, and thereby for an immutable God, we need look no further than Augustine’s treatise On the Immortality of the Soul. Augustine’s argument proceeds from the unchangeable nature of mathematics to the eternal nature of the soul. We may redesign his argument in chapter one as follows: Anything which contains something eternal, i.e., unchanging, cannot itself be non-eternal. The soul or mind contains something eternal, namely science, which in turn contains the unchanging mathematical structure that a line drawn through the midpoint of a circle is greater than any line not drawn through the midpoint, and hence is eternal itself. The critical relation on which the argument hangs is inclusion. The soul A includes (contains) science B which contains an eternal truth of mathematics C. A cannot be totally destroyed or eliminated without eliminating both the subsets B and C. Thus, the guaranteed or eternal existence of C entails the conclusion that the soul can never be ultimately or completely destroyed.

Tertullian put his finger on the source of the doctrine of an incorporeal soul when he pointed out that it is the philosophers, those "patriarchs of heretics," and the chief among them Plato himself, who have led us astray to suppose the soul is not bodily. The fault lies squarely, according to Tertullian, on Plato’s doctrine of forms, which in separating intellectual faculties from bodily functions, make claim to a kind of truth "whose realities are not palpable, nor open to the senses."³ Tertullian believed in an eternal soul, but after careful examination of the scriptures concluded that it was quite corporeal.

I think Tertullian’s historical analysis is sound. It was Plato’s doctrine of form which, if not the clear source, was the primary philosophical justification, of an affirmation of an eternal soul and an unchanging God -- at least in the theological period dominated by Augustine. We see a clear argument in the Phaedo for eternal soul and unchanging divinity based on forms -- although, of course, Plato was radically inconsistent about the immutability of God.⁴ If one assumes that God’s Wisdom is Platonic in form, i.e., utterly unchanging and eternal, it is a simple matter to go from there to understand Cod in totality as unchanging. This is the primary approach of Augustine and of all Christian Platonists. I could document this in innumerable ways.

There is excellent evidence to believe that Plato’s doctrine of forms was precipitated by his mathematical involvement and that he modeled his understanding of forms after an understanding of mathematical figures that was then held by the burgeoning mathematical community. Aristotle, for example, claimed that Plato’s ideas had ontologically the same status as Pythagorean numbers and were used by Plato the way the mathematical society used their numbers.⁵ Plato himself frequently used examples from geometry to show the nature of form. A. E. Taylor has made a comprehensive study of the usage of idea and eidos in Greek literature prior to and contemporary with the Platonic dialogues.⁶ He actually lists each such use of the word. His conclusion from the study was that the term idea itself came from a technical Pythagorean use which meant geometrical pattern or figure. Since the publication of his study, the main thrust of argument against it has been, not that there is close ontological identification between the true nature of mathematical existence and the other ideas, but that the concept of Platonic form could have arisen from sources historically independent of mathematics.⁷ Even if the concept of idea did arise independently, it was quickly welded to mathematical examples, identified with them, and influenced thereby.

It was Aristotle who in revising a Platonic understanding of form championed an exclusively immutable God. He understood Platonic forms to be immanent within physical things and not in a realm transcendent over them. In ordinary substances each sensible thing was seen to be a composite of matter and form possessing a combination of fixity, the form, and potentiality for change, the matter. All such substances, according to Aristotle, are in motion, that is, changing from one form to another. The reason for change from potential to actual in the individual substances is ultimately pure form itself, i.e., God (as much as Aristotle has a God), who attracts, as it were, by virtue of being a final cause or goal, all things unto himself. The unmoved mover or pure form, is absolutely immutable. He possesses only actuality and has no trace of potentiality. Although Aristotle differs markedly from Plato in the use of forms, the forms themselves, which constitute that which is most real in any particular substance and is reality itself in God, are essentially Platonic in nature, possessing Platonic characteristics of eternality, fixity, abstractness and logical relatedness.

In. addition to Platonic form, there is another presupposition attendant to arguments for both an eternal soul and an unchanging God, namely the idea that unity is not divided. Augustine’s argument above rests upon an assumed unicity of the soul, i.e., that it is one and indivisible. For if the soul is composed of parts, the eternal existence of a mathematical truth C may only guarantee the existence of that part of the soul which is C. This would entail that that which truly continues to live is mathematically pure form, which would be too much of a Platonic realism even for Augustine.

Greek mathematicians consistently insisted that the true mathematical one could not be divided. Seldom was one listed as a number. The first number was two. The unit was understood to be the standard of measure, the means by which number was determined, and hence in itself of a different order of reality than other numbers. One, according to Aristotle, who attempted to present essentially the mathematical tradition, is to the other numbers as is the measure to the measureable.⁸ By virtue of its use as a standard it both transcends and gives meaning to other measurements. It is the number one, however, as contrasted with the geometrical measure of one, that is, according to Aristotle, in every way indivisible. It is interesting to consider the qualities given to Aristotle’s prime mover in the Physics, which is "not divisible, has no parts, and is not dimensional (i.e., has no magnitude)."⁹ These are the characteristics of the true number one which is not divisible, has no parts and as the standard for magnitude does not itself possess magnitude.

It seems strange to us that the number one should not be divided -- that there should be no fractions. Although Greek mathematicians knew of the embryonic development of fractional numbers in both Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics, they did not include within the body of pure mathematics these numbers but relegated them to practical matters where they languished without benefit of theoretical consideration. I think that it was a strange turn of mathematical competence rather than naiveté that prevented Greek mathematicians from objectifying fractions. They solved the enigma of the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes by the brilliant extension of the concept of ratio which itself compares magnitudes by whole numbers, that in turn depend on an indivisible unit. They could have objectified fractions and thereby declared their existence. Indeed, they had all the theoretical development in terms of ratio to do so -- provided these fractions did not include incommensurables. The Greeks knew that if one had rational numbers, he must also have irrational ones, and they chose the theory that allowed them to have both in a consistent setting. Remember, it was not until the nineteenth century that theory was developed which allows irrational fractional numbers to exist alongside rational ones in a consistent axiomatic framework.

In the two basic philosophical positions the church had available to it, the Platonic and Aristotelian, the choice of an Aristotelian emphasis led quickly and easily to an immutable God. God as pure form did not change. In a Platonic emphasis adapted to Jewish and Christian monotheism, if one considers the realm of Platonic ideas to be part of the thought of God, as did Philo, who more than any other is the founder of classical theism, we can understand how God who possesses these ideas is necessarily, at least in part, immutable. We can understand Augustine’s statement: "For He does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness; . . . these are by Him comprehended by Him in His stable and eternal presence."¹⁰ Possession of these ideas by God, however, is no true authority for the claim that he is altogether immutable; something else is required, namely that God is One, and not just the one and only God, but One in the then understood mathematical and metaphysical sense that unity is not divided. As Aquinas states, "one means undivided being," and this is authority for affirming "one is convertible with being."¹¹ But neither Aquinas, nor the other theologians, nor the mathematicians assumed they were talking about God whenever they used one in mathematics. They distinguished between the mathematical one and the metaphysical one. I am maintaining that the understanding of the metaphysical one was influenced by an understanding of the mathematical one out of which it was derived.

Parmenides was the first philosopher to associate a metaphysical one with the strict immutability of Being itself. He may have been indebted to the Milesians who affirmed a generalized divine substance, the arche, as the foundation of all things, or to Xenophanes, who in reaction to anthropomorphic Homeric polytheism described God as motionless though not strictly immutable. But it was Parmenides’ mathematical background with the Pythagoreans that seems decisive. He made Pythagoreanism consistent by reducing its dualism to a monism -- of a very special sort.

Pythagorean dualism is expressed in terms of ten contrarieties: limit and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong. Each of these represents manifestations of the two primary opposites leading the list, the limited and unlimited. The limit is that which can be known clearly, objectified, made finite and bounded in some way. The unlimited is that which cannot. The limited is associated with good as opposed to bad, light as opposed to darkness. A resting object is more self contained, visually distinct and exactly characterized than a moving one. Something moving may move we know not where, and accordingly will change we know not how. The straight is characterized by exactness of concept, the curving has unlimited varieties of possibilities and cannot be contained as a precise and fixed structure. The contrarieties odd and even, square and oblong, are related to the Pythagorean representation of numbers as patterns of dots. The odd always has the same shape, a square; the even varies.

The limit is characterized best by precise mathematical structure. This grasping of the mathematical bounded and known, allowed an ecstatic experience that transcended the round of birth and rebirth, and, hence, effected salvation. It was the number one, identified by the Pythagoreans with the unit point, that was the epitome of exact objectification. From the unit point came all the numbers, and from numbers came the whole universe. The unit point for them, as for us, was indivisible. Their identification of the number one, however, with the unit point also made it indivisible.

Parmenides, though trained as a Pythagorean, rebelled against Pythagorean thought by intensifying the importance of the objectified known, by identifying the properties of the left-hand column of the Pythagorean dichotomies as the true and only properties of Being, and by rejecting altogether the properties of the right-hand column as having no existential import whatsoever. As such, his project may be viewed as an attempt to make Pythagoreanism consistent by really taking seriously the Pythagorean identification of being with that which is known and objectified precisely. Parmenides, however, in his movement towards objectifying the whole, culminating in his ecstatic and religious revelation, came to view that upon grasping Being, that which is as a unified whole, all internal structure: time, space, multiplicity, sense experience, etc., must be denied as truly real. Essentially, Parmenides saw everything, the whole, as the one, indeed, as the Pythagorean unit point made cosmic, but having the then understood qualities of the number one -- namely, no internal divisions whatsoever.

I have tried to show how mathematics’ influence on the philosophical notions of Platonic forms and metaphysical One had an effect on the traditional Christian doctrine of the immutability of God. I have limited myself to one aspect of the influence of mathematics on a doctrine of God. We could have further considered the shift that occurred when God was referred to as the Infinite as well as the One. Or we could have examined in some detail the rationalization of Christian Logos that occurred from mathematical sources.¹² Logos was first, remember, a mathematical word and was influenced considerably by mathematical developments.

Mathematics As Changing

One of the primary characteristics discovered by the Greeks about mathematical structures is that once proved they do not change. A theorem accurately proved in the Elements is valid today, although we will probably view it from a different perspective in the light of subsequent mathematical developments. Geometrical figures became the primary examples, if not the source of the position itself, of Platonic forms. These figures, though individual in themselves, were seen to be linked together by a logical and mathematical connection which itself was seen as unchanging. As the discipline of mathematics progressed, the realm of mathematicals, the domain of Platonic mathematical relationships, was seen to be a structured whole, unchanging, eternal and primordial.

Mathematicians and philosophers have not always seen, nor always maintained, that mathematics is best understood in a Platonic way -- although this has been by far the dominant position. By Platonic here, I do not mean that mathematicians accept as a matter of course the whole body of Plato’s philosophy, but I do mean that they view in a minimal way that mathematical structures and relationships exist independently of man’s construction of them and are there existing in some way or some form to be discovered. In regard to what is now an accepted convention we call this general position platonic (with a small p). The mere mention of the philosophers Locke, Wittgenstein, the whole logical positivist movement, shows that not all mathematicians and philosophers are platonic. Also, it is the case that these non-platonic mathematicians and philosophers have influenced theology and sometimes a doctrine of God. But this influence has been primarily negative in the sense that it has denied the existence or attributes of the traditionally understood and metaphysically presented Christian God. Any traditionally conceived understanding of God has as a consequence, by and large, a platonic understanding of mathematics, if nothing else than because of the assumption that God knows and understands mathematical relations, thereby giving them some kind of existence independent of man’s creation.

The primary sources of influence of mathematics on Christian theology have been the result of changes in the understanding of the nature of platonic mathematical structures as a result of the changing discipline of mathematics itself. I have indicated how the platonic understanding of mathematics influenced and confirmed the doctrine of the immutability of God. This was because of the strict immutability of an assumed existing realm of rigidly connected mathematical structures. Not all, however, who believe in such a rigid realm of mathematics have affirmed a strictly immutable God. Whitehead, for example, and process theologians following him maintain a doctrine of a changing God, especially in his response to the world. This God does possess, however, an unchanging essential nature, called by Whitehead God’s Primordial Nature (the realm of eternal objects), that itself contains the rigidly connected realm of mathematical relationships. The nature of eternal objects, and hence, God’s primordial nature, was modeled by Whitehead after his understanding of the nature of mathematical existence.¹³

What if we could understand the realm of mathematical structures to be itself evolving? Would this not modify both an Augustinian and a contemporary process view of God? The chief authority for the stability of a platonic realm would be challenged, and hence one of the primary means for arguing God’s immutable essential nature questioned. There are developments in mathematics that might lead us to come to that opinion.

The primary mathematical developments that appear to me to be relevant for contemporary theology are the creations of multiple models for the real numbers. There are apparently a number of different real number systems, all of which characterize real numbers in that they satisfy all the accepted axioms of real numbers but differ among themselves in specific and exact details. This is like telling the number theorist that there is no one arithmetic but a number of different arithmetics possessing different properties. And we can say that also! The mathematical authority that allows us to claim the existence of a multiplicity of different real number models also provides for a multiplicity of different arithmetics, and vice versa. In fact, if we accept any axiomatization for the real numbers or for arithmetic, there are an infinite number of different real number systems and an infinite number of different arithmetics that satisfy the respective axiomatizations.

The discovery of nonstandard models for arithmetic and real numbers differ in degree and kind from the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries. Non-Euclidean geometries were formulated by changing the axioms of Euclidean geometry, and in particular the parallel postulate axiom of Euclid. Each of the resulting different geometries had its own axiom system that was understood to characterize its own specific properties. Once one had the axioms, he had, presumably, the system "wrapped up" provided he had the skill and the means to deduce the theorems from it. The different geometries were clearly distinguishable from each other in terms of clearly discernible sets of different axioms. This is not the case for non-standard models, for within any one given family of models, they all have the same axioms.

The possibility of the existence of non-standard models has been evident since the announcement by Gödel to the Vienna Academy of Sciences in 1930 of his now famous Incompleteness Theorem. This theorem is an effective proof by metamathematical considerations that arithmetic is essentially incomplete: that not only are there true theorems in arithmetic that cannot be proved from the axioms of arithmetic but also that no matter how many axioms are added there always remain true theorems that cannot be proved. If one finds some true theorem that cannot be proved from the axioms, then neither can its negation be proved. What if one adds to the set of axioms not the unproved true theorem but its negation? We know that in any consistent first order theory, if some theorem A is not provable from the axioms, then the theory with the negation of A affixed to the axioms is itself consistent. Obviously this new system, or more accurately an interpretation or model of this system, is different from the previously accepted one. It differs exactly in that the accepted unprovable but true theorem in the original system is false in the newly constructed one. Yet both theories conform to the previously accepted axiom system.

We can see in terms of these developments why the question arose that I mentioned in the first part of the paper, namely, whether there are true but unknowable mathematical structures. In terms of the adequately, or perhaps "vividly," known, we have shown that there are structures that conform to an axiomatic system that cannot be proved from an axiomatic system. We know that there are models of the real number axioms which may never be explicitly formulated. Traditionally we have encompassed and understood an infinitude of structures by an axiomatic system. It has been the authority for our declaring that we know all of a certain type of structure. We cannot now make any comprehensive claim to know all structures for any complicated mathematical axiomatic system. Could there be compatible interpretations of a system that are somehow in principle impossible to know? Could there be true but unknowable mathematical facts?

I share Steen’s and Robinson’s skepticism about the existence of platonic mathematical structures that are true but unknowable. I find there is a certain presumption about affirming the existence of a platonic mathematical form that cannot be known -- either within a Platonic perspective or outside of it. In principle, one could never have any evidence of the form’s positive existence. Also, I find the affirmation that there is a platonic realm of mathematical structures that are eternally fixed in their relationship to each other but never growing or diminishing in totality, to be also somewhat presumptuous. Our evidence historically, certainly in terms of what we know, is almost exclusively of a changing domain of mathematical structures, a domain that changes primarily by addition to itself. Of course, it may be claimed that this is simply a growth of our knowledge of a fixed domain, and I would certainly acknowledge the explosion of mathematical discoveries in this century. But it may be the case that there is an actual ontological addition to mathematical structures.

If one believes in any platonically understood realm of mathematical structures, it seems to me best to understand it as a loosely known multiplicity which is incapable of unification axiomatically and to which new relationships may be added. The addition of any new relationship would, of course, be compatible with some structures and logically incompatible with others. Instead of "true but unknowable" we might say "unknowable because not yet true."

In assuming that mathematical relationships have a kind of platonic reality at least in terms of being potentials for matters of fact as known by God, we recognize that these relationships may be structures of that which is known -- or part of the structures of knowing itself. The structures of knowing, at least the means by which one can know mathematics, have traditionally been known as logic. It is a well-known fact that these structures have been objectified and made epistemological objects whose nature can be examined mathematically as structures of the known. Gödel’s theorem points out that the structures of knowing cannot all be formalized mathematically.

The new developments in mathematics seem to me to allow a better understanding of what it might mean for God to have the freedom to change the totality of potentials -- both in terms of the structures of knowing among human consciousness and in terms of the objects known. This would mean that not only could man’s consciousness, as well as other structures of the world, evolve in ways hitherto unknown, and in ways impossible to know, but in ways that might be even a surprise to God -- a surprise in the sense that the potential mathematical structure that could characterize (in part) such consciousness might not even be at present. My viewpoint here is a departure from a strictly Whiteheadian process theology that could understand God’s surprise at the way Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony turned out, but a surprise because it turned out this way and not that way, or some other way, all ways being known as strict potentials. God may not be surprised, however, at new mathematical potentials that are added, for he may create and add them all himself. But we need not, in our knowledge, limit new potentials solely to God; they may come from God’s interaction with the world or from the world itself, i.e., by the creative power given to the world by God.

Almost all traditional and contemporary theologies that maintain a platonic reality for mathematical potentials insist both that the mathematical structures do not change and that they are complete in their totality as understood or envisioned by God. This doctrine is found in Augustine as well as in contemporary process theology. God, though changing in his actual consequent nature in process theology, does not change in his essential nature, that aspect of him called the primordial nature. The eternal objects that comprise the primordial nature are fixed, they are pure potentials and as such have a rigid logical structure. God may establish possibilities for actual entities by selective envisionment of, or ordering of, the realm of eternal objects, and in this role he acts as destiny or providence for actual entities. From the perspective of the actual entity, there are multiple routes to the future in terms of different potentials for actualization, but each of these routes as in the completion of Beethoven’s symphony is a choice of this route or that one, each of which is known to God and thereby potentially knowable to man. God is the ground of an individual’s possibility in traditional process theology. He provides the options. But he may not create new pure possibilities, i.e., eternal objects, or destroy old ones. This is a fixed aspect of his own nature.

I would like to maintain the emphasis that platonic mathematical structures do not change, as affirmed by Whitehead and Augustine, but relax the requirement that no new potentials or structures be added to the realm of eternal objects. This relaxation is based on the simple observation that it has been primarily the axiomatic method that has given mathematicians and philosophers the authority for stabilizing the mathematical realm, for claiming it to be complete as related logically to a few unquestionable assumptions. What we have learned about mathematics since the advent of Whitehead’s philosophy is that the axiomatic method cannot adequately characterize the nature of mathematical structures that are presently known. It is true that we may know some aspects of these structures apart from the axiomatic method. This is essential. But we still know the unity of mathematics, or the unity of mathematical systems, primarily through axiomatic investigation. It may be that what unity we know we know through axiomatic systems, but that this unity is not complete.

The claim that individual mathematical structures are unchanging but that new ones may be formed, new potentials added to the realm of eternal objects, entails some kind of evolution in the realm of eternal objects. Under the principle that actuality determines (at least) potentiality, we would maintain that all actual relationships in the past are now potential. The realm of eternal objects is comprised at least of those relationships that were (or are) actual -- of course understood now as potential. In addition, the realm of eternal objects is comprised of all known potential relationships and especially that vast welter of mathematical relationships created by the imagination and consciousness of man. For as known by man, these relationships do have a tie to the actual world, even though in their objective status they do not characterize or have never characterized any particular complex of events. I am sure that the realm of potentials, i.e., eternal objects, is greatly enlarged by God’s knowledge of potentials. He knows the mathematical structures that we could know but now in fact do not know. In addition, I think that his activity is the primary source of new structured relationships in the realm of eternal objects and that those relationships coming from the world comprise probably only a small portion of the total.

My proposal concerning the nature and evolution of eternal objects tips the balance towards a Hartshornian rather than a strictly Whiteheadian process theology. Whitehead did model his understanding of eternal objects after his understanding of mathematical existence. Eternal objects, therefore, according to him, are exact, discrete, individual, objective and existing in themselves apart from any relationship to particular actual entities. Whitehead’s God, though not fully developed in Process and Reality, is described characteristically as a nontemporal actual entity whose primordial nature, the realm of eternal objects, is given primacy over his consequent nature. For Hartshorne, however, who emphasizes that the concrete contains the abstract, the temporal includes the atemporal; eternal objects are given less emphasis than actual entities. It is the becoming of actual entities that determines their being and especially that being characterized by (mathematical) eternal objects. Consequently Hartshorne’s God is much more temporal than Whitehead’s God; God’s consequent nature is understood to embody concretely his primordial nature as abstract essence. My position is Whiteheadian as it views the nature of eternal objects presently existing and Hartshornian in that God’s consequent nature is the ground and source of (most) new eternal objects. Here I am trying to maintain the emphasis of Hartshorne that actuality ontologically precedes potentiality; that of the two, actual entities and eternal objects, precedence must go to actual entities. In my estimation, contemporary mathematics makes this position easier to maintain.

God’s freedom in this revision of process theology not only extends to his influence on actualities but also on the limitations of that which is possible, not just in the sense of choosing those possibilities that may be most relevant in a particular set, but in creating the possibilities themselves. The realm of eternal objects grows as history progresses. Things in their true possibility literally become more complex. Not only can God point out possibilities that we do not know of, he can create them. Thus in a genuinely new sense, at least in process theology, the future is his.

There is another aspect of the theory under consideration that I find attractive, because it conforms to my ideas of the relativity of metaphysics. There is a similarity of nature and function between overarching metaphysical principles and mathematical ones. In process theology both turn out to be varieties of eternal objects. Our difficulty in finding an adequate metaphysics may be due to the fact that there is no (mathematical) structure existing presently that can characterize adequately the cosmos. The irony may be, and indeed it would be an irony appropriate to God, that the true metaphysics is a structure yet to be evolved. Metaphysical truth may genuinely come from the hands of God in the future.

In the first part of this paper I tried to show how an understanding of standard mathematics conditioned the doctrine of God’s immutability. Obviously, our interpretation of contemporary nonstandard mathematics relaxes any restrictions, at least from mathematics itself, of requiring God to be strictly immutable. In the second part I have tried to show how contemporary developments in mathematics might affect a contemporary doctrine of God. In particular, I chose process theology to work with. I challenge those who may have an allegiance to another set of theological doctrines of God to work out what might be the consequence if the traditional understanding that mathematical structures are complete, unified and eternal in nature were relaxed.

Notes

1 Abraham Robinson, "Formalism 64," Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science; Proceedings of the 1964 International Congress, ed. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1965). p. 232.

2 Lynn Arthur Steen, "New Models ₀f the Real Number Line," Scientific American 225/2 (August. 1971), 99.

3 Treatise on the Saul, Ch. III, from The Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Roberts and Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans) III, 183.

41n the earlier works of Phaedo, Republic and Parmenides the deity and at times the soul are supreme examples of fixity and immutability, whereas in the Phaedrus and the Laws the deity is freely mobile. In the Timaeus the eternal God is immutable and the world soul is self moving.

5 Metaphysics, 987b 9-13.

6 A. E. Taylor, Varia Socratica (Oxford: James Parker & Co., 1911), pp. 187 ff.

7 See, for example, Sir David Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), p. 13.

8 Metaphysics, 1052b16--1053a5.

9 Physics, 267b25,

10 The City of God. Ch. XXI, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. tr. M. Dods (New York: Random House. 1948), II, 162.

11 The Summa Theologica Question XI, First Article.

12 "Mathematics and Theology." Bucknell Review, 20/2 (Fall, 1972), 113-26.

13 My "Whitehead’s Philosophical Response to the New Mathematics," The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70). 341-49.

Lynne Belaief’s discussion, "Whitehead and Private Interest Theories," in the July 1966 Ethics purports to present the foundational elements of a Whiteheadian ethical theory. In the course of so doing, Belalef offers refutations of the complementary charges that Whitehead reduces ethics to aesthetics and adheres to a private-interest theory of morality. Here I contend that Belaief’s defense of Whitehead on the latter point fails due to an apparent inconsistency in her discussion.¹ I then suggest that this inconsistency derives from three sources: a popular but inadequate handling of the concept of "satisfaction," the failure to abandon completely a non-Whiteheadian conception of the self, and the further failure to distinguish adequately her notions of moral and religious phenomena. Indeed, these shortcomings seem to underlie most discussions of Whitehead’s moral thought -- particularly those which depict it as either egoistically or altruistically self-realizational.

While some points in this initial polemic have independent interest, I present it only by way of introducing some of the overlooked but essential elements of Whitehead’s moral thought. In particular, I contend that Whitehead sees moral theory as inseparable from social philosophy and the self-transcendence involved in the external life of the individual. To the contrary, it is religion that is ultimately concerned with the internal relevance of past and future to present self-realization.

I

Belaief depicts Whitehead’s view as a self-realizational ethics which reconciles the conflict between the individual interest and the general interest by appeal to morally preferable "true self-interest." The latter is found in recognition of internal relatedness and self-identification with the broad environment out of which the individual arises. The apparent inconsistency in Belaief’s treatment is to be found in her claims that "one always acts according to his purposes and self-interest" (WPI 283) and that all desires are "desires for happiness" while denying that "such deeds are accomplished only for the sake of his happiness and would not have been done otherwise" (WPI 284). The latter suggests a motivational alternative to happiness and seems incompatible with the former two claims as well as Belaief’s basic position that it is only the "content of that which makes a man happy" (WPI 279) which determines whether he is egoistic or not.

The inconsistency seems further demonstrated in Belaief’s claim that one discovers his "true self-interest" in realizing a "concern for others as conducive to one’s own well-being and purpose" (WPI 283; italics added). Yet somehow this is held to account for altruistic interests motivating "actions wherein acting for another’s well-being would in actual fact decrease one’s own welfare" (WPI 283). Belaief concludes that Whitehead would endorse such altruistic actions and that recognition of the inescapable moral tragedy implicit in such situations is a major Whiteheadian contribution to moral philosophy.

II

Perhaps the issue may be clarified by pointing out what Belaief seems not to be saying. Obviously, a teleologist who contends that all men aim at their own happiness in addition to other interests is not a psychological egoist. Further, if he allows that some of these other interests take precedence over the aim at my own happiness then he is not an ethical egoist. But this is not the view attributed to Whitehead, for if it were there would be no point in developing the solution in terms of the internal content of true self-interest. To the contrary, we are told all desires are "desires for happiness" with their morality or immorality depending upon their object.

One such object seems to be the narrow self-interest which Belaief condemns as selfishly immoral when preferred to the interests of others. But why is it immoral? Surely a naturalist would not want to claim that its constitutive elements were inherently evil. Indeed, Belaief indicates that the evil is the loss of a "higher experience," embracing concern for others, while the altruistic act is a moral object of aim. In the conflict of interests which Belaief considers in Whitehead’s example of moral tragedy, I assume that she intends the issue to be: choice of my own "narrow interests" or another’s "narrow interests" with other factors being considered equal. Otherwise, she would surely not advocate the choice of a lesser good over a greater. But even in such a circumstance, why should the individual choose the other’s interest over his own? Belaief’s answer would seem to be that "the other’s happiness is conducive to my own. If this is true, then where is the sacrifice and tragedy? Presumably I would now have a "higher experience" of my true interests" (and "true happiness") to compensate the loss. But notice, for "other factors to be equal," I must presuppose mutual concern. Thus not only has my supposed sacrifice not been of ultimate personal cost, it has actually been a loss to my "beneficiary" by depriving him of the opportunity to achieve the "higher experience" for himself. Further, his loss is far greater in that he realizes his "illusory" and "narrow" self at the price of his "true" self-interest and happiness.

Thus, the question becomes: how is it possible to make the better choice of internally conflicting interests and not be better off for it? On this analysis, I am not choosing between the interest of another individual and my own interest but between my own interest in another individual and other interests of my own. Thus I wish to suggest that this attempt to account for moral interest in terms of "true" self-interest does not explain how moral tragedy can be possible. For in each case, if desires be understood as "desires for happiness" and true self-interest to be deeper in some sense, then action in accord with it ought to lead to greater happiness. Yet as Belaief stresses, such tragedy does occur. The teleologist must meet Kant’s point that we do occasionally seem morally compelled to act in a manner that conflicts with personal inclination -- even where happiness is not restricted to the limiting conceptions of Kant’s psychology.

III

If the apparent conflict between duty and interest is to be resolved m terms of the inner conflict between apparent self-interest and true self-interest, then the failure of felicity and virtue to coincide can only be left to miscarriage of intent or ignorance of true interest. Neither ignorance of consequences nor ignorance of aim are directly pertinent to the issue of conscious intentions in moral decisions. In general, I believe that the perplexities in Belaief’s discussion may well stem from the attempt to understand Whitehead’s moral philosophy in classical terms which have only a limited applicability to it.

Belaief starts from the presupposition that all desires are "desires for happiness" but later introduces the objections that the presence of subjective satisfaction, as accompanying the fulfillment of all aims, does not imply that the action is done for the satisfaction. Comparing Whitehead with the subjectivists, Belaief claims: "Whitehead . . . does not accept their identification of good with what is satisfying, which inference is productive of a private-interest theory" (WPI 284). To claim that the desire is carried out for the sake of the object and not the satisfaction which its fulfillment affords is to speak as if the satisfaction were something over against the fulfillment itself. Further, there is the clear implication that the satisfaction is a result of the achievement which is enjoyed by the same individual whose aims are realized.

Initially it should be pointed out that Whitehead would agree that all aims are "desires for happiness," if this be understood as synonymous with "aims at satisfaction." However, to make this claim is only to assert that satisfaction is a generic term for the fulfillment of aim, in which case each individual interest terminates in the achievement which comprises its partial or complete satisfaction. In this case, it is simply self-contradictory to deny that the satisfaction of an aim is its own proper object. While this whole viewpoint might be paradoxical in an ontology which ultimately opposed experience to the world, it is perfectly appropriate to Whitehead’s wherein each occasion of experience literally includes its given world within itself.

To oppose experience to its object and to speak of what a subject must do in order "to endure and to achieve satisfaction" seems to be a reintroduction of the substantialistic conceptions, the absence of which Belaief correctly regards as a significant moral contribution of Whitehead’s thought. But for Whitehead:

By "creative determination," Whitehead means the effort toward realization which is the agency of the present. It is the aim of composition and not the individual unity of a subjective "agent" acting upon a plurality of data. It becomes the objectified expression of the value of the individual for a new plurality, but as such it is for enjoyment by new individuals. Only in this sense can satisfaction be distinguished from aim, and this sense does not serve Belaief’s purpose. Whitehead’s concept of the "self," as he frequently remarks, is most similar to Hume’s "bundle theory." From the standpoint of subjective immediacy experience is a plurality of interests, each with its proper object, moving toward mutual adjustment. It is emphatically not a vacuous subjectivity entertaining interests like guests of the spirit.

That Belaief does not seem fully to understand Whitehead on this point is clearly indicated by her claim that:

However, actual individuals "are what they are." They do in fact realize a wholly determinate set of relations to their given universes. But when such determinacy has been achieved there is no longer any active valuation for that occasion. That the perspective of active valuation is perpetually open-ended cannot be the distinguishing characteristic of the moral viewpoint, for it is an ontological limitation imposed upon all valuation. Were valuation wholly determinate, there would simply be no novel occasion and thus no present moment.

It is true that, for Whitehead, the self as a social structure may be changed, both as novel individuals are added to the "nexus" and as novel characteristics are incorporated into the inherited order. However, to attribute the enjoyment of self-forming agency to either this order or the nexus apart from its role in some individual actual occasion would be to commit a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Only in the immediate becoming of individual experience can there be a seeking of fulfillment and enjoyment of (antecedent) satisfaction. From this viewpoint, each interest is an interest in its specific object -- the sense of its own "importance." The "feelings aim at the feeler" but the "feeler" is a novel organic composition of the things felt, not a distinct individuality over against them.

IV

To approach the moral situation in terms of justifying an interest in others to the individual aiming at his own happiness is to take a step which has proved very sterile for classical moral debate. It leads only to recognition of valuation of the "other" in respect of the contribution of his well-being to my own well-being rather than a recognition of the valuation of his well-being for its own sake. It is the latter which is requisite to the altruistic interests sought by Belaief.

If the interest in an other for his own sake were discovered as an internal component of experience, the further appeal to "my own" happiness would be superfluous. It would involve an attempt to justify to me "externally" that which I already accept "internally" -- as if the happiness of the other were not recognized as a value in itself. Further, it seems to presuppose the primacy of enduring subjects as sources of valuation rather than recognizing that values are specific experiences achieved, identified by their objects. This approach has always left moralists presupposing a basic egoism and either struggling to overcome it or rationalizing it into a moral theory.

To the contrary, we must reject the notion that "all desires are desires for happiness" implies that "each man desires his own happiness." To value an object as my own satisfaction, rather than simply as satisfactory, is to engage in a highly complex and reflective evaluation -- one that is by no means primitive. For Whitehead, the perspective within which I may question my own valuations as an integral "person" in relation to other "persons" is a derivative achievement of social consciousness. It is no more fundamental morally than that perspective from within which I relate present moments of interest to "my own future interests. Each involves a common structure which can only be re-constructed through a more detailed examination of moral experience.

V

To attempt a thorough reconstruction of Whitehead’s moral thought here would be folly, due to its complexity. However, I have attempted to indicate some of its facets not brought out by Belaief. The primary implication is that traditional axiologists have mistakenly presupposed that the concrete condition of valuation is one of subjective unity whether realizing its inherent potentials, modifying its scope of interest, or subordinating its individuality to general principles. Rather, the situation is closer to James’s "blooming, buzzing confusion."

Practical morality is a concern with the future, but more particularly with the usefulness of the present to the future. Thus while the recognition of the internal value of the past to the present may well be one origin of moral consciousness, conscious moral aim requires a recognition of the external value of immediate activity to subsequent experience -- conjoined with the valuation of that experience to which the service is rendered. As such, moral interests are self -transcending. To the contrary. self-realization is primarily an aesthetic process, lacking this element of self-detachment and focusing upon the satisfaction which the world offers (and can be made to offer) directly.

The moral value of Whitehead’s thought stems from his insistence that the present literally perishes and yet holds an interest in the future and determines an achievement for it. Moral consciousness is "social consciousness" and its analysis requires study of the manner in which the individual nature is derivative from human society and, in turn, is capable of modifying that structure. Here, "human society" must be understood to include the environment which it utilizes -- as utilized by it. I am suggesting that the absence of an ethics written by Whitehead is to be explained by the fact that he does not distinguish "ethics" from "social philosophy." Adventures of Ideas must be understood to be an ethical work in the same sense as Plato’s Republic. Here Whitehead remarks:

Whitehead is not saying that in a "civilized" society, the members confuse each other with themselves. He is saying that they recognize each other as realizing an intrinsic value in their own right and not as mere objects of use. The distinguishing trait of a social consciousness is precisely the recognition of the external dependence of other individuals upon myself. The recognition that my own immediate satisfaction internally depends upon others may be only an aesthetic appreciation. However, when this "appreciation" becomes "gratitude" I have already achieved an emotion which takes the form of a response externally relating the present to other individualities.

Moral recognition may begin with a concern for future moments in our "personal" career (or it may not), but it is unlikely that this realization proceeds very far before involving some conscious recognition of a valuation of other subjects. Long before we acquire a sense of ourselves as whole "persons," for whose extensive careers we are concerned, we exhibit an interest in our fellows that may involve a broad community. Simply put, once one abandons a classical psychology in favor of a Whiteheadian one, he should recognize that what we call "egoism" is no less an "acquired" pattern of valuation than "altruism." Nor is it any less "other-oriented." If either is more "natural," it can only be determined by a genetic analysis of the biological basis for social consciousness and a similar analysis of differing social environments with respect to determining the conceptions of the individual that they afford, together with the modes of relationship and experience which are determined thereby.

A significant portion of Adventures of Ideas is taken up by Whitehead’s arguments that there is in fact a structure of social "instinct" which constitutes a biological foundation for the subsequent development of "fellow-feelings" in conscious socialization. "These emotions are at the basis of all social groups. As relatively blind emotions they must pervade animal society, namely, the urge to cooperate, to help, to feed, to cherish, to play together, to express affection" (AI 4-4). But such emotions alone are not "morality"; they are routines of experience: "All these feelings can exist with the minimum of intellectuality. Their basis is emotional, and humanity acquired these emotions by reason of its unthinking activities amid the course of nature" (AI 106).

Whitehead’s genetic account involves an analysis of the survival value of systems of order established as successful routines of cooperative function between organic elements of individual organisms and individual members of social, symbiotic complexes. The importance and nature of moral values requires an analysis of how: "The biological ends pass into ideals of standards, and the formation of standards affects the biological facts. The individual is formative of the society, the society is formative of the individual" (RM 85). However much men (or other complex organisms) may have in common biologically, when one ventures into the contents of moral consciousness there is a bewildering array of diversity. One need only consider the differences between being an individual in a Hopi community or our own. Of course our own culture offers an enormously wide diversity of conceptions of individuals, their relations, and careers in differing contexts.

Whitehead holds that human societies differ from the more stable and enduring insect societies with regard to their diversifying "progressiveness." Further, this great fact of progressiveness, be it from worse to better, or from better to worse, has become of greater and greater importance in Western Civilization as we come to modern times" (AI 98); Here Whitehead is stressing his familiar theme of the "coincidence of practical and theoretic reason" in recent history to afford enormous control over natural and social processes. However, he is also speaking of the preparation of a social environment for gradual entertainment of the "humanitarian ideal." Technology, like consciousness itself, can decrease the valuation of interdependent functions by increasing the possibility and intensity of gratifying independent interests. If man functioned in accord with mere instinct, he might exhibit the same species-cooperativeness and lack of infra-species aggression as other mammals. "Indeed the ferocity may have been the later development, due to the increase of intelligent self-interest" (AI 76). But at the same time, developments in communication, transportation, commerce, and education give concrete significance to abstract conceptions of world and species community.

Whitehead’s concept of "social instinct," which can be suppressed or transformed by individual social and moral development, poses no conflict with geneticists who hold that instinctive behavior patterns are significant but decrease in direct proportion to the complexity of the central nervous system. To the contrary, this conclusion offers empirical support for his analysis of experience. Complex organizations of blind "valuation" (or "instinct") can be partially submerged by consciousness which is ". . . the growth of emphasis. The totality is characterized by a selection from its details" (MT 168). As a result, "each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality" (PR 22).

VI

Morality is not a matter of man triumphing over his animal instincts. Rather it involves the realization of intellectual and social structures capable of overcoming the selectiveness of consciousness through the introduction of cooperative patterns of valuation. If successful, these derive reinforcement from social instinct and sublimate individual interests in complex systems of mutual satisfaction. Here "individual interests" means "specific interests. Personalities are only one complex subset of these, comprising such a social system themselves.

Creative compromises of diverse interest are not simply discovered amid the given past, which comprises the "world of fact," except insofar as they are facts of past imagination. They are ideal conceptions for novel forms of social order which -- if they were given -- would no longer be needed. From a purely moral viewpoint, the "truth" is important as revealing given potentials for value and the relevance of the present to their future achievement. But it is important primarily in respect of the limits which present facts impose on the possible and the deficiencies of these conditions in the light of the same.

The "rational vision," for Whitehead, is not merely a conscious grasp of "the true origins of present value," as Belaief would have it (or Leibniz and other rationalistic self-realizationists). Rather, it is the urge to "live better" and a more or less workable image of the reformation. Morality is "the control of process so as to maximize importance. It is the aim at greatness of experience in the various dimensions belonging to it" (MT 19).

Moral activity and moral vision are creative; and it is in his concept of "creativity" that Whitehead breaks with the Platonic as well as the Aristotelian traditions. Moral creativity is the attempt to transform reality for the better. In small and large issues its progress (and sometimes its loss) is a function of striving to enhance the potentialities which the world offers for individual fulfillment -- not their mere discovery and enactment. In its pursuit of the conceptually possible, moral idealism often leads to a self-defeating romanticism. It is here that the concern with fact must temper it. "Moral authority is limited by competence to attain those ends whose immediate dominance is evident to enlightened wisdom" (AI 69). But he stresses that:

The growth of individual moral character within a community can best be understood, in Whiteheadian terms, by analogy with the above conception -- provided that the concept of "communal custom" be replaced with the account of the growth of subordinate nexuses as a background to individual experience.

It is worth stressing that both the adaptation of social structures and personal structures to tolerate modes of valuation and achievement not previously possible is a genuinely creative process in Whitehead’s ontology. If we correlate Whitehead’s ideas of "pure" and "real" potentiality with the familiar notions of "logical" and "empirical possibility" (the latter being defined as "what is in conformity with the laws of nature"), then he is saying that what enters experience as a mere logical possibility may in fact transform what is empirically possible. Again, it is in Adventures of Ideas that he presents his concept of the laws of nature as descriptions of the mutual influence which actual occasions have upon each other. Technological ingenuity is not merely a matter of discovering nature’s secrets and utilizing them. Rather, it involves creation of the subordinate structures which render possible the impossible. Applied to moral contexts, the idea of "reformation" is far more accurate than that of "self-realization" which suggests a non-creative conception of "given" potentialities.

VII

There are two poles to a Whiteheadian account of moral experience: the concrete sentiments which are highly limited to particular communities and the abstract ideals which may embrace the widest sense of community. The former has great motivational intensity. The latter is weak and can derive force only from the unification it achieves in experience as a whole -- as a "way of life." The fusion of these extremes in diverse connection affords the variable experience of daily existence.

In his moral philosophy, Whitehead does not present a pat system of decision making, resolving individual differences -- because such notions have only the limited utility of vast oversimplifications. Such systems themselves are among the data which moral philosophy must study in order to determine their limits and practical contributions. A philosophic moral theory and moral (or social) science must study human beings as organisms capable of moral experience and as capable of self-fulfillment. They must study the complex ways in which differing social systems define, relate, and fulfill individual roles as structures affording fulfilling experience. Indeed, in Process and Reality, Whitehead suggests that we need a wholly new science of "Psychological Physiology" to explain bow there can be "originality of response to stimulus" (PR 159). Differing ideals have differing effects in various situations. Subsystems of value vary not only in their mutual compatibility and conflict but in their degree of these same when entertained with varying degrees of emphasis. Morality can hardly be reduced to balancing the interests of Richard Davis against his fellows when the very nature and conception of these interests is a varying function of an internally complex social structure involving subordinate and partially autonomous social structures.

If we are to accept the implications of the social conception of the self, then we ought to take them seriously. It avails little to complain of the complexity of the subject matter as indicated above. Moral experience is itself a most subtle dimension of human nature and society. Given the complexity of the studies requisite to understanding an ideally isolated atomic system, it is astonishing that we should expect a non-isolated organism of the highest sophistication to be simpler. On the other hand, we do have a more or less successful tradition of moral methodologies to aid us and the occasional freedom from practical exigencies which enables us to reflect upon the details of what we do.

VIII

Democritus dreamed of atoms and today we use and misuse their hidden resources. Plato dreamed of a harmonious social order in which each individual element was given the justice of its own appropriate merit. In the latter instance our approximations to practical significance are rather more crude. Like Plato’s, Whitehead’s moral philosophy bears a resemblance to utilitarianism. Also, like Plato’s and Mill’s, if the emphasis is misplaced in Whitehead’s thought, it might give rise to a misconceived social idealism that resembles a fascist horror. After all if morality involves a subordination of the present to the future, where is the safeguard against puritan self-denial to the point of destruction? Such misemphasis seems present in Schilpp’s accusation that Whitehead identifies the "good life" with the patterned life while offering no criterion of Pattern.² Further, Belaief’s analysis seems to identify the individual, as moral subject, with an ego-object in the social order defining personal identity.

Whitehead himself criticized utilitarianism in terms of the vagueness of the ontology which it presupposed in explication of its basic terms. I think Whitehead does indeed offer somewhat more definite axiological notions than might be concluded from the literature, though they can hardly be developed here. However, there is one point central to his moral philosophy, missed by both Schilpp and Belaif, which does have practical importance for "muddling through" social reality in the lack of a more detailed moral science. In drawing Adventures of ideas to its conclusion, Whitehead asserts that the search for social perfection must be qualified by the recognition that moral codes reflect the special circumstances of the societies within which they emerge. However, this does not preclude the attempt to grasp generalities underlying all such codes:

The point to be noted here is that from the standpoint of communal consciousness, from within which the individual evaluates his role, a sacrifice of peculiarly "personal" interest is possible since judgment can be rendered from the impersonal perspective of viewing these values as elements in a wider communal order. He sees himself as one among a many, with each element to be judged according to merit. Of course, in practice, such judgment will also be qualified to a greater or lesser degree by particular moral loyalties. Moreover, it is concrete moral sentiments which always provide the testing ground of moral abstractions. For though the individual is to be rated both in terms of his intrinsic and extrinsic values, the latter contribution can itself be judged only in terms of actual experience. Though he is judged for his contribution to a "high grade type of order," the system of order is so rated in behalf of its contribution to "magnifying the individual actualities."

Thus Whitehead is saving that individuals must be judged both in behalf of the quality of their own experience and their contribution to the experience of others. However, the estimation of this latter quality can only be carried out by means of the ideally conceived social system. The ultimate moral values of Whitehead’s system are individual moments of value experience -- actual occasions. The systems of social order in terms of which moral judgments are rendered must always be judged first in respect of concrete individual experiences. Here the empirical ground lies in the quality of experience afforded by existent systems regarded as partial exemplifications of the ideal and by the actual effect of ideal elements upon the experience of adherents. Only then can individuals, and their particular dominant systems of interest, be judged in terms of the order. The actual individuals of Whitehead’s system are the occasions of creative experience which determine a world for themselves and their successors. Morality is not simply a matter of judging the individual or his actions in behalf of a social, or formal, or axiological order. It is more a matter of judging these latter -- whether in the particular form of a "personal order" or the wider form of a civilization -- in behalf of the individual experiences which they afford. Ascetic self-sacrifice and the evaluation of the individual only in behalf of his contribution to "the state" or "a cause" are direct inversions of this conception.

Beyond the claim that extrinsic value depends in part upon the strength of the intrinsic satisfaction of the individual, and the claim that the "personal" characters afforded by a social order must include nonmoral fulfillments, there is a final self-rewarding dimension of moral interest which reconciles these opposing factors: "The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment" (PR 531). Through anticipation, moral experience affords its own satisfaction. But note: when this fulfillment is taken as the value of moral interest, the latter is reduced to an object of aesthetic interest. As a result, morality may degenerate into passive self-righteousness.

In the end, Whitehead’s moral reality is a kingdom of ends. His ends are subjects, like Kant’s, but valued in behalf of their creativity as self-determining centers of valuation rather than as rational determining grounds of practical law. It is a kingdom in which every end is the intrinsic value of the experience which it realizes for itself, which includes the enjoyment of the contribution it makes to others and of the contribution that the enjoyments of others have made to it. But it is a kingdom in constant revolution, one whose citizens are moments of experience rendering constant judgment on the kingdom itself. For the kingdom has no value beyond its citizens, who perish at every moment yet demand that every moment count for what it can. It is a kingdom we enter in moral consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree, on varying occasions.

IX

If the sovereignty of Whitehead’s kingdom, its moral agency, be understood to reside in the immediacy of a present moment, then it is a kingdom which lies outside its sovereign and into which he enters only objectively. Judgments of intra-personal and inter-personal relations of interest are alike evaluations of systems of order in respect of the value experience which they may afford in the future (or might have afforded in an imaginative reenactment of the past). The tools of judgment are high abstractions and immediate sentiments, considered as revelatory of what is felt rather than as immediate impulses to action. The latter are the safeguard of individual relevance, while the former are the means of ever-broadening this sense of importance and overcoming its provincial limitations. Moral deliberation is "reflective" and "objective" insofar as it involves the entrance of values as recognized "prospects" rather than immediate "interests." Its conclusions are "theoretic" in the Whiteheadian sense of a "lure for feeling." It is in this manner that they stand as external impositions upon immediate and more limited (or overly ambitious) inclinations.

One of the more distinctive implications of Whitehead’s moral philosophy is the notion, derived from his theory of motivations, that individual moral decisions must primarily be carried out in the detachment of the "quiet hour" -- when it is possible to achieve freedom in abstraction from practical exigencies. In the immediacy of moments dominated by the latter, our impulses and behavior will follow almost entirely in accord with habitual response. Approached from the standpoint of an individual "personal order," it is the preparatory reformation of these dispositions that is the basic task of personal morality. Of course, as Plato clearly saw, such self-reformation is a very limited substitute for the determination of moral character by moral education in a suitable environment. Whitehead is certainly not a strict social determinist, though he would hold that the problem of morality is a matter of achieving moral "character" and that such achievements are first a function of social environment. Indeed, where the subsystems of a "personal order," within an interpersonal society, include a high capacity for self-reformation, it will be largely a function of fortunate circumstances enhancing the importance of individual creativity. When Whitehead speaks of "moral beauty" as an ultimate aim of existence it is the Platonic notion of beauty of character. The creation of moral character is a function of education. Here as elsewhere, self-educated men may be a model to us all but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Plato thought to achieve this end by having all his citizens use "mine" in the same manner, suggesting that like Belaief he found the moment of moral consciousness in an experience of a "true self" or a supra-individuality. Whitehead is closer to Royce in that morality is a communal loyalty but unlike Royce in that the loyalty is to the community only in behalf of its individual members and not in behalf of an abstraction like "the loyalty to loyalty itself." Royce seems to suggest that loyalty is a value, the exemplification of which comprises the value of his subjects. To the contrary, the formal elements in Whitehead’s system are themselves only values in behalf of the role that they play in individual experience.

As I suggested at the outset, Belaief seems to have confused the religious and moral perspective in Whitehead’s thought. Whitehead, himself, stresses:

Moral consciousness is by nature limited and preferential. Ambition for reform presupposes a commitment to that which is sought above that which is incompatible with it. It involves "moral intuition into the nature of intellectual action -- that it should embody the adventure of hope" (PR 67). To the contrary, religious consciousness is "not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values" (AI 283). The "disengagement" of religion is not the detachment of moral reflection. The latter may broaden limited sentiments but is itself always restricted by its vision of potential values to be realized and its conceptions of the individuals in whom this value is to be achieved. Moreover, religions have been at least as potent a source of moral interests (constructive and destructive) as political movements. However, the. moral "sense of rightness" finds its locus in the transcendent individualities that it envisions. A distinctively religious "sense of rightness" finds its good in the fulfillment of a given natural teleology. "Morality emphasizes the detailed occasion; while religion emphasizes the unity of ideal inherent in the universe" (MT 39).

In essence Whitehead is holding that religious consciousness -- in its widest scope -- accepts the universe itself as a self-determining system in which every element expresses a realization of value. Secular morality is the law of a beloved community imposed upon the world, while religious morality subordinates all communal interests to the fulfillment of a natural law. Of course, in a creative religious perspective, that law may itself embrace movements toward reform as exemplifying instances. But while secular morality looks to the future for justice in reaction against present injustice, religion seeks justification in the present for what it already offers -- including morality itself.

The limitations of moral loyalty raise opposition by their nature and thus pose a threat. It is the "halfway house" upon the road to "Peace" which Whitehead discusses at the end of Adventures of Ideas. Hope deepens the significance of life but brings fear for its objects of concern. Religion, rather than concentrating upon the limited society of subjects to be served, deals with "the formation of the experiencing subject" (PR 24). It is "directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity" (PR 23) through "the sub-limitation of the egoistic aim by its inclusion of the transcendent whole" (AI 293). For Whitehead, the religious perspective is not a "social consciousness"; it is a "solitary" consciousness. The awareness of personal identity (and egoism) as "subjective" continuity is primarily of religious rather than moral significance.

Religious consciousness could be characterized as a cosmic egoism, one which has lost its sting by broadening subjective interests to embrace the world rather than subordinating the world to itself. It can achieve the Peace sought by morality through achieving the sense that the kingdom is here and now and each detail within it does count -- even as a component in tragedy.

The point to be made is that religion replaces the moral sense of communal unity, realized within a plurality of subjects, with a sense of subjective unity -- sheer cosmic individuality. As such it is a return from objective self-transcendence in the moral sense to the internal achievement of a wider self-realization.

On the other hand, morality is the art and theory of the external significance of the individual and of his internal life so far as it depends upon social order. It is also concerned with what is changeable in the nature of things as externally contrasted with appealing alternatives.

Religion is a return to aesthetic fulfillment with a cosmic sense of perspective, a search for identity in the "true self." From such a viewpoint, all conflicts of interest are indeed internal and there can be no personal sacrifice. However, there must still be recognition of aesthetic loss and the constant effort to insure that it merits what is preserved and served. Otherwise, Whitehead would be the first to insist that "Peace" as the "Harmony of Harmonies" has been confused with insensitivity" in its diverse forms of "anæsthesia," "complacency," and "dogmatism." The "noble discontent" of secular morality may clash with the religious sense of justification found in identification with a given order. It does so whenever the latter is prematurely narrow (and especially when it is the state that is deified) - It is this narrowness which breeds "defensive moralists" whom Whitehead holds to be:

In the end, it is a religious appeal which poses "my own" satisfaction as the justification for accepting a recognized order of value -- whether it is the intellectual satisfaction of the rational theologian or the concrete satisfaction of the mystic in his cosmic identification. Each in his own manner accepts a subjective interest in what is given -- a continuity of self-interest in the world.

Religion ranges from defense of provincial interests to insistence that everything matters, however small. Its relation to morality varies with its scope.

References

WPI -- Lynne Belaief. "Whitehead and Private-Interest Theories," Ethics, 76 (1966), 277-86.

Notes

1 Here, I have not considered the question of whether Whitehead reduces ethics to aesthetics because Belaief’s defense of Whitehead on this point is adequate. Belaief contends that Whitehead’s use of aesthetic terminology in other areas of axiology must be understood in terms of his theory of philosophic metaphor. This contention is explicitly supported by a passage which Belaief omits: "But intellectual beauty, however capable of being hymned in terms relevant to sensible beauty, is yet beautiful by stretch of metaphor. The same consideration applies to moral beauty" (AI 18-19; italics added).

2 This charge and others, which seem equally to depend upon an inadequate reading of Whitehead, may be found in Paul Arthur Schilpp, "Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy," in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951), pp. 561-618.

(This article is a revised version of a lecture given on September 30, 1991 in Claremont, California during a conference celebrating Charles Hartshorne and the publication of The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Vol. XX in The Library of Living Philosophers Series, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn [La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991].)

Reading through the literature of Charles Hartshorne on the issue of immortality is a richly rewarding experience. His sense of the value and beauty of life in itself, and human life in particular, is filled with wonder and gratitude. His fundamental position is that birth and death are the necessary boundaries to an existence that is fragmentary, and only God is capable of sustaining the infinite novelty that would be required for everlasting life.

Often he gives us a polemic against everlasting life for mortals, and the polemic sounds very much like Luther’s argument for salvation by faith alone. Luther claimed that if works of love were necessary to merit God’s acceptance, then it was impossible to do real works of love. To the contrary, every work of so-called love done in order to merit God’s favor would in fact be no love at all, but merely a manipulation of another toward one’s own supposed good. As for Hartshorne, he understands the traditional view of everlasting life to be a place of rewards and punishments. Surely, then, to love another simply for the sake of eventually receiving a reward would be but a poor parody of love. But Luther and Hartshorne, while agreeing on the dilemma, find very different ways for resolving it. For Luther, God accepts us, and therefore we can live lives that indeed are loving, for we do not have to earn that which we already possess. For Hartshorne, eliminating everlasting life altogether releases us from the "future rewards and punishments" bind, and therefore frees us as well to love in and for the beauty and goodness that loving presently creates.

Also present in Hartshorne’s discussions is the gentle chiding that he gives to those who for whatever reason cannot accept the inevitability of death. The very fragility and brevity of life contribute to its beauty. Our small lives are bounded at either end with infinite time; we are like carbon become diamonds by the very intensity of pressure brought about as the weight of such infinity bears down upon our mortality. Hartshorne conveys the wonder of life that comes about precisely through its shining brevity. God alone has immortality.

And yet there are two tensions: the first introduced by a tension between immortality as "rewards and punishments" and immortality as a deeper concern for justice, and the second introduced by the opposition of objective to subjective immortality within Hartshorne’s own understanding. The vision of justice fades into mocking illusion unless there is more to our existence than what Hegel aptly called the "slaughterbench of history." Immortality as a realm where evil is overcome is a deeper reading than immortality as the trivial "rewards and punishments" Hartshorne so rightly rejects. The second tension holds the possibility of answering the first. If Hartshorne’s argument for God’s prehension of the subjectivity of an occasion holds, then regardless of his preference for objective immortality, he has provided the basis for subjective immortality and therefore the basis for the further possibility of justice.

With regard to justice, I can only agree that the vision of subjective immortality is absurd or selfish if in fact all persons are as privileged as most philosophers and theologians. The point is not that we die, nor that some of us die young, nor that others of us die painfully. Death, like life, comes in many ways; why not? Death is not the problem -- the problem is injustice. There are little children who are grossly mistreated, burned, battered, and continuously raped, who manage to survive physically, but do not survive psychically. Never having known love, they never learn to give love, and their lives are lived in a web of tragedy. There are countries involved in the madness of continual warfare, maiming and destroying their citizens young and old, who together live in continual terror. There are governments supported by systematic torture of their dissidents. The tortures are not restricted to a few moments in the prisoners’ lives; rather, the brutalized torturers are commissioned to exercise consummate skill in devising continuous torment. Holocausts, genocides, nuclear destructions -- how many miseries can people survive? The problem is not death. Many of these victims might -- and eventually do -- welcome it as a solution to the problem of life. The deeper problem is injustice. That there is no justice for many in this life is quite evident. But we believe in God; is God no more just than our own sorry histories? Is there no balm in Gilead?

To answer that there are some moments of value in the reality of tortured lives seems but a poor substitute for a justice that somehow allows victims to participate in the wider and transforming reality of the God who receives, co-experiences, and transforms their suffering. Hartshorne argues with Whitehead that God is the "fellow sufferer who understands." Surely, in the light of injustice, it should be possible to consider that co-experiencing might work both ways: that God co-experiences our suffering with us, and that we co-experience its transformation in and therefore with God.

Hartshorne holds that God prehends our evil, and therefore contains our evil. He notes that this no more makes God evil than a house made of small bricks makes the house itself small. The house incorporates the bricks, but is more than the bricks; God incorporates our evils, but is more than our evils. The "more than" is decisive, for the evils God receives are like impulses that God then renders into a richness of contrast, supplementing evil with its ideal complement, and so achieving aesthetic harmony. Thus "the divine synthesis creates as much good as the state of the world makes possible" (ReM 7:106).

Is it not possible, for the sake of justice, that those who have been made so wretched through injustice might also taste this divine synthesis? Their misery has made this good possible; why is it so metaphysically impossible that they should experience the good with God if they are prehended into God? How can the universe be such that not even God can redeem its sorrows? It seems a strange anomaly if, in a thoroughly relational metaphysics, God alone in solitary splendor is the only one to experience the fullness of justice. One would question the justness of such "justice."

And so I come to the second point: it seems to me that Hartshorne, while using the terminology of objective immortality to speak of occasions in God, nonetheless lays the groundwork for subjective immortality in God. I base this not only on his writings, but on my first meeting with Charles in Hawaii in 1974, at my first professional conference. The excitement over the privilege of meeting him turned out to be an example of self-surpassability when we had our first conversation. I had written a paper for the conference arguing for subjective immortality in God, and Charles’ first words to me were that he agreed with my position.

The basis for that argument lies in Hartshorne’s consideration of the completeness of God’s prehensions of the world. God and only God is able to prehend another occasion completely; finite occasions necessarily "murder to dissect," and are capable of prehending only a portion of a predecessor’s satisfaction. Note the following quotations from Hartshorne’s various writings from 1952 through 1984: God is that one in whom prehensions are "wholly concrete. . . without eliminations of any kind" (ReM 7:109); "what we once were to God, less than that we can never be" (JR 32:101; also LP 252); ". . . if we can never be less than we have been to God, we can in reality never be less than we have been . . . That there can be no subtraction is, in my opinion, more certain than that there can be no addition" (JR 32:102, LP 253); "What in us is extremely partial, feeble retention of the past may in God be complete, ideally vivid and adequate retention" (OOTM 34). That Hartshorne considers God’s prehension to include the entirety of an occasion’s satisfaction in a way that is inclusive of its immediacy is demonstrated in the following: "[T]he satisfaction contains its process of becoming, so that to prehend a past satisfaction is to prehend the becoming, the subjective immediacy itself, of the past actuality . . . 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"’ (PS 93-94).

It seems, then, that God’s prehension of an occasion cannot prescind anything from the occasion, which indicates that the occasion’s own sense of its experience is also included. If so, then God’s prehension of the occasion is a prehension of the occasion’s subjective immediacy: the subject as subject is taken into God. The object for God’s prehension is not the dessicated remains of the subjectivity of an occasion, but the occasion as subject.

While Hartshorne thus holds that the completeness of God’s prehensions is such that the subjective immediacy is retained in God, it is clear that he does not associate this with immortality; to the contrary, he reverts to the language of objective immortality. He associates subjective immortality so fully with what he sees to be the tradition’s coercive way of demanding good action because of rewards and punishments that he has never considered immortality in any other light. Like omnipotence, immortality is a theological mistake. But unlike his ability to go around the theological mistake of omnipotence to find a new way of defining divine power, he never transcended his view of a defective immortality to discover the possibilities inherent in the completeness of God’s prehensions for providing a more adequate view of a defective immortality to discover the possibilities inherent in the completeness of God’s prehensions for providing a more adequate view of immortality. There is no evidence that he has ever related the issue of immortality to justice. But a retained subjective immediacy in God would in fact constitute subjective rather than objective immortality, and provide new grounds for considering the further possibility of an occasion’s everlasting participation in God’s overcoming of evil.

The closest Hartshorne comes to opening the question of immortality (and it is not very close at all) occurs in two letters which are in his files at the Center for Process studies, the one to Alan Anderson in 1986, and the other to John Kennedy in 1989. He writes to Anderson, "you presumably know that for me objective immortality in the consequent nature of God is the essential [emphasis Hartshorne’s] immortality, whatever may or may not happen upon or after our death." And to Kennedy he writes, "Immortality. I have no interest in a continuation of my sequence of experiences after death, but am dogmatic only against an infinite or unending sequence. Objective immortality in divine prehending seems to me all that is appropriate for homo sapiens." The qualifying phrases are "whatever may or may not happen" and "am dogmatic only against an infinite or unending sequence." Here Hartshorne seems to raise the possibility of other options, but he never explores them. Yet the subjective immortality arising from his own position on God’s retention of the occasion’s immediacy would rule out any infinite or unending sequence of new occasions added to the former temporal series, since the locus of subjective immortality would be the divine concrescence. It may be that Hartshorne’s replacement of the singular divine concrescence with a divine series of concrescences prohibited him from seeing the new, nonlinear form or immortality made possible by the retention of the occasion’s immediacy in God.

Subjective immortality alone, of course, cannot answer the question of justice. The further problem is to define within the parameters of Whitehead’s metaphysics how it is that the completed actual occasion, through its own transitional creativity (Whitehead maintains that the appetition for the future is a mode of creativity), is united to God in such a way that it participates in God’s feelings of its own transformation. The prehended occasion must be incorporated into the unique divine concrescence, co-experiencing God’s ongoing internal life according to its capacity, even as God had co-experienced its own. Divine consciousness would be multifaceted, embracing the consciousnesses of every reality that had included this as its subjective form. Through this incorporation into God’s consciousness of the divine concrescence, the prehended subject would participate in God’s transformation of its suffering.

In Hartshorne’s view, objective immortality within the life of God includes the subjective immediacy of the occasion so retained. Including the subjective immediacy, this "objective" immortality also includes consciousness in those cases where consciousness is the subjective form of immediacy. If the conscious immediacy of the subject is fully retained in God, this constitutes subjective, not objective, immortality. It remains, then, to go beyond this simple retention to show how the occasion in God, now as a part of God, participates experientially in the whole. There may yet be a balm in Gilead.

Hartshorne References

IP: "The Immortality of the Past: Critique of a Prevalent Misinterpretation," The Review of Metaphysics 7/1, 1953.

LP: The Logic of Perfection. La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1962.

OOTM: Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

JR 32: "Time, Death and Eternal Life," The Journal of Religion 32/2, 1952.

PS 10: Hartshorne, Cobb, Ford: "Three Responses to Neville’s Creativity and God," Process Studies 10/3-4, 1980.

Hartshorne Works Consulted

1952: "Time, Death and Eternal Life," The Journal of Religion 32/2.

1953. "The Immortality of the Past: Critique of a Prevalent Misinterpretation," The Review of Metaphysics 7/1.

1956: "Life and the Everlasting," unpublished sermon delivered at United Liberal Church, October 28,1956. On file at the Center for Process Studies.

1962: The Logic of Perfection. La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1962.

1978: "The Acceptance of Death," Philosophical Aspects of Thanatology, vol. I. New York: Arno Press. 1978.

1978: "A Philosophy of Death," Philosophical Aspects of Thanatology, vol. II. New York: Arno Press. 1978.

1980: "Three Responses to Neville’s Creativity and God," Process Studies 10/3-4.

1984: Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: State University of New York Press.

1986: Unpublished letter to Alan Anderson on file at the Center for Process Studies.

1989: Unpublished letter to John Kennedy on file at the Center for Process Studies.

Sin has fallen on hard times. We exist in the paradox of a time with a profound realization that our problems are systemic, far exceeding individual is-tic consent or solutions, but the fundamental approach to sin in our society remains a litany of personal failures. Yet ecological disasters, fearsome instruments of war, vast systems of classism, racism, and sexism all have impact upon our lives, and we experience ourselves as caught up in such systems with or without our consent. At a time when it could be argued that we most need it, we have lost the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin as a corporate human condition preceding and affecting each individual.

The issue, then, is this: most contemporary analyses of sin begin with the personal, and transfer it to the social, but individual analysis seems hard-pressed to account for the gravity of social ills confronting us. The tradition did a somewhat better job, even though it began with a personal analysis of sin: Adam’s fall. However, it then interpreted Adam’s fall as the corporate corruption of human nature per se, so that every human being is born already dealing with the effects of sin not directly its own. Original sin conveyed a corporate problem that then yielded individual sins, Something like this would now seem necessary, but we no longer have access to the old myth of Adam and its corporate corruption. Instead, we deal with individual sins that either remain in the private realm, or if projected into the wider social realm fail to deal with the collective power of sin and its relation to individuals. While we cannot use the myth of Adam and corporate corruption, we need to go beyond the mythology to recapture its meaning in forms that address the human and indeed, the planetary situation today.

My supposition is that the individualization of sin is the trivialization of sin, and given the systematic connection between our understanding of sin and our understanding of God as the one who addresses us in our human plight, the trivialization of sin has an inexorable affect upon two areas: the doctrine of God, and the sense of individual and corporate responsibility for social ills. hi this article, however, I will explore only the second of these suppositions and that insofar as it is entailed in a reappropriation of a doctrine of original sin. I will briefly address the wavering fortunes of original sin in these past few centuries, and then begin to explore some of the resources of process, feminist, and black theology for a contemporary development of the doctrine.

A Brief Contemporary History of Original Sin

Since Pierre Bayle launched his satirical attacks on Adam in his immensely popular Dictionnaire in the seventeenth century, the doctrine of original sin has never been the same. Perhaps it was the rise of rationalism, with its corollary emphasis upon the individual, or the discovery of history, or the questioning of biblical authority -- but the age-old notions of the corruption of the race through Adam’s fall itself fell from theological favor, never to be thoroughly recovered. In the seventeenth century, phenomena such as the environment and the humors became substitutes for original sin in explaining the peculiar tendency to perversity within humankind, but with the loss of corporate corruption and corporate culpability, the focus on sin began its slow shift to sins, individually committed and individually suffered.

Schleiermacher was the first theologian after Bayle to resuscitate the doctrine of original sin without reliance on the myth of Adam. While Immanuel Kant also made an enormous contribution with his theory of radical evil, his emphasis led more to individual rather than corporate responsibility, and thus continued the Enlightenment trend toward individualism. Schleiermacher, however, built a theory of the solidarity of humankind in sin upon an evolutionary view of human nature. His basic thesis was that the physical aspects of human existence preceded and provided the basis for spirituality. Our physicality involved a necessary self-preservation instinct that led to protection of one’s own self or kind over against that which was defined as other -- a view not too dissimilar from what Cornel West develops in the late twentieth century as the "normative gaze that tends toward universalization of one ‘s own kind to the detriment of otherness. For Schleiermacher, spirituality -- or the God consciousness -- involved a reversal of self-interest toward an inclusive care for all existence. An important supposition in this thinking is that all existence is in fact bonded together, interwoven in a solidarity whereby each actually is involved in the other’s well-being. That is, there is a fundamental falseness to the egotism that develops from one’s physical instincts for survival, since the ontological reality is that one’s own survival is bound up with the survival of all else. As process thought would later say, all reality is interconnected. Spiritual existence, recognition of our bondedness and therefore mutual care, is congruent with our ontological reality.

For Schleiermacher, the solidarity of the race and its mutual struggle toward spiritual existence from a starting place of sensuous existence accounts for the universal tendency of humans to act against one another’s good, and so against their own good as well. Sin is not an individual phenomenon, but a social phenomenon in the sense that each individual sin is only properly understood in relation to the backdrop of sin evidenced by the race as a whole. Further, the sin of one contributes to the deeper plight of the whole, for each one affects the condition of all. Solidarity, not individuality, is the fundamental basis for understanding sin. Thus Schleiermacher reestablished a notion of original sin apart from reliance on the myth of Adam.

Schleiermacher’s major influence in the nineteenth century was in areas other than this unique development of the doctrine of original sin and its transmission. Ritschl was one of the few theologians to expand on his insights,’ considering the solidarity of the race as the fundamental condition of religion, plunging us corporately into sin and making way for a new corporate reality of righteousness in Christian salvation. But on the whole, nineteenth century philosophical theology was not particularly interested in the question of original or corporate sin; it was far more involved in various responses to Hegel, the new prominence of biblical study and its corollary "quest for the historical Jesus," and the implications of economic and psychological developments for Christian faith. The theology of original sin lay languishing in the lurch. The alternative voices came primarily from Russia in Dostoevsky, and in America through Josiah Royce. Dostoevsky also saw all humanity existing in an interconnected web of mutual responsibility, mystical in its dimensions, where each was responsible for all. In American theology, Josiah Royce probed the communal nature of sin through what he called "social contentiousness" in the tension between the individual and the community.

It remained for Walter Rauschenbusch in A Theology for the Social Gospel to deal simply and forcefully with the social nature of sin and its transmission from generation to generation in a way somewhat reminiscent of Schleiermacher, but far more oriented toward the pragmatics of contemporary life than toward the metaphysics underlying the phenomenon of sin. Rauschenbusch presumed the solidarity of humankind, and focused upon the effects of that solidarity in the transmission of sin such that each generation is predisposed to evil. He cited both biological and social transmission of sin: biological in that we inherit a physical nature with conflicting instincts, and with a great capacity for ignorance, both of which foster inertia and/or inappropriate behavior which, depending upon the degree of intelligence and will involved, lead to sin. But by far the greater factor in the transmission of sin is our embeddedness within a ready-made social system. We draw our ideas, our moral standards, and our spiritual ideals from the social body into which we are born; these are mediated to us by the public and personal institutions that make up the society. Our norms for moral action are not drawn from a disinterested study of objective reality, but are absorbed from the social environs of our childhood. Even though these norms can easily tend to the destruction of the common good, the norms are buttressed by the authority of the dominant social group, its idealization of the structures that work evil, and by the profitableness that most often is entailed in the norms of destruction. One might paraphrase Rauschenbusch by saying that "the problem of sin is that it is profitable."

From a contemporary perspective, it is clear that Rauschenbusch’s absorbing passion was to expose the capitalistic sins of American society; he did so under a normative vision of the Kingdom of God that entailed shared rather than shirked labor, and full opportunities for self-realization for all. War, militarism, landlordism, predatory industries, and finance are the demons he named that shape social institutions toward fostering their own respectability and perpetuation at the expense of justice. The individual sins that Rauschenbusch named are drink, overeating, sexualism, vanity, and idleness -- actions that were often associated with the excesses of a victimized working class. Rauschenbusch focused almost entirely on an economic understanding of sin, and did not see the psychic structures of racism and sexism that accompany and undergird the classism of economic systems. Nonetheless, his achievement is that he built on the earlier work of Schleiermacher and Royce, showing the pragmatic working out of the solidarity of the race that Schleiermacher developed. Rauschenbusch gave the strongest statement in the first half of the twentieth century relating sin to social conditions that form us against the common good, such that each generation corrupts the next.

Two world wars and the increasing importance of existentialism interrupted the theological agenda begun by Rauschenbusch. Not until the liberation theologians began to write in the sixties would social forces of evil receive again such forceful attention in American theology. Indeed, Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the most influential American theologian relative to political and ethical action in this century, wrote his theories of sin under the grip of Soren Kierkegaard’s more individualistic notions of the origin of sin. There is little evidence in his analysis of sin in The Nature and Destiny of Man of any indebtedness to Rauschenbusch, and as for the solidarity theories developed by Schleiermacher. Niebuhr dismissed them by saying that "the ‘cultural lag’ theory of human evil is completely irrelevant to the analysis of . . . sin (NDM 250)." Niebuhr’s antipathy toward any form of inherited sin reflected his fear that it would mitigate responsibility; hence he writes: "the theory of an inherited second nature is as clearly destructive of the idea of responsibility for sin as rationalistic and dualistic theories which attribute human evil to the inertia of nature" (NDM 262). Solidarity and its inevitable implication in corporate sin gave way to every individual’s encounter with the tension and anxiety of finitude and freedom.

Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s development of the individual before God, Niebuhr sets the self as caught between finitude and freedom, seeking to escape vulnerability and anxiety. But this tension can only be lived creatively insofar as the individual trusts in God. Apart from this trust, the individual is pulled by the tension into either pride (the act of treating the finite as if it were infinite), or sensuousness (the sloth that causes one to retreat into the finite as if it alone were of consequence). With regard to political or corporate ills, Niebuhr tended toward a projection of the individual dilemma upon the body politic.² He saw corporate evil as the gathered force of individual evils within the looser structure of a corporate body. Since the looser structure of the corporation, be it nation or institution, lacks anything analogous to mind or conscience, the corporate structure has little power of self-transcendence, and hence is governed by the unrestrained egoism that Niebuhr attributes to human nature in its finite aspects. Since sin is located fundamentally in freedom, and freedom is connected with human self-transcendence, corporate evil is something less than sin. Original sin relates solely to the individual’s flight from anxiety.

Early in the movement of liberation theologies, attention was indeed given to the problem of corporate evil. However, initial forays into the problem tended to see the issue in totally externalized terms. For example, James Cone wrote devastatingly about the sins of white society, and Mary Daly was exceeding clear in delineating the evils of patriarchy, but for both, the problem of corporate evil was "out there." Blacks and women deal indeed with the effects of the sins of others, but it was as if the corporate sins of the others totally absorbed all the sin there is. To speak of sin as also involving Blacks or women was to fall into the sin of "blaming the victim"; there was a myth of presumed innocence for all but those involved in perpetrating or benefiting from the structures of oppression.

The exception to this is the early work by Valerie Saiving suggesting that the sin of pride as defined throughout the tradition, but particularly in the works of Niebuhr, actually defined male existence, and that the sin most apt to describe female existence is the sin of a lack of centered existence. In the late seventies Judith Plaskow picked up this insight in Sex, Sin, and Grace. She critiqued Niebuhr for excessive attention to the sin of pride, and corrected him by expanding his understanding of sensuousness to describe the conditioning women receive that mitigates against their responsible development of selfhood. Susan Nelson Dunfee expanded this yet further, speaking of women’s "sin of hiding." However, in none of these writers is there any attention beyond the individual’s sin toward an analysis of social or corporate sin. They, no more than Niebuhr, had any use for the insights hidden within the old doctrine of original sin.

Meanwhile, one process theologian in particular began to address the problem. John B. Cobb, Jr., in his small publication called Is it Too Late? A Theology of Ecology, began addressing the corporate structures of evil insofar as they wreak their damage on the environment. Earlier, in The Structure of Christian Existence, he had also developed a system that can yet prove helpful in reconsidering the doctrine of original sin. In that work, he analyzed the peculiarities of the cultural transmission of structures of consciousness. He was concerned to explore and then compare the pluralism of these structures as evidenced in the various religions of the world, and to develop the unique particularities of Christian consciousness. There is no application of his work to original sin, but the insights are there: the dynamics of becoming are ontologically given for selves as for every other actuality, but the parameters of what a self may become are not an ontological given, but are in fact mediated by one’s particular cultural/religious situation. One could develop the insight as a metaphysical basis of Rauschenbush’s claim for the social transmission of sin.

There are several further developments in both Black and feminist theology that took place in the eighties that must be mentioned before moving on to the development of process/feminist resources for a reappropriation of the doctrine of original sin. Cornel West, in Prophesy Deliverance, speaks of the "normative gaze." Like Cone, he is addressing the racist structures of society, expanding upon Cone’s work by delving into the human tendency to universalize one’s own experience. One might associate the normative gaze with Schleiermacher’s analysis of the physiological development of self-protection and own-kind preservation that evolved through humanity’s long struggle for existence, although West does not make this association. Instead, he traces its manifestation in the past few centuries, and its invidious effects when it is accompanied by power. In dominant groups, the normative gaze becomes the creation of norms that idealize one’s own kind, subordinating otherness to serve the dominant group’s ends and purposes. In subordinate groups, the normative gaze translates into social inferiority, and internalized images of inferiority. In the latter case, the social and personal combine to produce variations of self-hatred, with a corollary projection of these feelings onto one’s own kind as a whole. A failure to own or develop one’s full potential as a human being is the result.

The feminist parallel to this development is Rosemary Radford Ruether’s analysis of sin and evil in Sexism and God-Talk. Unlike West, she relates her insights to the old doctrine of original sin, stating that "feminism can rediscover the meaning of the fall in a radically new way" (SGT 37). Sin is both individual and systemic: individually, the human condition is radical alienation from one’s true relationship to self, nature, and God; systemically, this translates into structures of domination and subordination that are enforced by the group in power. However, even though she goes so far as to say that alienating social structures are central to the transmission of the alienated and fallen condition of patriarchal sin, she no more than Niebuhr goes beyond the analysis of individual sin as the primal cause of social structures. Like Niebuhr, she speaks of both active and passive sin, or pride and sloth. Pride is acting on the capacity to set oneself up over against others, and sloth is the passive acquiescence, manifested by men as well as women, to the dominant group ego. Apart from the assertion that socioeconomic and political structures transmit the effects of pride and sloth to successive generations, there is no investigation of the differences and connections between individual and social sin.

What is needed at the present time, then, is a theology of sin that builds upon the work of the persons cited here, but that can develop a stronger connection between social structures and individuals, and with the ancient insights concerning original sin.

A New Basis for Original Sin

To restate the problem, original sin defined the human situation as one of universal implication in sin, apart from any conscious consent. Sins arise from the condition of sin. Whether classical theologians dealt with the nature of sin as pride, sloth, unbelief, disobedience, or any other variation, the exercise of such vices depended upon this original condition. The mechanism used to account for universal perversity was that the supposed first humans deviated from their given good, and with this deviation, corrupted the nature that was then passed on to their progeny. The plight today is that we experience an enormity to social evils, but we have no mechanism such as "original sin" to account for them theologically. Issues such as racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, handicapism, anthropocentrism, and whatever other ‘isms" we have devised toward the ill-being of peoples require more than an analysis of individual sin to account for the pervasiveness and depth of the problem. We must re-appropriate the doctrine of original sin in such a way that it speaks to our condition, and lends heuristic power to our personal and corporate forms of addressing evil.

Interdependence, intersubjectivity, and the peculiarities of consciousness are tools provided through process thought for developing a notion of original sin in which original sin can be interpreted as inherited structures of consciousness, acting as socially sanctioned norms, that assume the ill-being of earth or any of its inhabitants. These norms predispose us toward their perpetuation, and inevitably involve us in sin. My operative definition of sin is those intents and actions that work the ill-being of any facet of existence.

I recognize the vast inclusiveness of such a definition, and hold that there is a great variance of degrees of culpability for sin, from negligible to great, but that the working of ill-being is nonetheless appropriately named sin.

Like Schleiermacher, process theology depends heavily upon the notion of an evolutionary world of interdependent actualities. Both draw from the sciences of their day: Schleiermacher on the developing notions of evolution, and process from early twentieth-century physics. There are in fact parallels between Cobb’s exploration of the structure of Christian existence, and Schleiermacher’s development of God-conscious existence, both of which draw upon evolutionary suppositions. Process thought, more than Schleiermacher, develops the dynamism involved in evolution and in the interconnected nature of existence that is essential to both systems.

A process model is a relational model, drawing on the data of physics and biology, maintaining that we do indeed live in an interconnected universe where everything relates to everything else. From the world of the physicist Freeman Dyson, we learn of the butterfly effect: a butterfly, taking off from a flower in Beijing, has an effect on the weather patterns of mid-America. We already know of the interconnected life patterns whereby oxygen generated by rainforests nourishes all the earth, or where water falling in northern mountains means green gardens in southern California. We are no strangers to the daily witnesses of interdependence. A process-relational philosophy suggests that the interconnectedness that we experience at a macro-cosmic level is also operative at a microcosmic level, and in fact accounts for the dynamism of existence itself. Everything exists in and through its creative response to relationships beyond itself. This means that everything matters: each reality receives from all that have preceded it, and gives to all who succeed it.

If there is no reality that does not participate in this dynamic process of existence, surely it sets up a structure whereby the interactive influence between the individual and society is highlighted at the personal as well as microscopic level. If each moment of existence inherits from all of the past, then the individual and corporate actions of the past have an effect on what the present individual might become. Further, one’s social location is a critical factor in this inheritance, since one’s incorporation of the past is perspectival, rooted in particularity. One receives the past already weighted in value relative to one’s own place in the sun. There is an inevitable intentionality within that which one inherits, and this inherited intentionality strongly influences the direction of one’s own intentions.

Within this process-relational model, the totality of ourselves must be considered as a matter of relationships; these relationships are internal to who we are, and not external. We inherit from a personal past, a familial past, a social and cultural and political past -- but these are truisms. Process simply points out that this inheritance is woven into ourselves, together with our own creative response to those relationships. We become ourselves in a relative freedom through the many relationships that influence us at the depths of our being. The case is easily illustrated in every instance where one whom we love encounters hardship. Our own well-being is affected by the well-being of the one we love, so that the other’s pain causes us distress. We are internally affected by the other, and therefore dependent upon the other. Process provides a model to discuss this internality of relation: we receive from the past in our innermost nature, and through our creative response to that past, we become ourselves. In our own becoming we in our turn influence others, who must take our influence into their own becoming, and so the dance of relationship fills our days with variations of pain and pleasure. Relations are internal to who we are.

Process suggests that most of the relations that we experience are much deeper than the conscious levels of our being. We, too, inherit from the butterfly in Beijing! Most of the effects of the vast network of relations impinging upon us are screened out at preconscious levels; others are projected back onto environmental phenomena; very few make their way into conscious existence.

The implication, of course, is that the relationality that makes up the personal world of each one of us encompasses all other persons, as well as all elements in the universe preceding us. On the physical level, our very bodies are made up through internal relations to atoms streaming toward us from throughout the universe; physicists become poets when they tell us we are stardust. For the purposes of this investigation of original sin, the singularly important facet of this reality is that the old views of the solidarity of the race have a basis in ontic fact. Whether we like it or not, we are bound up with one another’s good, woven into one another’s welfare. Such a reality is easy to acknowledge at the level we call collegiality, community, and family, but the deeper reality is that our consciousness is but the rim of what we receive. Freeman Dyson reminds us of the little old lady who confronted the scientific view of the origins of the universe with the retort that everyone knew the universe was really held in existence by being placed on the back of a giant turtle. "Aha," said the scientist, "and what holds up the turtle?" "You think you’ve caught me, young man," she replied, "but it’s turtles, all the way down!" In a process world, it’s relation, all the way down. We are bound up with one another throughout the earth, inexorably inheriting from each, inexorably influencing all. Our prized individuality exists through connectedness. Individual inheritance is at the same time social inheritance.

If this is the structure of personal existence, clearly there is a renewed basis for discussing the universal effects of sin. It takes us in several directions, the obvious and the implied. Obviously, we are not isolated from the ill-being of others in the world. Events in distant Kuwait affected many families; drought in one part of the world affects the food supply in another. But if such macrocosmic and obvious interrelatedness is common, the model again says these are but "tip of the iceberg" occurrences, and that there is a lessening of our own humanity with every human evil, a heightening of our good with every human joy. There is no such thing as private ill, having no effect upon others, for private ills both derive from social effects and have social effects, yielding again further private ills.

Schleiermacher spoke of a solidarity of the race through an evolutionary journey as we evolved from purely physical existence, bound up with survival, toward modes of spiritual existence, where our survival depends upon our extending our own sense of well-being to include the well-being of others. Process affirms this insight, and expands it by going deeper into the nature of interconnectedness, and by arguing that the metaphysical basis of spirituality is the increasingly complex organization of relationships until they create first consciousness, and then self-consciousness. With self-consciousness comes in-creased responsibility for the quality of relationships, and hence the basis for the spirituality of which Schleiermacher speaks.

However, while this basic interrelationality is the foundation for a process view of original sin, it requires expansion into the peculiarity not simply of subjectivity, but of intersubjectivity at the level of social institutions that organize the shaping influence of the past upon the present. For I am convinced that the dynamics of the individual alone are not enough to account for the pervasiveness of sin, and that we need an understanding of institutions and their relationship to individuals as well.

The increased complexity of relational organization does not stop with self-conscious existence, but, upon this basis, develops yet further modes of complexity in institutions. In order to push toward a comprehensive understanding of sin that undergirds and expands insights from Schleiermacher, Rauschenbusch, Ruether, and West, process thought must focus on the intersubjectivity that is uniquely characteristic of institutions. Just as there is a grouping of many actualities in the creation of the complexity of embodied personality, even so there is obviously a grouping of many persons in the creation of an institution. Personal existence becomes uniquely personal in the achievement of self-consciousness; institutional existence gains its character through its unique form of intersubjectivity, or the cooperation of many self-conscious subjects in the joint creation of a supra-personal form of existence.

The intersubjectivity works both personally and institutionally. Notice the peculiar dynamics of a new association with an institution, whereby a person encounters a whole new configuration of her or his personal past. One’s history is contextualized in a different way, being intertwined with the histories of all others in the institution, and by the history of the institution as a whole. Part of the jarring sense of transition is the ontological demand at subliminal levels of one’s being to respond to newly relevant relationships, weaving them into one’s own continuing becoming self. New associations place new demands and invitations upon one’s becoming. Personal participation in the intersubjectivity of an institution is the recontextualization of identity. But by the same token, one’s own energies become newly interwoven with the institution and those associated with it, adding a new dimension to its character which will be manifest at greater or lesser intensities, depending upon the size of the institution. The complexity in the resulting intersubjectivity is increased still further by the overarching reality of the institution, which is woven not simply through the intersubjectivity of its members, but through the tendrils of its relationship to all of its constituencies in its own unique trajectory of time.

Institutions and social organizations work through the intersubjectivity created by concentric rings of participants, governed by the dynamic force of a rather fluid mission, or purpose for its being. The peculiar power of an institution is the sense in which its central purpose is reflected a myriad of times as if in some great hall of mirrors through the intersubjectivity created by all of its participants. This reflection process need not be at explicitly conscious levels for its effectiveness; it is enough that one has absorbed the institutional purpose to whatever degree into the internal structures of one’s identity, and then, in the naturalness of a relational world, woven that purpose into the projections of one’s own influence upon others. Within the institution, this reflection-projection process creates the peculiar intersubjectivity of the institution, nuancing and intensifying the institutional purpose, and therefore creating the power of the institution’s psychic impact on society as a whole. This psychic impact is woven into the physical or material effects of the institution as it carries out its reason for being.

Agency in institutional existence is diffuse, shared, and mutually delegated. It can take the form of hierarchy similar to that which exists in an individual person, where there is a unique governing center coordinating the relationality of all its parts, or it can build upon its ontic base of intersubjectivity and act through consensual modes. The size and complexity of the institution influences the mode of agency, in that the larger the institution, the greater the likelihood that its agency will be coordinated hierarchically. Responsibility is created and shared through the intersubjectivity of the institution, but in varying degrees, depending upon the particular institutional structure. All who participate in an institution bear a real responsibility, to one degree or another, for what the institution is.

It should be noted that the intersubjectivity of an institution allows a peculiar manipulation of that intersubjectivity for individual or specialized group advantage. Its diffuse complexity of agency can mask personal responsibility; intersubjectivity can be used to hide one’s subjectivity. That is, while institutions are more powerful than individuals, exerting greater social force, their looser and intersubjective structures lend themselves to manipulation of that social force by individuals.

In any form, institutional agency is created through intersubjectivity; it is a cumbersome agency, because diffuse. At the same time, its compounded complexity of intersubjectivity gives it power that is greater than that of a single individual, even though it may be subverted by an individual. Intersubjectivity differs from a person’s subjectivity in and through this different order of complexity. It entails a multiple nuanced and mirrored and repeated intentionality of purpose that exercises its corporate influence on the rest of society, particularly those within its immediate environs.

Institutions themselves, however, are hardly the final word, for they contribute to larger groups that are more loosely organized to create a culturally defined society as a whole, bound together as a unit through mutually albeit somewhat loosely reinforced language and customs. Again, responsibility is diffuse, permeating the intersubjectivity that actually and dynamically creates the whole, of whatever proportions that whole might be. We live in a Chinese-nesting-box world of interconnected societies, all of which impinge upon the forming consciousness of every individual. Subjectivity, or the unique mode of existence that belongs to individuals, is replaced by intersubjectivity at the level of institutions and society.

The importance of this brief discussion of persons, institutions, and society relative to the notion of original sin is that all three are involved in the mediation of both good and ill, that which makes up the richness of communal existence, and that which mitigates against it. All three are routes of inheritance, receiving the past, weaving the past, and becoming the past for the future that will succeed them. Their gift to their progeny is to provide the parameters within which consciousness becomes self-consciousness, ordered into a world. This is both bane and blessing, and insofar as it is bane, it is the perpetual origin of original sin.

The psychic power of the forms of intersubjectivity that create institutions and societies lies in their being channels for a multiply reinforced group structure of consciousness, a common grid for interpreting experience in the world. Intersubjectivity itself creates the normative structures whereby we individual subjects order our lives. Further, these structures are not externally imposed, they are internally inherited through the relationality of existence, contributing to the formation of every subjectivity that receives them.

Given this structure to social existence, then, there are two basic elements that contribute to the situation of being disposed toward sin prior to one’s consent. The first element is the interconnected structure of existence, as outlined above, and as developed through process thought; the second draws from the profound insights of black and feminist theology relative to the shaping power of the "normative gaze," or the tendency to value one’s own kind as over against the other. The normative gaze, sanctioned and channeled through the intersubjectivity of institutions and society, is sufficient to shape the consciousness of persons from birth and throughout life. The background of the normative gaze is intersubjective and therefore diffuse, but its foreground is its shaping of the norms and expectations of each individual consciousness. Since it is the individual self-consciousness that is so formed, it becomes constitutive of the self, and difficult to transcend. One’s actions from this center of consciousness will then actualize the norms, perpetuating them relative to one’s own position and perspective within the grid of the intersubjective society at large. By definition, the inherited norms cannot be questioned prior to their enactment: one is caught in sin without virtue of consent. Original sin simply creates sinners.

Against this definitional understanding of original sin, Rauschenbusch’s insights may be given full rein. He spoke to the economic dimensions of original sin when social structures are used to the so-called enhancement of the few at the expense of the many. John B. Cobb Jr.’s insights concerning the devastating effects of anthropocentrism upon earth as a whole through the restriction of well-being to the human community also follow. These views drawn from process, feminist, and Black thought are also extensions of Schleiermacher’s analysis of physical and spiritual existence, albeit translated into the language of "normative gaze" and "own-kindness.

The question remains that if we can refer to inherited structures of consciousness that normalize the good of some at the expense of others, and if these structures of consciousness form persons apart from their consent, how is it that original sin entails guilt? For we suppose that some degree of freedom and responsibility is necessary for the attribution of guilt. The requirement in a process metaphysics that freedom inhere, to one degree or another, in every subject whatsoever is the route to establishing responsibility for one’s actualization of sin. The "Catch 22" -- and the reason for appropriating the name "original sin" instead of simply describing these conditions as the way of things -- is that personal action depends upon structures of consciousness which themselves involve seeds of their own transcendence. The possibility for self-transcendence through questioning one’s structured norms creates the responsibility and therefore the guilt that is entailed in the transition from original sin to sins. However -- and we are again in a "Catch 22" -- in the nature of the case, we inherit structures of consciousness from our birth onward, and hence by the time questioning is possible, the destructive norms are already internalized. The combined power of intersubjectivity creates the grooves of subjectivity.

My introduction to this topic indicated that we need to reappropriate a doctrine of original sin to illumine the ills of our day, and our own participation in those ills. The purpose of such theologizing, however, is not to wallow in the problem, but to name the problem. Naming is itself a form of self-transcendence that has the power to draw us into transformed structures of consciousness, and a wider embrace of the well-being of all earth’s creatures. Such transformations, however, must necessarily involve a transformed mode of communal existence, a renewed intersubjectivity intentionally open to multiple forms of well-being. Such a topic also requires much further development. For the present, my aim has been to explore new foundations for the old doctrine of original sin, allowing us once again to name its power. Such naming is itself a mode of transcendence that can begin the process of transformation toward the good.

References

BS -- Susan Nelson Dunfee. Beyond Servanthood. University Press of America, 1989.

CF -- Freidrich Schleiermacher. The Christian Faith. Harper & Row, 1963.

Eth -- Dan Rhoades. "The Prophetic Insight and Theoretical-Analytical Inadequacy of ‘Christian Realism.’" Ethics 75/1 (October 1964).

IAD -- Freeman Dyson. Infinite in All Directions. Harper & Row, 1989.

NDM -- Reinhold Niebuhr. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941.

PD -- Cornel West. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. The Westminster Press, 1982.

SCE -- John Cobb, Jr. The Structure of Christian Existence. The Westminster Press, 1967.

SGT -- Rosemary Ruether. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Beacon Press, 1983.

SSG -- Judith Plaskow. Sex, Sin and Grace. University Press of America, 1980.

TE -- John B. Cobb, Jr. Is it Too Late? A Theology of Ecology. Bruce Books, 1971.

TSG -- Walter Rauschenbusch. A Theology for the Social Gospel. Abingdon, 1945.

Notes

1Julius Mueller also developed a work on original sin that harks back to Originistic theories of pre-existent souls; however, this thesis entails many of the problems of a mythic Adam, which truncated its twentieth-century influence.

2See Dan Rhoades, "The Prophetic Insight and Theoretical-Analytical Inadequacy of Christian Realism’," Ethics, LXXV/1, October, 1964.