Charles Hartshorne
The varied reactions with which Whitehead’s contribution to theism has been received are due in part to the fact that so few philosophers or theologians have learned to see the development of thought about God in anything like its full range and with anything like adequate balance and freedom. Whatever difficulties we have with his system, we regard him as the supreme example that has yet appeared of the complete application of the polar contrasts, without partiality or favor, to deity. He is the outstanding surrelativist or panentheist.
Why did Whitehead accept theism? We suggest that his entire system requires the theistic principle. One of the lines of reasoning is that “the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere” and can only be in a primordial mind. Since his doctrine is that experience is the principle of all being, potential being must also be expressed in terms of experience; further, the potential can only be in the bosom of the actual (the “ontological principle”), so that, if general or undifferentiated potentiality is presupposed by all differentiated potentiality, then there is some primordial persistence of actual experience in which this general potency resides. The argument, thus briefly stared. is doubtless not entirely clear. Easier to see is the argument for God as ground of order. All actualities are units of experience, each of which is partly self-determined and partly influenced by other such units. But no such unit can exist unless it is furnished with a world of units already in being, to offer it data of experience. And there must be some measure of harmony among the data. Units influence one another, but this influence is expressed partly in frustrations, in mutual incompatibilities.
Why should not the “cross currents of incompatibility” be so great as to render existence intolerable? What keeps the world going, if nothing opposes the alternative of frustration, issuing in cessation of all experience? Whitehead’s answer is the one which the situation suggests: There is at any moment one unit of experience whose influence upon all is supreme; and, since all thus undergo a common influence to which they subordinate themselves, there is bound to be a measure of agreement among them.
Only in this context can we see the meaning of the famous but rather misunderstood and not wholly happy phrase, “principle of limitation,” as descriptive of God. When Whitehead introduced this expression (in Science and the Modern World). he perhaps bad not yet achieved clarity as to the panentheistic structure of his theism. Certainly the God of his later writings is no mere “principle,” that is, mere abstraction, but a concrete stream of “experience” containing at each moment the unity of the whole of reality, as actual at that moment. Whitehead’s point is not that selection among abstractly possible alternatives can be made only by deity; for, according to the Whiteheadian philosophy, every actual entity is an agent of such selection. The “self-created creature” (synonymous with “actual entity”) is the partly self-determining act of experience, for instance, a human experience. But the point is that a multitude of agents could not select a common world and must indeed simply nullify one another’s efforts, unless some common limitation or bias pervades their acts. This common limitation to the selections must itself be selected, for there is no one world order which alone is possible. Who or what can select the universal limitation or direction of the secondary, local selections? Obviously, only a being with universal influence. But supreme qualities alone could endow a being with such influence, could make it universally irresistible, within such limits of possible resistance as would not nullify cosmic order. So we come to God as the supreme self-determining act, or perpetual series of such acts (for Whitehead holds that no one order is valid for all time), a series which never began and can never cease and which has in supreme form that highest mode of unity through development which constitutes personality.
God is, as Whitehead agreed in a carefully noted conversation with A. H. Johnson, a linear sequence (which Whitehead terms “a personally ordered society”) of occasions—with the difference, as contrasted to ordinary personal sequences, that in God there is no lapse of memory, no loss of immediacy, as to occasions already achieved. However, no theologian of the past who is credited with conceiving God as personal ever failed to make at least this difference between human and divine personality—that God is not, like man, separated from a past which he has largely forgotten!
It may indeed be said that this is one of the first philosophies which has any intellectual right to speak of divine personality. For personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas, and it therefore has a certain abstractness, in that it expresses itself now in this particular experience and now in that, whether one looks out the window and sees rain or sunshine or opens a book and sees words. Thus personality is, in Whitehead’s language, a “defining characteristic” of a sequence of experiences, and the characteristic does not fully determine the sequence; for, if it did, we should never know any persons until they were dead, since we certainly never anticipate their experiences in their concreteness, even our own. All concepts of personality seem to imply this partial independence of particular experiences from the determining influence of the personality. We shall not here pursue the argument, but we doubt if anyone can really, or other than verbally, mean by a “person” more than what Whitehead means by a “personally ordered” sequence of experiences with certain defining characteristics or personality traits. This is also how he conceives God, with the appropriate qualification that in God the imperfection involved in forgetting is denied. God, indeed, in this philosophy as in that of Royce, is the home of all truth; and for God to forget would mean that it could not be true that what he forgets really occurred, and so it would not be forgetting after all.
It is to be noted how Whitehead, unlike so many others, is able to introduce God into his system in terms of concepts universally operative in it. When he says that God exerts providential influence upon the world, he means by influencing something identifiable in experience as he describes it. We are influenced by God because we “prehend” him, as we do other actualities, for example, our past experiences. God’s influence is supreme because he is the supreme actuality, supremely beautiful and attractive. Thus one need not resort to some wholly mysterious “power” to create ex nihilo, analogous to nothing known or imaginable, and in no imaginable relation to our freedom of self-determination.
There is no “power” anywhere, on earth or in heaven, except the direct and indirect workings of attractiveness (“persuasion”). We have power over other men’s minds through the value they find in our thoughts and feelings; we have power over our bodies because the sentient units composing them derive such inspiration as their lowly natures can receive from these same thoughts and feelings; and through controlling our own bodies we can indirectly influence other men’s bodies and minds. But the direct influence of God is analogous only to the direct power of thought over thought, and of feeling over feeling, and this is the power of inspiration or suggestion. It could not possibly suppress all freedom in the recipient, since a minimum of response on his part is presupposed. It is not that God “makes” us to be what we are— these are mere words with vague or inconsistent meanings—it is rather that we make ourselves, utilizing his beauty as inspiration.
Even Fechner perhaps did not quite reach this insight. That our volitions are God’s impulses (Fechner’s great discovery), however, is valid for Whitehead, though he does not use this language. For the language he does use comes to the same. God influences us, and we in our turn influence God, “react” upon his prehensive nature, give him data for new “physical feelings”; the communication back and forth is on both sides partly receptive or “passive” (ending the long sad tradition of unreasoning intellectual hatred for passivity) and on both sides partly creative and active. This does not make God merely a greater man. For God, but not man, is the general ground of possibility who cannot not exist, who cannot be generated as a new personality, or ever reach an end of his personal development, or fail to do for all beings as much as can be done for them (fail in perfect fidelity to the ultimate “ideals” inherent in his primordial nature). These are infinite differences.
It is also to be noted that Whitehead steers a middle course between those who make the world without qualification necessary to God, required by his very essence, and those who make God so independent of the world that it is literally nothing to him, and might exactly as well, so far as his entire reality is concerned, never have been. Our philosopher says: “The world’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World” (Process and Reality, p. 529). Observe that it is not said that the world is a primordial datum, or that God is, but reference is in each case to the nature of world and of God. This means that there can never have failed to be some world or other and likewise that some state of (the consequent nature of) God is always given to entities in the world. But what world and what state of God is not primordially or eternally or necessarily determined. Thus while God is not free as between world and no world, and the world is not free as between God and no God, yet God could have existed without ever having been presented with just this world, and there could have been a world though God had never been just as he actually is. The difference between deity and world in this correlation is that God is always the same personal sequence, the same individual (though not the same particular actuality), while the world is not any single individual but a mere form-of-collection of individuals as presented to one individual (God). So God is the only individual who exists necessarily and independently of what other individuals exist or fail to exist. Though he requires some such other individuals, he has power always to elicit or entice some such into being. If this unconditional power to entice something into being is a mystery, then mystery there is in this philosophy. Yet we all experience something analogous to it. Each of us has a sense of actively affirming his own aliveness at each moment; and he also senses that he would scarcely be inspired to go on with this affirmation if no one cared about him, and if there were none about whom he could care. God’s power to keep existence going is the “eminent” case of this social nature of the act of existing.
Another phrase upon which we wish to comment is this: “Either of them, God and the World, is the instrument of novelty for the other” (sec. 389). In this passage Whitehead is expressing partial agreement with the ancient idea that, if an individual changes, something other than himself must have changed it. But Whitehead follows experience in taking the typical case to be a mutual rather than a one-way affair. Take a conversation: A says something, B makes a comment thereon, A replies to the comment, B comments upon the reply, etc. Here each individual changes in a certain way because the other has changed in a certain way. There is no need that any individual involved in the process should be unchanging. True, there must be something fixed throughout, but this need not be an individual in its concreteness but may be an abstract ideal. This for Whitehead is furnished by the primordial nature of God, which is Aristotle’s unmoved mover or Plato’s demiurge or Plotinus’ nous. But it is only a nature of God, not God himself in his total being. The primordial nature is devoid of change, but it changes the concrete God in his consequent nature, and all other concrete individuals (“societies,” in our author’s phrase) also—in such fashion, however, that their change is a social affair in which each occasion “decides” or enacts itself upon the basis of data furnished by the others. All this contradicts the axiom that the antecedent cause must be at least equal in dignity to the effect; rather, the inclusive effect is always a new and richer phase of the divine life as including all life. For process philosophy the axiom is merely the arbitrary denial of creative interaction—indeed, of any creation—since it is meaningless or contradictory that creating something should leave the antecedent total reality unenriched.
Much perplexity in interpreting Whitehead has been due to his concept of “creativity,” which is expressly distinguished from God, and is once almost equated with Spinoza’s substance and once with Aristotle’s matter. And we are told that both God and the world are in the grip of the creative ground, driving them on to ever new states (sec. 389). Now, the most coherent interpretation of the various statements seems to be attained if we view creativity as simply the common generic abstraction or form of forms (we are on occasion told it is just that, and we are also warned that it is not a concrete actuality). But whereas in Thomism, for example, the generic abstraction is “being,” in the philosophy of process it is “becoming” or, rather, self-creation. (Even in Thomism, being is said to be an act, but we are never allowed to see, in any experiential sense, how it is an act.) Again, the generic abstraction in Thomism is said to be analogical, not univocal; and to this also there is something corresponding in Whitehead. The divine becoming or creation is not just another case of the “process” which other things illustrate. For the divine becoming has properties whose uniqueness can he stared in categorical terms; it alone is able adequately to embrace all actuality as its data; it alone goes on primordially and everlastingly in the same individual way, embodying the same individual personality traits; etc. These are not just differences; they are categorical differences, statable in purely general terms (as the “self-existence” of God in contrast to “existence through another” was statable in Thomism). So there is no simply univocal concept here. But, on the other hand, there is a unity lacking to the Thomistic “being” (a lack which has bothered many a Thomist and occasioned controversy). For the advance of reality from achieved actuality to additional achieved actuality is one advance both for us and for God in the sense that each addition is fully taken account of by him as well as (or infinitely better than) by us. There is a “solidarity” of becoming, so that, as all things qualify the Spinozistic substance, so each actuality is once for all added to the common stock of “real potentials” (adequately contained only in the de facto state of the Consequent Nature) for further creation. This is the panentheistic principle, with stress upon the temporalistic aspect of process, divine as well as worldly.
The metaphor “in the grip of” may mislead some into thinking that God must be under some constraint to go on creatively. But there is no constraint, any more than his “necessary existence” in classical theism was something constrained. The Deity could not fail to exist, but he also does not, and could not, even wish not to exist. Similarly, in Whitehead’s view, God could not wish not to go on experiencing novel content, since his ideals are incapable of final exhaustive realization. This inexhaustibility of the ideal is again no alien power over God but the intrinsic nature of his own primordial essence, yet embracing the general principles of all value, including the principle of incompatibility which makes exhaustive realization nonsense. A temporalistic theism has no trouble with the ancient problem, signalized by Carneades, that if God is to be judged by an ideal of goodness he is relativized to something not himself. The ideal is not good because God arbitrarily wills it, nor are his acts good because they express goodness as something nondivine; they are good, as our acts (in their categorically inferior way) are good, because of an abstract ideal antecedent to each such act; however, this ideal is not antecedent to God but his eternal and unchangeable purpose (to be contrasted with his special purposes, new for each occasion). We and God serve the same ideal; but in us it is our glimpse of God’s essence, and in God it is his clear intuition into that same essence. The old dilemma thus proves to be sophistical.
We wish to warn the reader that Whitehead must be read rather slowly. One must expect a good many ideas in each dozen lines and must expect these ideas to qualify each other backward and forward, to some extent. This is particularly true of the score or so of pages which are all that Whitehead has written directly dealing with God.
Comment on the Passages by Whitehead
Included in the Book:
It is impossible to avoid a feeling of impertinence in attempting to comment on thinking so great as this. Not in many centuries, perhaps, has such a contribution been made to philosophical theism.
We wish to remind the reader of the passage quoted on the frontispiece from Adventures of Ideas.
The foregoing passages seem to make it very clear that Whitehead fully accepts the five factors which we have specified as essential to the divine nature: eternity, temporality, consciousness, world knowledge, and world inclusion. God as primordial is strictly eternal in the sense of being immutable and ungenerated. (As ground of all possibility, how could he be generated?) God as consequent is “fluent,” reaches no final completion, contains succession, and is ever in “process” of further creation. And the passage (not quoted) which says that God is “in one sense temporal” must refer to God in this aspect. Hence the contrast drawn between God and temporal world does not mean that God is simply above time or immutable but rather that he is beginningless and that process in him has a unique perfection of mnemonic retention of past experiences. This does not imply that all is merely “present” or nonsuccessive for God. For the part is always distinguished from the whole, and the remembered is only the content of the memory, while the memory is the memory-of-the-content, i.e., the content and something more. The past is present in the sense of given but not in the sense of being the whole experience in which there is this givenness. The present is always this whole.
That God is conscious is explicitly stated and never denied. To quote (as is sometimes done) the denial of consciousness to the primordial nature in this connection is as irrelevant as it would be to say, “Socrates is not a conscious being, because the innate character of Socrates is not aware of itself” (rather, “Socrates is aware of his character”).
That God knows the entire actual world is also clear; for the physical experience of all actual occasions as they occur, integrated with conceptual experience, and fully conscious of itself, is just what complete and perfect knowledge would be in this philosophy. It also renders better justice to the old idea of the divine knowledge as intuitive or concrete and direct, rather than discursive or essentially abstract and indirect, than classical theists were effectively able to do—since they really denied any concrete union of God with the world such as an intuition of it must be. Finally, we are told by Whitehead, over and over again, that God is the unity of all things—that he contains all actuality. And, thanks to the admission of fluency or temporality in God, there is no need and no tendency to deny the full individual reality of the creatures in God. The consequent nature is just as much multiple as one—this is one aspect of the panentheistic principle.
What is said about particular providence and suffering love is meant literally enough. God perceives the concrete particularity of actual experiences, say, of men. He reacts to these in the light of his primordial wisdom as he receives them into his experience, giving them the best place they are capable of in the total synthesis of this experience. Then, in the next phase, persons in the world in the depths of their largely unconscious feelings take account of this divine reaction to them. In this way they tend to find the place which divine love has made for them. That God’s physical experience is not “mere happiness” but involves tragedy or suffering is not sentimentalism but logic. How can the quality of suffering be concretely perceived by one in whose experience there is only joy? We think the answer is, “In no way.”
The use of the word “transformation, or transmutation,” in connection with the consequent nature has led to discussion as to whether the “immortality” affirmed in this philosophy is in any sense personal or individual. Are we not absorbed into the divine experience in such fashion as to lose what is unique and individual in us? It is somewhat doubtful if Whitehead is always fully consistent on this point. Not that there is a contradiction in his position but that he wavers between two positions. On the one hand, we are told many times that it is the individualities of the world in their actual uniqueness and multiplicity that are received into and immortalized in deity. And the reason is given: The beauty of a whole with intensely individual components is greater than that of one whose elements lack intense individuality.
On the other hand, we are also told that all objectification, or physical perception, “abstracts,” it prehends its object under a limitation; and in conversation A. H. Johnson was told by Whitehead that this applies also to God—which agrees with one possible meaning of “he saves whatever can be saved.” Is this the “transformation”? But then it is not true that “there is no loss.” And then also it cannot be that “the truth itself is only the way all things are together in the consequent nature”; for how can it be true that something is left out if the truth is just what is retained? And then, too, if abstractness or limitation affects even divine prehensions, in what is their “supreme” quality? Nor is there any ground for such limitation in the principle that all realization is finite or limited; for, granted unlimited retention of all occasions, this would still limit God (in his actual data) to the actual occasions, in contrast to all that might have, but, in fact, have not, been achieved in the past of the world. And while not all possible values can be realized together, the problem here is only whether all actual ones can be so realized. Their coactuality already implies, it seems, a kind of compatibility. As for the meaning of “transformation,” we suggest that the data perceived are not altered but that an emergent synthesis is effected which as a whole or unity is more than the world taken collectively and, in this sense only, is a transformation of the world.
The word “transformed” occurs in the following passage, among others: “The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering, which haunts the world. It is the generalization of its very minor exemplification as the aesthetic value of discords in art” (sec. 391). This will be viewed by some as showing that Whitehead’s God sadistically exploits our sorrows for his own enjoyment. But we must avoid errors due to anthropomorphism. When we enjoy the spectacle of the suffering of others, we do so from outside, without full realization of that suffering as such. But God fully internalizes the suffering into himself: Any good he can derive from it is not sadistic but tragic. It is the very sort of good we ourselves derive from our own suffering when and if we achieve perspective upon it, as in tragic drama and moments of heroic joy. And, Whitehead reminds us, we can always to some degree participate—through cultivating the religious imagination—in God’s sublime experience of all the world’s joy and sorrow.
The one thing that one must not do, according to Whitehead, is to hold that all evil is required just as it is for the perfection of the whole. There is no finally perfect whole and no reason to suppose that a more harmonious whole would not have been possible at this very moment than actually exists.
We must also remember Whitehead’s doctrine that pain is a halfway house between full harmony and the zero value of utter indifference or boredom. Both for us and for God our sorrows are better than mere indifference. We, as well as he, have a stake in the intensity of existence. Nietzsche’s insistence that dramatic tragedy is an assertion of power and vitality is correct and has theological relevance. Not that tragedy is simply good but that for God to exclude it through the only possible method, that of eliminating all dangerous freedom, would reduce, not enhance, the total value.
The common notion of immortality, that after death we begin a new series of adventures bound together by a prolongation of our present personality, is apparently ignored by Whitehead. But are we in a position to say that there ought to be such prolongation? The argument that only thus, through transcendental rewards and punishments, can the injustices of the present life be overcome, and only by the expectation of such future consequences to “ourselves,” can our acts be adequately motivated, leaves a Whiteheadian unconvinced, to say the least. For consider: The present occasion enjoys itself; this occasion has already all the reward it can ever have. The same human personality may be re-embodied in future occasions falling into the same personal sequence; but our interest in these future occasions is only one of our interests, with no absolute metaphysical priority. Whether future joys belong to the series constituting my personal life, or even to any human series now existing, is a secondary, not a primary, question, from the ethical, and from any imaginative or generous, point of view. We should love our children and in principle their children’s children as ourselves. This does not mean that there is no truth in the deep feeling that there must be a thread of personal identity connecting our present act and any future good with which it can be concerned. Indeed, there must be, for truth itself depends on this thread, and so do the coherence and order of the world. But not our personality is this necessary, this primary, personal unity, but only God’s. It is a hard lesson to learn—that God is more important than we are.
It remains true that the Whiteheadian immortality is “personal” in a literal sense. For all that is known to be actual of any human personality is the life of that person while on earth. And all this actuality, as actuality of experience—and what is value beyond all experience?—is just what, according to Whitehead, is immortalized in the all-receptive unity of God. Nothing is more personal about a man than his concrete experiences—which “perish, and yet live for evermore”—in the divine, supremely personal life!
Source:
Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, pp. 273-285.
* * *
Here is what the authors say, on page ix, about the division of labor in this project:
There is no simple way of describing the division of labor between the two author-editors. Every chapter and almost every main aspect of the book contains the work of both. Chapters ii and viii-x were primarily Mr. Reese’s responsibility. The prefatory notes and commentaries concerning Plato (chap. i), Peirce, Watts (chap. vii), Brightman (chap. viii), Alexander, Berman, Ames, Catrell (chap. ix), and Nietzsche (chap. xiii) are almost entirely of his authorship as are also considerable portions of the discussions of Aristotle (chap. ii), Philo (chap. iii), Plotinus (chap. iv), Fechner, Weiss (chap. vii), James, Ehrenfels (chap. viii), and certain additional prefatory notes as that for Wieman (chap. x). Mr. Reese, too, in most of these and some other cases largely selected the passages and throughout the book performed much of the editorial detail work. Mr. Hartshorne wrote the general Introduction and a majority of the commentaries and prefatory notes. The translation of Fechner was first made by Mr. Reese but was revised jointly. The plan of the book grew out of discussions between us, and without intensive joint effort neither it nor anything much like it could have been conceived or executed.
HyC