On Whitehead, Process Theology
Deleuze-Whitehead (Rhizomatic Process Theology)
An event can be described by its three elements:
Objective data = physical prehension
Eternal possibilities = conceptual prehension
Decision = subjective aim
Reality for Whitehead is events, with durations. Tiny events (low duration) he called actual occasions. Large scale events he calls actual entities. Each event is a different size with a different duration. All events can be described in terms of three constituent elements: objective data (efficient causes), eternal possibilities, and the decision. So a process is going along and what initiates a new event is another process coming into contact - an event is an intersection of two processes. That is to say the objective data of the second process intersects with the existing state of affairs of the first process. This is a cause-effect mechanism.
In human consciousness, we would say that the objective data is made aware through physical prehension (Leibniz term). To prehend something is simply to be aware of it, for it to affect you. There can be positive and negative prehension: the positive prehension is to accept the influence and absorb it, negative would be where you simply reject it or ignore it. Whitehead would refer to ‘physical prehension’ as an affective experience (as opposed to cognitive). He criticizes Kant, Descartes, and others for giving primacy to the cognitive (primacy to the idea/concept). The first initiating thing in an event is affective not cognitive. Whitehead would even say in unconscious beings, this event model holds and the unconscious being would experience a low grade equivalent to physical prehension (namely the cause effect mechanism).
Eternal possibilities are simply abstract logical possibilities (ideas), brought to bear by the objective data - he calls these conceptual prehensions (cognitive). Whitehead says that the logical possibilities are sort of objective possibilities, in the very nature of things there exist these objective possibilities but we don’t invent these. We may actualize the possibilities but we don’t invent them. The possibilities are there whether we know it or not, in this sense they are ‘objective’. Later in his work, he calls them eternal objects - objects of thought like ideas are. These possibilities are still there in unconscious human psyche events.
For the decision, Whitehead refers to it as a subjective aim. From the eternal possibilities which are selectable, the decision becomes the goal at which you aim. The initial subjective aim is that which is presented by the natural causal process. In a deterministic process, the initial subjective aim is simply the subjective aim of this new event. Subjective in the sense that it becomes some intrinsic end for the new event by virtue of the new data you’ve absorbed by it. In this (the notion of a subjective aim) Whitehead uses a teleological universe along with teleological explanations as opposed to mechanistic or a mechanical universe framework. In the case of conscious beings, the initial subjective aim can become a modified subjective aim - one might resist the effect of something and handle the new input in a different way. Even a dog resists your whistle and chases the cat next door (initial subjective aim becomes modified). This is how Whitehead describes all events. The teleological end in the subjective aim concludes the event. When the possibility inherent in this new data is achieved, then the event is completed. This completion leads to satisfaction, but Whitehead refers to this as an Aesthetic satisfaction. This Aesthetic satisfaction can be described as a ‘coming together’ or unity of everything in the event of the three constituent elements (data, possibility, decision) - so that this event is felt as one feeling or one experience.
Again the event can be different durations, the event could be the first taste of pie, or your college experience, or an epoch of history that comes together as an identity of its own. Pulling from Hegel, Whitehead says the satisfaction is a unity harmony of opposites - contrasts of actuality and possibility. In the arts, they describe the experience of beauty as contrasts harmonized in the final moment where the symphony brings it all together - or how we know when to clap after an orchestra. Aesthetic satisfaction has been achieved and is felt as a unified experience. The Good is what contributes to the aesthetic satisfaction, and is instrumental to beauty for Whitehead. Here he uses a Utilitarian ethic where Good is a means to aesthetic ends. Evil is the fragmentary transitory opposition to that harmony, either by virtue of resisting the emerging aim with its grand synthesis or by virtue of sheer triviality causing boredom. Extraneous things that interfere with the developmental movement of the thing, this is the Bad. But much of what we call evil is simply the conflict of opposites to be harmonized in the synthesis. This characterization of an event like perceptual experience is the characterization of a persons life, of all human history, of all cosmic history. Whitehead’s category of the ultimate, that is to say the ultimate explanatory category, is creativity. The way in which novelty emerges out of the conflict of opposites. One event gives birth to another, in dying we live.
David Hume defines personal identity as a bundle of perceptions, our identity as we know it in consciousness is simply a present memory of past experiences. Whitehead strings out these perceptions over a duration of time, but it’s the continuity of experiences that gives identity (so that when you look at a photo of yourself from ten years ago you said, “yeah that’s me”). But Whitehead says the human self is simply a society of events with a unifying structure.
What about God? For Whitehead, God is no exception to these metaphysical generalities but the example par excellence. So God is conceived in the image of perceptual experience (or God is understood in terms of being God). The self consciousness is the lens projected on to the ultimate.
There are three phases in the nature of God, three-fold nature of God in relationship with the three-fold nature of the event, (the three-fold nature of God is simply another example of a three-fold event). In other words the Being we call God is like any other being is an event, just an everlasting event (without beginning or end).
Three-Fold Nature of God:
Primordial Nature: what God begins with (but this is everlasting and never changes). Ordered harmony of all eternal objects.
Consequent Nature: God gets something from the world
Superjective Nature: God gives something to nature, to the world
You have to think of God as the sum total of all logical possibilities. For St Augustus, Plato’s forms were conceptual possibilities in the mind of God (archetypes in the mind of God). This is what Augustine got from those Alexandrian church fathers, from the logos tradition that was so influenced from middle platonism. Whitehead is picking up on the platonic theory of forms, as it was translated through middle platonism into the logos language of the stoics that the Christian church adopted and applied to the Creator God. As the world (nature itself) and the world’s history development takes place, natural events, God experiences the world. And he can be touched by the feeling of what’s going on in the world - God feels what’s going on, and feels with us. God’s primordial nature is the conceptual prehension (knowledge of all forms), God’s consequent nature is the physical prehension of objective data (affecting), and God experiencing in that affective sense what is going on in the world while knowing (conceptually) all sorts of eternal possibilities for harmonizing - in His superjective nature He offers possibilities to the world process. It’s God who provides the initial subjective aim, not some blind mechanistic force. In human experience, human beings have freedom to resist the will of God, freedom to modify what God in his goodness offers as an aim or purpose.
God’s primordial nature corresponds to the second ingredient in a natural event (eternal possibilities), but his consequent nature corresponds to the first (objective data). Whereas Gods superjective nature corresponds with the third (decision) - which then leads into future events. As the next event comes down the complex pipeline, the primordial nature of God incorporates all the possibilities for this new event. The primordial nature of God is always there as a reserve for eternal possibilities. Whitehead’s God is a God that orders the universe, God is the principle of concretion (order). Concretion for Whitehead meaning growing together, concresence. God keeps the growth going into that harmony of a symphony, but God does not originate the world process. The category of the ultimate is creativity, primary example is God.
Whitehead says natural processes have been going on forever and God was not the first process. This differs from the cosmogony of theists. God is not the originator or terminator of the world process (a teleology without an eschatology). The harmony is being created all the time, and it’s everlasting. History doesn’t have some end to which it is moving nor can God bring about the end. God is the principle of limitation by creating the limited possibilities available (from His infinite eternal forms reserve). Whitehead‘s emphasis is on the creativity of God, exercising with loving care, the initial subjective aim in every event no matter how big or small in the entire world process. In that sense, God too is an event, an all-experiencing-event. It’s not pantheism, it’s not traditional theism, it’s a kind of panentheism (everything goes on within the experience that is God). But the event, the super all inclusive experience that is God, is much more than all the world process (panentheism).
You may be tempted to ask, “What is the experiencer?” Whitehead would reply a person, but the only thing we can say is a person is a succession of events with the unity and harmony to the whole. Memory theory of personal identity, this is process philosophy not substance philosophy - there is no substratum, no thing or entity that thinks or feels but only thinking and feeling.
Whitehead excerpt, “In the great formative period of theistic philosophy which ended in the rise of Mohammedanism after a continuance coeval with civilization three streams of thought emerge which amid many variations in detail respectively fashion:
God in the image of an imperial ruler = Divine Caesars
God as a personification of moral energy = Hebrew Prophets
God in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle = Aristotle
Aristotle was antedated by Buddhist thought and Hebrew prophets have traces with earlier thought, Mohammedanism and divine Caesars merely represent the most natural obvious idolatrous theistic symbolism at all epochs and places. The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining a problem. However there is the Galilee origin of Christianity, and yet another suggestion there that doesn’t fit well with any of the three main strands, it identifies with the tender elements in the world that in slow and quietness operate by love. And it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom that is not of this world. It’s not in the future, but finds its reward in the immediate present. The Kingdom is among you.”
Whitehead is caught up not by Christian theology but the image of Jesus as it was in a certain liberal theological tradition that emphasized Jesus as the man of love. This he got from his background.
Another Whitehead excerpt: “We can conceive of the patience of God, tenderly saving the turmoil of an intermediate world by the completion of His own nature. God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force, but lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization (primacy of the primordial nature). The revolts of destructive evil purely self regarding are dismissed into their triviality and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy and individual sorrow and the introduction to the needed contrast is saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image is that of tender care, that nothing be lost. God does not create the world, rather he saves it, or more accurately God is the poet of the world with tinder patience leading the world with its vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. The creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux, when it’s reached its final term, it’s everlastingness.”
Love, Whitehead takes to be Eros. Eros is the platonic word for love; which is a love of the Good. It’s in this overarching love of Good that God acts, the desire for Good. It’s that in that initial subjective aim that God gives, and being spread abroad. In the medieval teleology, all of nature has its natural tendency towards its natural Good. And even human beings who mistake the Good still desire the Good. Whitehead is trying to recapture this teleology in this way.
Notes taken from Dr. Arthur F. Holmes lecture “A History of Philosophy | 62 Whitehead and Process Theology”