Whitehead's Religious Thought

Daniel A. Dombrowski

Description

This original interpretation of the religious thought of Alfred North Whitehead highlights Whitehead's moves from mechanism to organism, and from force to persuasion to offer a third alternative between classical theism and religious skepticism. Daniel A. Dombrowski argues that the move from force to persuasion, in particular, is not only fundamental to Whitehead's own thought and to process thought in general, but is a necessary condition for the continuing existence of civilized life. Following this line of analysis, Dombrowski demonstrates Whitehead's relevance to contemporary work in philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and environmental ethics by placing him in dialogue with six major thinkers: David Ray Griffin, Isabelle Stengers, John Rawls, Charles Hartshorne, Judith Butler, and William Wordsworth.
Introduction
Abbreviations of Works by Whitehead

1. Griffin’s Panexperientialism as Perennial Philosophy

2. Stengers on Whitehead on God

3. Rawlsian Political Liberalism and Process Thought

4. Hartshorne, the Process Concept of God, and Pacifism

5. Butler and Grievable Lives

6. Wordsworth, Whitehead, and the Romantic Reaction

Bibliography
Index of Names

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy of religion
• Theology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 23 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464312
• Langue: English

Extrait

WHITEHEAD’S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
WHITEHEAD’S RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
From Mechanism to Organism, from Force to Persuasion
DANIEL A. DOMBROWSKI
Cover art: Coast of Porto courtesy of iStock by Getty Images.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dombrowski, Daniel A., author.
Title: Whitehead’s religious thought : from mechanism to organism, from force to persuasion / Daniel A. Dombrowski.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031445 (print) | LCCN 2016040661 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464299 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464312 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861-1947. | Religion—Philosophy. | Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B1674.W354 D66 2017 (print) | LCC B1674.W354 (ebook) | DDC 210.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031445
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To Marie
CONTENTS Introduction Abbreviations of Works by Whitehead ONE Griffin’s Panexperientialism as Perennial Philosophy TWO Stengers on Whitehead on God THREE Rawlsian Political Liberalism and Process Thought FOUR Hartshorne, the Process Concept of God, and Pacifism FIVE Butler and Grievable Lives SIX Wordsworth, Whitehead, and the Romantic Reaction Bibliography Index of Names
INTRODUCTION
I t is widely assumed both inside and outside of academe that there are two primary worldviews that are open to us in the period in which we live. One is the classical theistic worldview wherein God supernaturally hovers over a mechanical world and arbitrarily (and often violently) intervenes into the workings of the world machine. The other worldview is that defended by religious skeptics wherein at the anthropocentric level the (besouled) ghost is exorcized from the human machine and at the cosmological level the (divine) Ghost is exorcized from the cosmic machine. The present book is an attempt to explore a third alternative between these two extremes by way of an original interpretation of the process theistic thought of the great mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).
It is the responsibility of philosophers both to clarify nonempirical concepts and to use such concepts, along with empirical data, to illuminate problems of value. This book will attempt to clarify and apply the four major concepts mentioned in the subtitle of this book: mechanism, organism, force, and persuasion (see Hartshorne 1970, xiv).
Readers of the present book will notice that the subtitle is also the title of a chapter from Alfred North Whitehead’s AI : “From Force to Persuasion” (also Henning 2005, chap. 1). My thesis is that the move from force to persuasion (hereafter, FTP) is not a minor one in Whitehead’s thought, in particular, nor in what is commonly called process thought, in general. Indeed, as I see things, the transition from FTP is a topic that illuminates much that is going on in contemporary academe, both in English-language philosophy, theology, and religious studies, on the one hand, and in various tendencies in postmodernism influenced by well-known continental thinkers, on the other. To put the point more energetically, not to examine carefully the theme of FTP is to fail to understand not only Whitehead but also several important thinkers who have either been heavily influenced by Whitehead or who have recently been dialogical partners with Whitehead: David Ray Griffin, Isabelle Stengers, John Rawls, Charles Hartshorne, and Judith Butler. I will also treat William Wordsworth, who heavily influenced Whitehead and Hartshorne. The thesis can be put as follows: the transition from FTP is a necessary condition for the flourishing of (or perhaps even for the continued existence of!) our civilized life together.
In a way the topic of FTP is a perennial one, as is witnessed by the fact that in Plato’s Timaeus (which Whitehead viewed as one of the two greatest works in the history of cosmology, the other being written by Isaac Newton) the creation of the world of civilized order itself is “the victory of persuasion over force” ( AI 25; also PR xiv, 71–72), with “force” referring to what the antecedent volume of the world of fact contains. In this sense the victory of persuasion over force involves nothing less than the adventure of an idea with a creative power always on the verge of actualization ( AI 42). In cosmology, religion, and ethics, recourse to force is a disclosure of the failure of civilization. If interaction between individuals must take one of these two forms—persuasion or force, or perhaps a mixture of both—then we should beware of theories or cultural forms (e.g., the dominance of men over women) that depend primarily on force ( AI 83). Granted, persuasion can be powerful, but I assume that the reader will easily notice the difference between persuasive power, on the one hand, and coercive power or force, on the other.
Plato points the way toward the victory of persuasion over force when he denies omnipotence to the divine Demiurge, who can produce only such order as is possible through persuasive rather than coercive devices, a victory that Whitehead explicitly connects with the nonviolent devices of Mohandas Gandhi and the Quakers in the twentieth century. Plato’s discovery of FTP is one of the greatest in the history of humanity in that the later effects of belief in an omnipotent God, who coercively disposes at will a wholly derivative world, were disastrous, as we will see ( AI 148, 160, 166, 296).
Of course, both “force” and “persuasion” can mean different things when these terms are used in cosmology in contrast to their use in science or ethics or religion. In a Newtonian context, say, the force acting on a body is quite different from the force of belief that just is religion, on at least one of Whitehead’s definitions of religion ( RM 15; IM 17; SM 45). Even within religious discourse there is a difference between religion as the force of belief and the claim that the life of Jesus exhibits a persuasive power that is devoid of coercion or force ( RM 57). Further, all of these uses of “force” differ from the analytic force of evidence in an argument, which as a mathematician Whitehead understood quite well ( RM 65, 117). Although some uses of “force” in Whitehead have a positive connotation (as in the force of rational argument), some are neutral (as in the force of an accelerating body), and still others are treated with disapprobation. Regarding this last type, consider the following:
God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness. ( PR 346)
Presumably, if Whitehead were alive today, he would (along with Hartshorne, who lived long enough to see the merits of gender-neutral language regarding God) refuse to refer to God as “he,” even if he would nonetheless continue to view God in personal terms.
The first half of the subtitle to this book (“From Mechanism to Organism”) also refers to an important theme in that Whitehead’s preferred label for his view was not “process philosophy” but “philosophy of organism.” Although the science of mechanics had its origin in ancient Greece in the study of levers and various problems connected with the weight of bodies ( IM 30), it was not until the seventeenth century that the great forces of nature (e.g., gravitation) were systematically described as machines. The mechanistic theory of nature has reigned supreme ever since. Indeed, Whitehead refers to it as “the orthodox creed of physical science” ( SM 50), despite the fact that difficulties with this theory were apparent almost from the start, as in Giambattista Vico’s criticisms of René Descartes. Whitehead compares what is sometimes seen as an oddity in traditional Chinese culture (that one can be an adherent to two religions, say Confucianism and Buddhism) with a significant and peculiar feature of Western culture (that one can be a mechanist and have an unwavering belief that humans and other animals are self-determining organisms). On Whitehead’s view, “the only way of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not [really] mechanism” ( SM 76).
Only relatively recently has the importance of organisms led to a significant challenge to mechanism, which, despite its dominance in intellectual life, “is quite unbelievable.” We will see that the problem with mechanism is that it is based on high abstractions that are taken for concrete actuality; it commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We will also see that Whitehead endorses “the romantic reaction” to mechanism by putting organisms first in that they are the truly concrete realities ( SM 41, 54, 75, 79). The transition from mechanism to organism (hereafter, MTO) is found in many places in Whitehead in addition to his philosophy of science. For example, in AE he notes the mechanical tendencies found in educational institutions that merely impart information and the difficulty these institutions face in fostering zest for learnin