Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead - Softcover

Mesle, C. Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1599471329 ISBN 13: 9781599471327

Publisher: Templeton Press, 2008

Synopsis

Process thought is the foundation for studies in many areas of contemporary philosophy, theology, political theory, educational theory, and the religion-science dialogue. It is derived from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, known as process theology, which lays a groundwork for integrating evolutionary biology, physics, philosophy of mind, theology, environmental ethics, religious pluralism, education, economics, and more.

In Process-Relational Philosophy, C. Robert Mesle breaks down Whitehead's complex writings, providing a simple but accurate introduction to the vision that underlies much of contemporary process philosophy and theology. In doing so, he points to a "way beyond both reductive materialism and the traps of Cartesian dualism by showing reality as a relational process in which minds arise from bodies, in which freedom and creativity are foundational to process, in which the relational power of persuasion is more basic than the unilateral power of coercion."

Because process-relational philosophy addresses the deep intuitions of a relational world basic to environmental and global thinking, it is being incorporated into undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy, educational theory and practice, environmental ethics, and science and values, among others. Process-Relational Philosophy: A Basic Introduction makes Whitehead's creative vision accessible to all students and general readers.

About this title

About the Author

C. Robert Mesle is a recognized authority on process thought and the author of the acclaimed Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (1993), the most widely read introduction to process theology. A professor and chair of the philosophy and religion department of Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, he received his PhD from Northwestern University. He is a board member of the International Process Network and the China Project of the Center for Process Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy and Process Studies. He resides in Lamoni, Iowa.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Process-Relational Philosophy

AN INTRODUCTION TO ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

By C. Robert Mesle

TEMPLETON PRESS

Copyright © 2008 C. Robert Mesle
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59947-132-7

Contents

Being and Becoming: A Personal Preface.....................................
ix
Chapter 1: A Process-Relational World: An Adventure That Matters...........
3
Chapter 2: Imaginative Generalization: The Search for a Comprehensive 
Vision.....................................................................
11
Chapter 3: Minds, Bodies, and Experience: Envisioning a Unified Self.......
20
Chapter 4: Experience All the Way Down: Seeking an Imaginative Leap........
31
Chapter 5: Reality as Relational Process: Substance and Process............
42
Chapter 6: Reality as a Causal Web: A Constructive Postmodernism...........
54
Chapter 7: Unilateral Power: Power, Value, and Reality.....................
65
Chapter 8: Relational Power: So What?......................................
72
Chapter 9: Creativity, Freedom, and God: What Makes Freedom Possible?......
79
Chapter 10: Looking Ahead: The Future of Process-Relational Thought........
89
Appendix: Getting Technical: Whitehead's Language..........................
93
Notes......................................................................
111
Suggested Reading..........................................................
119
Index......................................................................
121

CHAPTER 1

A Process-Relational World

AN ADVENTURE THAT MATTERS

Rationalism never shakes off its status of an experimentaladventure.... Rationalism is an adventure in the clarificationof thought, progressive and never final. But it is an adventurein which even partial success has importance.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reaylit

Ideas shape actions, so it matters how we think aboutreality, the world, and ourselves. I don't mean that onlypeople who believe in one particular religion or philosophycan be good or intelligent people. But, clearly, it does matter howwe think about the world. I want to begin by suggesting three reasonswhy you might want to learn more about process-relationalthought. The first is simply wonder—the philosopher's joy in wonderingabout this incredible, amazing world. Second, thinking of theworld as deeply interwoven—as an ever-renewing relational process—can change the way we feel and act. Finally, we need a coherentvision of our world, something that can engage people from many differentscientific, cultural, philosophical, and religious perspectives.

The primary purpose of this book is to provide a basic introductionto the process-relational philosophy inspired principally byAlfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), especially as expressed in hisseminal 1929 work Process and Reality. This will not be a neutral introduction.I want to persuade you that process-relational philosophy isa vision that matters, that is worth taking seriously, even as it willinevitably require us to criticize, improve, and, in some respects, transcendit. Process-relational thinking has a long history stretchingback at least to the Buddha and the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitusin the sixth century BCE. While there are many contemporaryforms of process-relational thought, Whitehead provides one particularlyclear and focused vision of reality shared by many people andgroups around the world.

Unfortunately, Whitehead was developing his profoundly newvision of the world just as Anglo-American philosophers were throwingout the metaphysical baby with the bath water. Understandably,they found many metaphysical questions and answers to be emptyand useless—literally meaningless. Yet, the need for a comprehensivevision of reality has only grown greater since Whitehead first introducedthis philosophy. With the dramatic growth of science in everycorner, the great emergence of ecological awareness, the explosion ofthought about religious diversity, and both increased conflict andincreased dialogue between science and religion, we need more thanever to find ways of thinking that can pull these many conversationstogether in meaningful ways. This book reflects the convictions of anetwork of people who believe that process-relational thought canprovide such a unifying vision.

PROCESS, TIME, AND WONDER

An artist friend of mine observed that great art can make us simultaneouslycry out, "Holy Cow!" and "Of course!" Great art can makeus see something in a radically new way, while at the same time helpingus to see that this new vision fits, that it feels right. My goal inthis little book is to offer a philosophical vision of reality, and ofhuman existence in the world that makes you say both "HolyCow!" and "Of course!" So far as I succeed, things will snap intoplace so that you say, "It's so obvious. Why didn't I see that before?That is how I always experienced the world, but I never knew howto say it."

Whitehead's Process and Reality is a very tough book, so as a graduatestudent thirty years ago, I took a break and walked over to LakeMichigan, trying to understand what "process" was all about. Theweather was gray and the lake, choppy. "What is the alternative?" Iasked myself. What if the world were not in process? Would LakeMichigan somehow be sitting there waveless in the future, waitingfor waves to break on it? Suddenly, the world jolted, as if it had beenajar and unexpectedly dropped into place with a snap.

The future does not exist. There is no future Lake Michigan waitingfor water to fill it or waves to lap at its shores. The future does notexist. I looked at the world around me with wide, amazed eyes. Myeyes did not exist in the future. The sidewalk did not exist in the future.The foot that I was going to set down on the sidewalk in a momentdid not exist yet: Only the foot in the present existed. I practicallyskipped home, watching the sidewalk and my feet (and my watchingitself) become. At Morry's Deli, I looked in the window (becoming) andwatched the pastrami becoming, and the people becoming.

When I returned to my third-floor apartment, I looked down intothe yard next door and had a sense of vertigo. Time is like falling, Ithought. We are always on the verge of falling forward into nothingness;but, in each moment, the world becomes anew, and the creativeadvance continues.

How could I explain this to my wife? I put a record on the player.(Yes, this was many years ago, but the image will work just as well witha CD.) Our traditional Christian view of time assumes that the futureexists very much like music on a record or CD. All the "music" isstamped simultaneously onto the plastic—Pssst! The needle or laserreads the grooves and dips so that music leaps up as if it were becoming.But every note is already there, beginning, middle, and end. Fromthe perspective of the disc, nothing new happens. The future alreadyexists on a record or a CD.

Consider the idea that the future already exists from the perspectiveof the Christian theology that has so profoundly shaped Westernthought. Christians have traditionally believed in an omnipotent,omniscient God who creates "time" but stands outside of time as westand outside of a CD. Or, to pick a more traditional image, time hasbeen seen as like a great tapestry woven by God. The tapestry tells astory, but the whole story from beginning to end exists at once on thetapestry. God, it has been assumed, is able to stand back and see thewhole tapestry at once. Thus, the future may be unknown to us, butit exists—is already fully actual—for God. This concept explains howprophets are usually thought to see the future: God simply lifts themup above the tapestry so that they can see as far ahead as God chooses,because the future already exists.

Consider the image of time as a great novel. The novel has a beginning,a middle, and an end. Within the novel, people live and die, greatbattles are fought, and you and I agonize over decisions. Yet, none ofthe characters in the novel has anything to say about what theydecide. That is all determined by the author. On page 73, you may bestruggling with whether to marry or live in celibacy. Turning to page76, we see what you decide. Turning back to page 40, we can readwhere you first met the person you love. The novelist has created itall, and having been created, the past, present, and future are all fullysettled, fully actually, fully achieved simultaneously. Since God, as thenovelist, is outside of time, outside of the novel, there is not even aprocess of creation for God. God is timelessly eternal, with no past orfuture. So the novel exists timelessly in the mind of God—static,unchanging, eternal—with every decision, every action determinedtotally by the divine Author.

This static view of time in which the future already exists explainswhy Christians often assume that everything is predetermined byGod. Obviously, if God created the tapestry of time, with the wholeworld story on it, we had and have nothing to say about what Goddecided we would do. Whatever is going to happen has alreadyhappened. When did God create time? Since God is outside oftime, the answer can only be something like "timelessly" or "eternally."So, whatever is going to happen in the future actually happenseternally.

Western thinkers have generally avoided the Eastern view that timeand change are illusions, though Parmenides proposed a similar viewabout twenty-five centuries ago. Still, you can see that in importantways Western Christians have said that time is a kind of illusion. FromGod's perspective, which surely defines ultimate reality, nothing newhappens, nothing changes. God is eternal, and so is the world. Beingis real, but Becoming is a kind of illusion experienced only by us finitecreatures trapped within time. In this and other ways, the philosophyof Being rather than Becoming has dominated Western thought.

The view of time in which the past, present, and future exist simultaneously,so that the future already and always exists—is already fullysettled and actual—is exactly the view of time that I threw aside whenI discovered that the future does not exist and became a processphilosopher. The future does not exist. There isn't even a future "outthere" waiting to happen. Decisions must be made; the future mustbe created. The creatures of the present must decide between manypossibilities for what may happen, and their collective decisions bringthe new moment into being.

If the future does not exist, then you and I, the grass, the birds, theearth, the moon, sun and stars, even space itself—the entire universe—must be bursting into existence in each moment. What kind of aworld can do this? It cannot be a world composed of hard, unchangingsubstances that endure unchanged under all the surface appearancesof change. This must be a world in which energy erupts anewin each moment. Is this true?

Just look at your own experience. Isn't that exactly what your ownexperience is like? New drops of experience pop into being one afteranother like "buds or drops of perception" (PR 68, quoting WilliamJames). Each new drop of awareness is incredibly complex, composedof thoughts, feelings, sensory experiences, and deeper feelings ofbeing surrounded by a world of causal forces. You can never makethoughts stand still.

Your own flow of experience is a paradigm for the process-relationalvision of reality laid out in Whitehead's work and in thebook you are currently reading. We will keep coming back to this paradigmto see it from different angles and to see its complexity.

PROCESS AND RELATEDNESS

The interwoven, relational character of our world and our lives is glaringlyobvious to thoughtful people today. The World Wide Web ofthe Internet impacts everyone who reads this book—even if theynever go online. People commonly exchange email with others aroundthe globe. Globalization is simply a name for the fact that our worldeconomy is so interrelated that jobs can move anywhere in the world,restructuring the entire global economy. Human activities appear tobe changing the world climate, creating global warming, and causingmassive extinctions of animal species.

Equally glaring is the fact that these relationships are dynamicprocesses. Our world of rock stars, political borders, computers, andmedical technology changes so fast that no one can keep up. Never hasit been clearer, as Heraclitus observed twenty-five hundred years ago,that you can't step in the same river twice. Indeed, as his student Cratylusargued, you can't even step in the same river once. The riverchanges even as we step into it, and so do we. Some things change veryslowly, but all things change. Or, to put it better, the world is not finallymade of "things" at all, if a "thing" is something that exists over timewithout changing. The world is composed of events and processes.

Process philosophers claim that these features of relatedness andprocess are not mere surface appearance: They go all the way downto the roots of reality. Moreover, process thinkers insist that our failureto recognize that reality is a relational process is a source of greatharms. It matters how we think about reality, the world, and ourselvesbecause we act on what we think.

One function of philosophy is to help us see obvious truths moreclearly and deeply. Another function is to challenge ideas that appearobvious but that may be fundamentally mistaken. Process philosophyis an effort to think clearly and deeply about the obvious truth thatour world and our lives are dynamic, interrelated processes and tochallenge the apparently obvious, but fundamentally mistaken, ideathat the world (including ourselves) is made of things that exist independentlyof such relationships and that seem to endure unchangedthrough all the processes of change.

Philosophers have struggled for millennia over how best to thinkabout our experiences of both permanence and change—about therelationship between Being and Becoming. By and large, unchangingBeing has taken priority in Western philosophy and religion, whileBecoming often has primacy in Asian culture, although there areimportant exceptions in both cases. In the West, Plato firmly establishedthe primacy of Being when he argued that this world of changeis merely a shadowy copy of a realm of eternally unchanging forms.Following the Platonists (not the Bible), Western Christian theologiansasserted that God was the ultimate unchanging reality. Finally,in the Enlightenment, René Descartes and others argued for Beingover Becoming by insisting (contrary to many of their own observations)that the world is composed of physical and mental "substances,"especially including human souls, that (1) exist independentlyand (2) endure unchanged through change. Thus, Descartesimported Platonic and heavenly immutability into this world ofobjects and human minds. Our own minds (or souls) are, for Cartesianthinkers, primary instances of things that are not relational andnot dynamic processes. Cartesian dualism, like many philosophiesbefore it, became baptized into the Christian faith and powerfullyshaped the Christian view of the self in the West.

This nonrelational character of Cartesian dualism, especially ascombined with Christian theology, was intensified by the belief thatthis immaterial mental substance could not possibly arise out ofnature. Since early modern philosophers and scientists envisioned theworld as made out of nonexperiencing matter, it seemed clear that nonatural (that is, material) process could possibly give rise to humanminds/souls. The only alternative, they thought, was to assume thatsouls were created supernaturally by divine fiat. Consequently,human minds came to be seen as essentially unrelated to the world ofnature around us.

Process philosophers, on the other hand, argue that there isurgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processesof which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actionshave consequences for the world around us. This stance requires usto challenge and reject the prevailing philosophies and theologiesthat give primacy to Being over Becoming, to independence overrelatedness, to things over processes, to the idea that the human spiritis fundamentally isolated from the social and natural web in which weclearly all live and move and are becoming.

Yes, of course, there is something important about the ideas of permanence,of Being, and of standing as our own independent personregardless of what anyone else says. But what is important here is betterunderstood and more wisely addressed by rooting even theendurance of things in the deeper recognition that nothing stays thesame forever and that no person is an island. Or, as someone suggested,people are islands, but islands aren't what they appear to be. Deeperdown, even islands, like waves, are merely faces of a deeper unity. If wecannot see that unity, we imperil the web in which we live.

Process thinkers, along with modern physicists, emphasize thatrelatedness and process go all the way down and all the way up.Process theologians, such as John B. Cobb Jr., Marjorie Suchocki, andDavid Ray Griffin, argue that even God is best understood in termsof relatedness and process rather than as an unchanging, static Beingunafected by the world. It will be my task in this book to articulateas briefly and clearly as I can a process-relational vision of reality,arguments for that vision, and the important implications it has forunderstanding every aspect of our lives.

SO WHAT?

Learning to value diversity is one of the vital tasks we face if we are tolive together in our modern world. Travel and communication bringtogether people from a world of different cultural, religious, spiritual,intellectual, and scientific perspectives. This diversity can be a richsource of inspiration, yet we also need to find visions that can speakeffectively to as many of these different communities as possible. Weneed shared visions that can help integrate religion with science andancient worldviews with more modern ones and that can help us learnhow to value diversity as it helps integrate diverse perspectives.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Process-Relational Philosophy by C. Robert Mesle. Copyright © 2008 C. Robert Mesle. Excerpted by permission of TEMPLETON PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1599471329
• ISBN 13: 9781599471327
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136