Process thought

Process thought identifies fundamental reality with change or process rather than "things," like atoms.

The conventioanl way of looking at the world since the time of Plato, usually posits a "timeless" metaphysical reality of substances, objects, or things, while processes are denied or subordinated to timeless objects. Process philosophy reverses this trend, favoring "Becoming" over "Being" and "Non-being" which logically follows from Being, that is to say, it does not characterize change as illusory but as the cornerstone of metaphysical reality, or ontology. Modern process philosophers include Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Nicholas Rescher, and Gilles Deleuze, a list to which some add Arthur Schopenhauer and even Friedrich Nietzsche.

History

The formal development of this theory begins with Heraclitus's fragments in which he posits the noumenon (not to be confused with Kant's "Ding an sich"), the ground of Becoming, as agon or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change.

Much later, Aristotle's concept of moderation, which parallels the concept in Buddhism (the two are almost contemporaries) establishes goodness or value as a function of a process in which extremes are avoided. The process, not the outcomes or ideals balanced to achieve the process, is the ultimate good. The Noble Eightfold Path may be the clearest expression of this principle in any religion before modern times, although the more legalistic process of ijtihad in Islam is likewise an assignment of trust in a process of interpretation, the result of which (Islamic law) is held to be wholly trustworthy to make life-critical decisions. More monastic traditions in both East and West tended to emphasize the process of enlightenment, often interpreted quite literally as leaving the (heavy) body behind, especially among Roman Catholic monks. Historically, however, the Eastern traditions were more forgiving of temporary failures of will as long as they were in fact temporary. Many Buddhist and Taoist stories emphasize the value of quickly returning to one's disciplined state after a breach, and even forgetting it had occurred. Yoga-related disciplines also avoid any explicit goal-setting or measures of success. Eastern traditions almost universally invoke the concept of balance which implies multiple and contradictory pressures in, as Heraclitus suggested, ongoing "strife".

Process philosophy was not neglected during The Enlightenment but was often ignored as an attribute or element of more explicit ontology. René Descartes, for instance, proposed that the mind and body were actually connected and unified by a single process, the imagination. This was often discarded or devalued by Descartes' followers and critics who attributed to him (incorrectly) advocating a mind-body dualism. Very similarly, the law of the excluded middle was raised to ontological status by those of Aristotle's followers, notably those practicing medieval scholasticism, who wished to ignore some of his telling observations about moderation (the very ones that Francis Bacon celebrated) and rhetoric (which Aristotle praised, seemingly foreshadowing Descartes' imagination).

A number of other key Enlightenment figures, including those instrumental in the scientific method (especially Isaac Newton, obsessed with dreams and famously inspired by daily events, and Galileo Galilei, pioneer of diagnostic dialogue) made note of their working processes in terms that suggest change is what they seek to quantify because it is the most fundamental basis on which perception and thus reality proceeds. George Berkeley actually criticized Newton specifically for straying from this view and holding forth that certain objects existed, as opposed to perception suggesting they did.

By the 19th century, these views were coalescing and combining with newer sciences, most notably electromagnetism in physics and theories of harmony in music. John Keely held, in an early version of the Wave-particle duality, that all particles were outcomes of a change, one often analogized to the whitecaps upon a wave on the rolling sea: they are not themselves reasonably characterized as objects, only consequences of a change.

Of other philosophers, more dominant at that time, Immanuel Kant noted that either experience made objects possible, or objects made experience possible. He seemed to have missed that processes might make both possible. Gottfried Leibniz's monads were not related to all other occasions of experience that preceded them. Reductionism was in vogue - to reduce processes (say into tasks or events) was more difficult than reducing objects. In the management science of Frederick Taylor however there was emerging a view of infinitely reducible work processes and an ontology limited to "practical" tasks - later to come into bloom with total quality management and the "six sigma" goal.

In 1905, the theory of general relativity curtailed exploration of pure process views and made the case for a specific and expanding universe that did exist as an objective object of our human perception and cognition. This was attractive if only for simplicity. The curiously fixed speed of light provided the basis on which a number or limit, rather than a process, could be said to be defining reality itself, at least as perceivable by beings similar to ourselves. At the same time, a philosophy of mathematics was developing that favoured some specific foundations of mathematics that could be specified as a set of axioms, again, a fixed not process-oriented description.

These hopes proved vain, although it remained for Russell and Whitehead to prove that so in 1913 - after which Whitehead elaborated what had been learned from attempts to escape process as the basis of ontology. This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy—Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. - a work which can be seen as a lighter and more accessible form of describing the basic Hegelian truth, namely that absolute, or "philosophical", truth can only be a logical and /or worldly "movement" in and through determinates, not these deteminates as fixed concepts or "things". Hegel is the real (modern) rootsource of what (clumsily) can be termed dialectical-dynamical-ontology, and of which process philosophy is a branch.

Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was a very unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity rivaling Einstein's - see relativity. He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.

The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing. However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience).

Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.

Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.

Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective. This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities.

Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson.^{[citation needed]}

Process philosophy since Whitehead

Several fields of science and especially medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public health, environmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable.

In psychology the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging.

In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses.

Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdos' simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g. he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdos and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdos behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

External links

• Center for Process Studies
• International Process Network
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

Process theology (also known as neoclassical theology) is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Process theology is unrelated to the Process Church.

The concepts of process theology include:

• God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than force. Process theologians have often seen the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving coercion, and themselves claim something more restricted than the classical doctrine. "Persuasion" in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.
• Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. These events have both a physical and mental aspect. All experience (male, female, atomic, and botanical) is important and contributes to the ongoing and interrelated process of reality.
• The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God's will.
• God contains the universe but is not identical with it (panentheism, not pantheism). Some also call this "theocosmocentrism" to emphasize that God has always been related to some world or another.
• Because God interacts with the changing universe, God is changeable (that is to say, God is affected by the actions that take place in the universe) over the course of time. However, the abstract elements of God (goodness, wisdom, etc.) remain eternally solid.
• Charles Hartshorne believes that people do not experience subjective (or personal) immortality, but they do have objective immortality because their experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Others believe that people do have subjective experience after bodily death.
• Dipolar theism, is the idea that God has both a changing aspect (God's existence as a Living God) and an unchanging aspect (God's eternal essence).

The original ideas of process thought are found in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Various theological and philosophical aspects have been expanded and developed by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), John B. Cobb, and David Ray Griffin.

Process theology soon influenced a number of Jewish theologians including Australian philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1938), and Rabbis Max Kaddushin, Milton Steinberg and Levi A. Olan, Harry Slominsky and to a lesser degree, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Today some rabbis who advocate some form of process theology include Donald B. Rossoff, William E. Kaufman, Harold Kushner, Anton Laytner, Gilbert S. Rosenthal, Lawrence Troster and Nahum Ward.

Alan Anderson and Deb Whitehouse have attempted to integrate process theology with the New Thought variant of Christianity.

Thomas Jay Oord integrates process theology with evangelical, openness, and Wesleyan theologies. Oord argues that it is part of God's essence as relational to provide freedom to others. This loving act means that God cannot withdraw or override the freedom of others, but this inability is part of who God is and not imposed by outside forces or conditions.

Process theologians

Charles Birch John B. Cobb Paul S. Fiddes Lewis S. Ford Stephen T. Franklin

David Ray Griffin Charles Hartshorne Nancy R. Howell William E. Kaufman Harold Kushner

Thomas Jay Oord Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki Alfred North Whitehead Daniel Day Williams

Readings

• Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki's God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (1989, ISBN 0-8245-0970-6) demonstrates the practical integration of process philosophy with Christianity.
• C. Robert Mesle's Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (1993, ISBN 0-8272-2945-3) is an introduction to process theology written for the layperson.
• Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981, ISBN 1-4000-3472-8) and Jewish Theology and Process Thought, (1995, ISBN 0-7914-2810-9) eds. Sandra B. Lubarsky and David Ray Griffin.
• Jewish introductions to classical theism, limited theism and process theology can be found in A Question of Faith: An Atheist and a Rabbi Debate the Existence of God (1994, ISBN 1-56821-089-2) and The Case for God, (1991, ISBN 0-8272-0458-2) both written by Rabbi William E. Kaufman.
• Christian introductions may be found in Schubert M. Ogden's The Reality of God and Other Essays, SMU Press (1992, ISBN 0-87074-318-X); John B. Cobb, Doubting Thomas, (1990, ISBN 0-8245-1033-X); and Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, State University of New York Press, (1984, ISBN 0-87395-771-7). In French, the best introduction may be André Gounelle, Le Dynamisme Créateur de Dieu Van Dieren Editeur (reprint in 2000).
• For essays exploring the relation of process thought to Wesleyan theology, see Bryan P. Stone and Thomas Jay Oord, Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love: Wesleyan and Process Theologies in Dialogue (Nashville: Kingswood, 2001, ISBN 0-687-05220-3).
• The most important work by Paul S. Fiddes is The Creative Suffering of God, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); see also idem., 'Process Theology', in A. E. McGrath, ed., The Blackwell encyclopaedia of modern Christian thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 472–6

See also

• Conceptions of God
• Existence of God
• God
• Names of God
• Postmodern Christianity

External links

• The Center for Process Studies
• Process and Faith
• Process theology and Judaism
• Process theology and the New Thought movement
• A longer, scholarly introduction to process theology
• Center for the Study of Cosmic Spirituality

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