Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead

by C. Robert Mesle

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781599471327
Publisher:	Templeton Press
Publication date:	03/01/2008
Edition description:	First Edition, 1
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Read an Excerpt

Process-Relational Philosophy

AN INTRODUCTION TO ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

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By C. Robert Mesle

TEMPLETON PRESS

Copyright © 2008 C. Robert Mesle
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59947-132-7

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CHAPTER 1

A Process-Relational World

AN ADVENTURE THAT MATTERS

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

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reaylit

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

The primary purpose of this book is to provide a basic introduction to the process-relational philosophy inspired principally by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), especially as expressed in his seminal 1929 work Process and Reality. This will not be a neutral introduction. I want to persuade you that process-relational philosophy is a vision that matters, that is worth taking seriously, even as it will inevitably require us to criticize, improve, and, in some respects, transcend it. Process-relational thinking has a long history stretching back at least to the Buddha and the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the sixth century BCE. While there are many contemporary forms of process-relational thought, Whitehead provides one particularly clear and focused vision of reality shared by many people and groups around the world.

Unfortunately, Whitehead was developing his profoundly new vision of the world just as Anglo-American philosophers were throwing out the metaphysical baby with the bath water. Understandably, they found many metaphysical questions and answers to be empty and useless—literally meaningless. Yet, the need for a comprehensive vision of reality has only grown greater since Whitehead first introduced this philosophy. With the dramatic growth of science in every corner, the great emergence of ecological awareness, the explosion of thought about religious diversity, and both increased conflict and increased dialogue between science and religion, we need more than ever to find ways of thinking that can pull these many conversations together in meaningful ways. This book reflects the convictions of a network of people who believe that process-relational thought can provide such a unifying vision.

PROCESS, TIME, AND WONDER

An artist friend of mine observed that great art can make us simultaneously cry out, "Holy Cow!" and "Of course!" Great art can make us see something in a radically new way, while at the same time helping us to see that this new vision fits, that it feels right. My goal in this little book is to offer a philosophical vision of reality, and of human existence in the world that makes you say both "Holy Cow!" and "Of course!" So far as I succeed, things will snap into place 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 how to say it."

Whitehead's Process and Reality is a very tough book, so as a graduate student thirty years ago, I took a break and walked over to Lake Michigan, trying to understand what "process" was all about. The weather was gray and the lake, choppy. "What is the alternative?" I asked myself. What if the world were not in process? Would Lake Michigan somehow be sitting there waveless in the future, waiting for waves to break on it? Suddenly, the world jolted, as if it had been ajar and unexpectedly dropped into place with a snap.

The future does not exist. There is no future Lake Michigan waiting for water to fill it or waves to lap at its shores. The future does not exist. I looked at the world around me with wide, amazed eyes. My eyes 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 moment did not exist yet: Only the foot in the present existed. I practically skipped home, watching the sidewalk and my feet (and my watching itself) become. At Morry's Deli, I looked in the window (becoming) and watched the pastrami becoming, and the people becoming.

When I returned to my third-floor apartment, I looked down into the yard next door and had a sense of vertigo. Time is like falling, I thought. We are always on the verge of falling forward into nothingness; but, in each moment, the world becomes anew, and the creative advance 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 with a CD.) Our traditional Christian view of time assumes that the future exists very much like music on a record or CD. All the "music" is stamped simultaneously onto the plastic—Pssst! The needle or laser reads the grooves and dips so that music leaps up as if it were becoming. But every note is already there, beginning, middle, and end. From the perspective of the disc, nothing new happens. The future already exists on a record or a CD.

Consider the idea that the future already exists from the perspective of the Christian theology that has so profoundly shaped Western thought. Christians have traditionally believed in an omnipotent, omniscient God who creates "time" but stands outside of time as we stand outside of a CD. Or, to pick a more traditional image, time has been seen as like a great tapestry woven by God. The tapestry tells a story, but the whole story from beginning to end exists at once on the tapestry. God, it has been assumed, is able to stand back and see the whole tapestry at once. Thus, the future may be unknown to us, but it exists—is already fully actual—for God. This concept explains how prophets are usually thought to see the future: God simply lifts them up 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, great battles are fought, and you and I agonize over decisions. Yet, none of the characters in the novel has anything to say about what they decide. That is all determined by the author. On page 73, you may be struggling with whether to marry or live in celibacy. Turning to page 76, we see what you decide. Turning back to page 40, we can read where you first met the person you love. The novelist has created it all, and having been created, the past, present, and future are all fully settled, fully actually, fully achieved simultaneously. Since God, as the novelist, is outside of time, outside of the novel, there is not even a process of creation for God. God is timelessly eternal, with no past or future. So the novel exists timelessly in the mind of God—static, unchanging, eternal—with every decision, every action determined totally by the divine Author.

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

Western thinkers have generally avoided the Eastern view that time and change are illusions, though Parmenides proposed a similar view about twenty-five centuries ago. Still, you can see that in important ways Western Christians have said that time is a kind of illusion. From God's perspective, which surely defines ultimate reality, nothing new happens, nothing changes. God is eternal, and so is the world. Being is real, but Becoming is a kind of illusion experienced only by us finite creatures trapped within time. In this and other ways, the philosophy of 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 fully settled and actual—is exactly the view of time that I threw aside when I discovered that the future does not exist and became a process philosopher. The future does not exist. There isn't even a future "out there" waiting to happen. Decisions must be made; the future must be created. The creatures of the present must decide between many possibilities for what may happen, and their collective decisions bring the new moment into being.

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

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

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

PROCESS AND RELATEDNESS

The interwoven, relational character of our world and our lives is glaringly obvious to thoughtful people today. The World Wide Web of the Internet impacts everyone who reads this book—even if they never go online. People commonly exchange email with others around the globe. Globalization is simply a name for the fact that our world economy is so interrelated that jobs can move anywhere in the world, restructuring the entire global economy. Human activities appear to be changing the world climate, creating global warming, and causing massive extinctions of animal species.

Equally glaring is the fact that these relationships are dynamic processes. Our world of rock stars, political borders, computers, and medical technology changes so fast that no one can keep up. Never has it been clearer, as Heraclitus observed twenty-five hundred years ago, that you can't step in the same river twice. Indeed, as his student Cratylus argued, you can't even step in the same river once. The river changes even as we step into it, and so do we. Some things change very slowly, but all things change. Or, to put it better, the world is not finally made of "things" at all, if a "thing" is something that exists over time without changing. The world is composed of events and processes.

Process philosophers claim that these features of relatedness and process are not mere surface appearance: They go all the way down to the roots of reality. Moreover, process thinkers insist that our failure to recognize that reality is a relational process is a source of great harms. It matters how we think about reality, the world, and ourselves because we act on what we think.

One function of philosophy is to help us see obvious truths more clearly and deeply. Another function is to challenge ideas that appear obvious but that may be fundamentally mistaken. Process philosophy is an effort to think clearly and deeply about the obvious truth that our world and our lives are dynamic, interrelated processes and to challenge the apparently obvious, but fundamentally mistaken, idea that the world (including ourselves) is made of things that exist independently of such relationships and that seem to endure unchanged through all the processes of change.

Philosophers have struggled for millennia over how best to think about our experiences of both permanence and change—about the relationship between Being and Becoming. By and large, unchanging Being has taken priority in Western philosophy and religion, while Becoming often has primacy in Asian culture, although there are important exceptions in both cases. In the West, Plato firmly established the primacy of Being when he argued that this world of change is merely a shadowy copy of a realm of eternally unchanging forms. Following the Platonists (not the Bible), Western Christian theologians asserted that God was the ultimate unchanging reality. Finally, in the Enlightenment, René Descartes and others argued for Being over 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 independently and (2) endure unchanged through change. Thus, Descartes imported Platonic and heavenly immutability into this world of objects and human minds. Our own minds (or souls) are, for Cartesian thinkers, primary instances of things that are not relational and not dynamic processes. Cartesian dualism, like many philosophies before it, became baptized into the Christian faith and powerfully shaped the Christian view of the self in the West.

This nonrelational character of Cartesian dualism, especially as combined with Christian theology, was intensified by the belief that this immaterial mental substance could not possibly arise out of nature. Since early modern philosophers and scientists envisioned the world as made out of nonexperiencing matter, it seemed clear that no natural (that is, material) process could possibly give rise to human minds/souls. The only alternative, they thought, was to assume that souls were created supernaturally by divine fiat. Consequently, human minds came to be seen as essentially unrelated to the world of nature around us.

Process philosophers, on the other hand, argue that there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us. This stance requires us to challenge and reject the prevailing philosophies and theologies that give primacy to Being over Becoming, to independence over relatedness, to things over processes, to the idea that the human spirit is fundamentally isolated from the social and natural web in which we clearly 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 person regardless of what anyone else says. But what is important here is better understood and more wisely addressed by rooting even the endurance of things in the deeper recognition that nothing stays the same forever and that no person is an island. Or, as someone suggested, people are islands, but islands aren't what they appear to be. Deeper down, even islands, like waves, are merely faces of a deeper unity. If we cannot see that unity, we imperil the web in which we live.

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

SO WHAT?

Learning to value diversity is one of the vital tasks we face if we are to live together in our modern world. Travel and communication bring together people from a world of different cultural, religious, spiritual, intellectual, and scientific perspectives. This diversity can be a rich source of inspiration, yet we also need to find visions that can speak effectively to as many of these different communities as possible. We need shared visions that can help integrate religion with science and ancient worldviews with more modern ones and that can help us learn how to value diversity as it helps integrate diverse perspectives.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Process-Relational Philosophy by C. Robert Mesle. Copyright © 2008 C. Robert Mesle. Excerpted by permission of TEMPLETON PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of 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