Process Philosophy leading to process theology

Process philosophy is a 20th century philosophical movement embracing novelty of experienced reality to rely on intuition and reject permanence, uniformity and materialism.

Henri Bergson 1859/ 1941 was considered a founding father who proposed life’s experience entailed a continuum of creating oneself analogous to existentialism.   

He appealed to both academia and in common and general appreciation culminating in his Nobel Prize awarded to him in Literature in 1927.

First educated at Lycée Condorcet in Paris in 1878 to 1881 he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, as a brilliant student at home in both Greek, Latin and scientific subjects. 

Early work- introducing the concept of lived time.   

His principal focus concerned his concept of the inner flow of his so called lived time which opposed the scientific spatialized conception of time as measured by a clock. .

His concept was to recognise an inner awareness and liberty to reject scientific determinism. 

In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a cousin of the French novelist Marcel Proust. 

Mind and Body- memory is independent of the body

He correctly conclude memory is not actually lost but rather it is only the bodily mechanism that is lost and unable to recall memories which was a ground-breaking idea at the time. . 

Bergson concluded that memory, and so mind, or soul, is independent of body and makes use of it to carry out its own purposes.

In 1897 he returned as the professor of philosophy to the École Normale Supérieure, having first entered as a student.

In 1900, he was called to the Collège de France, the academic institution of highest prestige in all of France, where he enjoyed immense success as a lecturer until the outbreak of World War I. 

William James was an enthusiastic reader of his works, and the two men became warm friends. 

1903 - 'An Introduction to Metaphysics' – the two ways of knowing 

The two ways of knowing separate the scientific approach  o see things as solid and discontinuous whilst the intuitive way conceptualises the global, immediate or references matters that reach into the heart.  

The first gets things done but cannot view reality as it leaves out duration and its perpetual flux, which is inexpressible and can only be grasped as in self-awareness. 

Créatrice (1907; Creative Evolution), is  considered his greatest work to define him as a process philosopher. He proposed that the evolutionary process involves an enduring  (“vital impulse”) that is continually developing and generating new forms. Evolution is creative and not mechanistic. 

His ideas then are remarkably similar to modern day evolutionary biology that understands our DNA blueprint is constantly subject to the environment. It doesn’t represent a form of Neo-Darwinism as portrayed by evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and others as a form of genetic determinism.

In this developing process, he traced two main lines: one through instinct, leading to the life of insects; the other through the evolution of intelligence. Both he suggested is the work of one vital impulse that is at work everywhere. Bergson was on the right track as in modernity we know, having spent billions on the DNA project we know our genes only play a limited role and the novel environment is far more influential. The switches within DNA can be switched on and off according to the environment which is far more influential. 

Summary of Bergson's main ideas:

·         Evolutionary and not materialistic. 

·         Life has an 'inner flow', an inner spirit, which is known by intuition and accounts for material/bodily changes.

·         Two kinds of time exist: Scientific, mechanical, objective, 'out there' time; and inner time, subjective, of our immediate intuitive flowing experience.

Understanding the self.  

He argued any attempt to understand the self by analysing it in terms of static concepts fails to reveal the dynamic, changing character. Reality is a continual process of change and is apprehended intuitively via the inner time awareness as a continuum of all existing changes or movements, with no break; a continual flow, ever evolving creatively.

There is a 'life force', an elan vital that has endured the ages and accounts for the creative evolution of life, instinct and intellect in all living things. It is the driving force propelling life to higher and higher levels of structure and organisation, an impetus which is creative but whose endpoint is not known. 

 His idea was that the ‘Elan Vital” cannot be known empirically or through the sciences which are concerned with the static, material, discrete way of apprehending reality.

Instinct is limited because it grasps the fluid, dynamic nature of life but is limited to the individual; intellect is limited because it can construct general truths and categories of existence but by doing so it imposes a static character to reality. 

By intuition knowledge is possible which is superior to that of instinct or intellect working separately.

His system is dualistic, insofar as he sees reality divided between life (and spirit in life) and matter. It is life that is the impetus to creativity, the flow ever evolving, unrestricted, not predetermined.

What flows is whatever we deem to be there, such as matter (inanimate) in tension with life, (the living, organic spirit). All part of a flowing reality. Matter tends towards inertia and it is life that is creative, using matter or whatever there is, to evolve into greater free forms, not prescribed or limited by the 'dead hand' of matter. 

Critics and analysis of his Philosophy

The idea that intuition is instinct, becoming aware not only of its objects but also of itself and is a necessary part of consciousness; (self-aware) is contrary to the Rationalists, Kant and Hegel who prioritised the intellect as the way to grasp the nature of reality.

Bergson claimed that the intellect evolved as a tool to divide and subdivide the flow (matter of life) - a continual creative process. This intellect-tool is a projection upon reality, upon the flow, which is reflected back to us so that we suppose it to be real, made up of clock-time static objects.

But it is not like that; it is just our way of subdividing the endless, continual flow so that action can be undertaken.

Later career.

It was until 25 years later in 1932 he published “The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where he claimed that the polar opposition of the static and the dynamic provides the basic insight. 

According to Bergen there are two sources of morality with one having its roots in intelligence and the other based on intuition, and finding its expression not only in the free creativity of art and philosophy but also in the mystical experience of the saints.

Influence of Bergson

His influence has been greatest in France, but it has also been felt in the US and Great Britain, especially in the work of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. 

Alfred North Whitehead 1861- 1947.

He was an English mathematician and philosopher, who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and, from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory.

The Concept of Nature (1920).

Whitehead was influenced by Henri Bergson's anti-mechanistic philosophy of change.

1925 Boston Lectures- A critique of “scientific Materialism”

He criticized Materialism as mistaking an abstract system of mathematical physics for the concrete reality of nature. 

Whitehead's mind was at home with such abstractions, and he saw them as real discoveries and not intellectual inventions. 

Religion in the Making

In 1926, Whitehead interpreted religion as reaching its deepest level in humanity's solitude, that is, as an attitude of the individual toward the universe rather than as a social phenomenon.

Gifford Lectures

In January 1927 the University of Edinburgh invited him to give a set of 10 Gifford Lectures in the ensuing academic year. 

For this, Whitehead drew up the complex technical structure of “the philosophy of organism” (as he called his metaphysics)

The lectures reflected Whitehead's speculative hypothesis that the universe consists entirely of becoming, each of them a process of appropriating and integrating the infinity of items (“reality”) provided by the antecedent universe and by GOd (the abiding source of novel possibilities.

Whitehead had an unwavering faith in the possibility of understanding existence and a superb power to construct a scheme of general ideas broad enough to overcome the classic dualisms. 

But he knew that no system can do more than make an approach, somewhat more adequate than its predecessors, 

to understand the infinitude of existence. He had seen the collapse of the long- entrenched Newtonian system of physics, and his “Adventures of Ideas (1933)” was Whitehead's last big philosophical book. 

Whitehead emphasized the impulse of life toward newness and the absolute need for societies stable enough to nourish adventure that is fruitful rather than anarchic. In this book he also summarized his metaphysics and used it to elucidate the nature of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. 

By “peace” he meant a religious attitude that is “primarily a trust in the efficacy of beauty.”

Main Ideas of Whitehead's Philosophy

 ·          The conventional, scientific/materialist accounts of the world (matter, bits of it in motion and that is all there is) is deeply flawed as it fails to give a any proper account of reality (the universe).

·         Physics (the primary science) has no place for qualia (secondary qualities we perceive, such as colours, sounds etc...) in its narration of what there is and   doesn’t offers a place for ethics, beauty or the religious experience.

·         Physics deals with natural laws, concepts like mass, universal constants and force but cannot provide an explanation of the reason why the universe is as it is. .

·          Everything in reality is super sensitive to the presence of everything else, to represent our experiences of “the other” through a non-conscious awareness or 'feeling.'

·        Our experience tells us that reality encompasses causation, valid rules of inductive inference, that the qualities of things must belong to them, that aesthetics, ethics, religious intuitions are parts of the world not just figments of the imagination. 

·         Everything is connected/related to everything else in a vast organic-like whole and this connection is a 'knowing' the other through feeling. 

What I liked: 

Rather obviously our view of reality is constrained by the fact one can’t step outside of the universe of which we are inextricably linked and view it independently. That case is argued under process philosophy rather successfully so that the only way we can view our place in the world is to understand the processes involved.

I think one can say that process philosophy ideas have practical benefits in inviting us to consider the appropriate process involved and to arrive at an optimum solution. 

So that Whitehead might be seen more as one who integrated those past ideas into his philosophy. 

Beginning with Henry Bergson the notion of lived time and the idea we have an inner self we have the psyche/spiritual aspect to our existence as in process philosophy which spills out to process theology. 

Process Theology  

Whitehead’s perspective is the soul has two poles, a mental/active and a physical/passive. The (infinite) World-Soul’s references as the “primordial nature of God.” It is sort of like the cosmic genetic code. 

Roughly speaking Process Theology in my view does not conflict with the idea of existence preceding essence as in existential thinking. 

There is “God", and there is man, a fragmented image of “God" if you will. 

At every moment, we have the ability to make a choice. We either make that choice based on our past experiences, or we make it based on a possibility that transcends our past. What allows for that transcendence? According to Process Theology, it is something like a mirror that gathers “the data” of all of the activity of the fragments and mirrors back to each one all of the past experiences along with a new possibility that would be the next best step to take given all the current data. Do we take that "leap of faith” into a new experience, or do we stick with the comfort of our past experiences? Whatever we choose, gets mirrored back to “GOD”, which is likewise the change in our choices and so the exchange continues… It’s a process.
As Nietzsche put it, do we remain a camel and follow the path that has been laid out for us by our familial and societal customs, or do we manage to gain the courage of the lion and create our own path? If we take on the role of “lion”, then we must be willing to slay every scale on the dragon, otherwise we will continue to repeat history.

One might hold the view that this can best be achieved by meditation and introspection. Another way to look at it is to say one can “transcends the Ego “?