Sunday, August 06, 2006
(1:27 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Scattered thoughts on "process"
I am about halfway through Process and Reality. Wary of the dangers of reading too much without ruminating, I thought that I would share my half-digested thoughts with my long-suffering blog audience.First, there are a lot of basic concepts that seem to be pretty much correct. First, the idea of there being a kind of "readiness for consciousness" in being in general has always seemed to be a great way to overcome dualism -- much better than a kind of reductionist vulgar materialism ("Did you know that when you think you're thinking, it's actually all just chemical reactions? Sad but true!"). This is what I thought was basically right in Teilhard de Chardin as well, and what is so appealling to me about Jean-Luc Nancy's thought. (Interestingly, Nancy like Whitehead concludes that God must be a particular being, as opposed to the Tillichian position that God is Being itself, or the Marionian position that God is "beyond Being.) It also seems to be compatible in some ways with Alexandrian Christianity and what develops out of that -- for instance, the idea of creation as God's hospitality to humanity (in Basil), or Gregory of Nyssa's idea that it's not so outrageous that Jesus could become bread and wine if he already became human, bread and wine being in some way "implicitly" human already. The breakdown of the "substance/accidents" scheme is also definitely to be found in the patristic literature -- Augustine is hard at work on it in the De Trinitate. He apparently presupposes that the Aristotelian categories "work" for things other than God, but to me that seems to me to begin to break down in the psychological analogies for the Trinity, in particular the "trinity" of sense-perception, which is supposed to be found in animals as well as humans.
The process God (in detail) still seems pretty lame to me, but the idea of a God who relies on persuasion rather than coersion is one of the primary themes of the patristic literature -- in fact, Origen's whole convoluted scheme of reincarnation was developed as a way of making God's non-coersive techniques compatible with the idea pf universal salvation. The fundamentally Christian character of persuasion over against coersion was recovered in early modern thought, as we discovered in the "Paul and Philosophy" seminar at CTS -- it was taken as axiomatic that St. Paul had to rely on persuasion rather than authority (though I guess this doesn't really apply to early modern concepts of God).
I just don't know that you need to import the whole Whiteheadian apparatus, in all its imposing majesty, into theology in order to recover this point. That is, you could probably just sit down and read the patristic literature -- for this reason, it seems to me that Catholic theologians (broadly construed to include, for example, Anglicans and the "Catholic Lutherans") would be better able to deal with the relevance of Whitehead to Christian theology, but it also seems as if most of the main exponents of "process" and now of its bastard son "open theism" are Protestant. So we get this stuff about how "process" is going "back to the Bible." Of course, here I'm reverting back to my stereotypes of "process," so this could be completely wrong.
But anyway, the remarks above about early modern philosophy are something of a bluff, as I am discovering that I have only the vaguest idea of what went on between Descartes and Kant -- which is the period Whitehead is basing his whole argument on. The sections where he is dealing with Descartes, Locke, and Hume seem to be the clearest parts of his argument -- if only I had independent knowledge of those thinkers' arguments! I guess this exposes my bias: having done most of my philosophical reading in the continental tradition, and specifically within the phenomenological branch of that tradition, I have always just assumed that the Kantian revolution was so decisive as to render previous philosophers obselete. This was largely an unconscious bias, since now that I'm stating it, it sounds completely ridiculous.
Finally, I need to get around to reading the Timaeus.
Such are my thoughts on "process." Oh, one more thing -- Whitehead is quite insistent on calling his mode of thought "the philosophy of organism." Why didn't they keep that name? (John Emerson, can you help me on this?)
