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An Introduction to Process Thought
In Five Easy Pieces

By Hyatt Carter

I

This is the first of “five easy pieces” that will be a short guided tour of one of the most original and creative minds in the history of Western philosophy. Welcome to the “process world” of Alfred North Whitehead. In a age of specialization, Whitehead was a modern Renaissance man, a polymath who distinguished himself not only in philosophy, but also in mathematics, physics, logic, and educational theory. A lifelong teacher, his popularity with students is revealed in the following humorous anecdote:

“At Oxford University, when a professor concludes a course, it is the custom for the students to pound the floor with their feet as a tribute to the teacher for his fine teaching. On one occasion, when Whitehead had finished his last lecture, the pounding of feet was so enthusiastic that in the room below, where a professor of logic was lecturing, the ceiling began to fall. The professor of logic remarked: ‘I am afraid that the premises will not support Dr. Whitehead’s conclusion!’”

At age 63, while teaching mathematics in London with thoughts of retirement in mind, Whitehead was surprised to receive an invitation to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. He enthusiastically accepted, telling his wife Evelyn, “I would rather do this than anything in the world!” They left their native England in 1924, crossed the Atlantic, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard where he then taught for more than a decade. The vitality of Whitehead’s thought in his final years is amazing—during his time at Harvard, a period of exuberant creative expression, he wrote nine ground-breaking books wherein he worked out and refined his revolutionary new cosmology.
 

Adventures of the Mind

In the winter of 1947, Whitehead died at his Cambridge home at the age of 86. By his instructions his body was cremated and there was no funeral. Nor is there a grave. What he left as a lasting monument is a new metaphysical system—an adventure of the mind—unsurpassed in its beauty, suggestiveness, and sublimity.

Whitehead’s conceptual breakthrough about a new frontier in philosophy began with his understanding of the radical revolution in science initiated by Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Quantum and relativity theory are not just steps in a different direction, but a cosmic leap into a new universe. Whitehead was among the first to realize that the new science involved a complete breakdown of the old Newtonian worldview, and thus a radical challenge for other fields of thought. Whitehead answered this challenge with a revolution of his own: process philosophy.

To see how Whitehead’s view contrasts with the Newtonian, let’s first take a look at how the universe, with the rise of modernism, is conceived in mechanistic terms.
 

The Mechanization of Nature

The controlling image of the Newtonian worldview is the machine. The very universe itself, and all living creatures in nature, are ultimately reducible to the mechanical workings of their inorganic parts. They are, in a word, machines. Some are marvelously elaborate, as is the “human machine,” but machines they are, nonetheless. What science seeks to discover are the internal mechanisms that drive these machines, or “what makes them tick,” to use a fitting clock metaphor. Although its luster has begun to tarnish in some quarters, for the most part “mechanistic” is still a positive word in the modern scientific community. The origin of this image becomes apparent with a realization that the only makers of machines are humans, and very recent humans at that. As biologist Rupert Sheldrake has noted, “The mechanistic worldview involves projecting modern man’s fascination with machines onto the whole of nature.”

Newton’s atoms, conceived like billiard balls, are the basic units of nature, the so-called “building blocks” of the universe. In Newton’s own words, “It seems to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, impenetrable particles.” These particles have no interior and their behavior of these particles is governed from without, and governed strictly, by mechanical laws. Whitehead dismissed such particles as “vacuous actualities.”

As to some of the other flaws in the mechanistic worldview, such a view is Materialistic, Atheistic, and Deterministic. In a fully determined universe there is no creativity, no freedom, no spontaneity. God is no longer a holy reality, but is reduced to a neurological episode in the so-called God spot, “a tiny locus of nerve cells in the frontal lobe of the brain that appears to be activated during religious experiences.” In other words, so-called “spiritual” experiences have an entirely physical basis—the “fire from heaven” turns out to be only the mundane “firing” of neural machinery.

We humans are somewhat better off than all other animals in that we have “minds,” but this “mind” is a mere “ghost in the machine” and is ultimately explainable in terms of some sort of electro-chemical activity. A complete materialism requires mere matter as the ultimate reality, and rejects “mind” as a category of existence.

Inspired by the mechanistic model, scientists dissected the living body of the cosmos, eviscerated all vital ideas such as spirit or soul, and assembled it back together as a clockwork machine. If the universe is God’s body, then the mechanistic revolution turned it into a cadaver or a corpse.

If you feel little sympathy with such a view, neither did Whitehead. In fact, the whole thrust of his philosophy was to overturn such a distortion of reality.
 

Hello, Silicon; Goodbye, Carbon

The mechanistic model has mesmerized most of the scientific community for more than three centuries—and is still going strong, as the following clearly reveals: In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Raymond Kurzweil suggests that our next evolutionary leap will come about through our merging with our technology.

According to Kurzweil, at some point in the not-too-distant future, maybe as early as 2099, we will enter the “transhuman “ or “posthuman” era. If we wish to keep up with our rapidly evolving technology, it will be necessary to scan our brains, say farewell to our carbon-based flesh, and upload our minds into a faster and more powerful computational unit. In other words: a machine.

By then, however, Kurzweil says that computers will have evolved to such an extent that they will claim to have consciousness, emotions, and spiritual experiences. Some may even claim to be enlightened, and will be meditating and regularly attending virtual houses of worship.

Towards the end of the 21st century, with the widespread use of neural-implant technology by humans, and with machine-based computers modeled more and more on human intelligence, it will become increasingly difficult to tell humans from computers. Those humans who have no neural implants will not be capable of entering into meaningful dialogue with those who do. And when we do upload our minds, so the prediction goes, we will achieve technological immortality—cyberlife everlasting. Just be sure to make frequent backups!

Those who hold this “posthuman” vision of the future make it sound like a silicon Shangri-La; from a process perspective it sounds more like the “dying gasp” of the whole mechanistic agenda.
 

II

In sharp contrast to the mechanistic model, Whitehead called his new metaphysical system “organic philosophy” or the “philosophy of organism.” The term “organism” suggests only biological entities, but Whitehead extends the meaning to include the physical entities studied by physics, such as electrons, atoms, and molecules. This radical shift from mechanism he saw as the new basic idea for science. As he put it, “Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.” With his philosophy of organism, Whitehead breathes new life into the universe, from top to bottom.

To say merely that an organism is “alive” is a great improvement over the mechanistic view, but how it is alive is what makes a subtle and decisive difference in Whitehead’s metaphysics.

The many parts (or cells) of an organism, and the relations and interdependence among these parts, constitute a complex unity, and a complex “environment,” wherein a higher level of actuality can emerge. This new actuality is the “presiding subject” of the organism. We can even call it “mind,” if “mind” is understood as a variable and not as a constant. This means that no matter how lowly the life form, or how primitive the particle, “mind,” or at least the “germ” of mind, is active in all the dynamic unities present in the natural world.

Note carefully that this new actuality is more than the sum of the parts of an organism; it is numerically distinct from them, exerts real power and purpose, and enjoys the most intimate relations with the constituent cells of the organism, feeling their influence, and exerting influence on them.

Indeed, In Whitehead’s system this new actuality is the primary reality to be found in all of nature. He calls it an “actual entity.”
 

Actual Entities: “Atoms” of Process

An actual entity is simply Whitehead’s term for what he conceives as the most fundamental unit of nature.

For Sir Isaac Newton, atoms were the basic units of nature, the so-called “building blocks” of the universe. These atoms have been likened to billiard balls, and Newton himself described them as “solid, massy, impenetrable particles.” They are inert, have no inner reality, and, since they are governed strictly from without by mechanical laws, are capable of no spontaneity whatsoever. Such atoms were seen as enduring substances with uninterrupted existence.

Unlike Newton’s billiard-ball atom, an actual entity is internally dynamic: it is an atom” of process, a pulsation, a throb of actuality that endures only for a split-second. At the very base of things, at the very heart of reality, we find not matter or substance, but process—units of dynamic process wherein possibilities can become actualities.

An actual entity does not endure in a state of static completion. So process-oriented is Whitehead’ conception that he says of an actual entity that “it never really is.” This is what the quantum revolution is all about. This revolutionary view reveals a vibratory atomic world—fairly sizzling with energy—wherein atoms emerge and vanish in incredibly brief quantum pulsations that come and go, one after the other. Inert as it may seem at first glance, a solid block of granite, at the quantum level, is so internally dynamic that its micro-constituents enjoy a veritable fiesta of rhythmic adventures.

As the name “quantum” implies, the movement of process is not a steady flow but, rather, in successive drops, or discrete units, of experience. Nature pulsates. This means that even the famous saying of Heraclitus, that all things flow, must be revised to read: all things flow, yes, but quantumly—i.e., in a series of vibratory reiterations.

In a quantum universe, existence is not a given, but must be achieved, over and over again, by all actual entities: with the closure of each pulsation, one fleeting moment of actuality ends, and the next pulsation begins a new adventure of self-actualization.

It should probably be emphasized that you are already intimately acquainted with actual entities. You directly experience them, though perhaps mostly on an unconscious level, more than a million times each day. Since they flicker by so fast—l0 to 12 times each second—they’re easy to miss and seem a steady stream. A good analogy would be the movies where separate frames of the film are projected onto the screen at just the right speed, so many frames per second, to give the illusion of a continuous flow.

An actual entity is simply a single moment of experience, a pulse of actuality, whether the experience be that of a human person, a cat, a single living cell, or even an electron.

As an electron flashes along its quantum way, each tiny pulsation throbs its own actuality into existence, just as quickly fades away, and is immediately followed by another. This vibratory signature underlies the nature of all reality—from the most primitive particles to the human mind, or soul, and, yes, even to the nature of God. The very essence of all reality, including the divine reality, is self-surpassing process.

As one of the first to see that Newton’s universe was topsy-turvy, Whitehead set about reversing many basic ideas. And so: the old Newtonian notion of static stuff is replaced by the new idea of fluent energy—substance thinking, by event thinking. In Whitehead’s new language and “grammar” of reality, the subject, whether of a sentence or a moment of experience, is no longer a noun—but a Verb!
 

III

Whitehead’s fundamental insight—his novel intuition about the nature of reality—he expressed in a simple but aphoristic phrase: “The many become one, and are increased by one.” These nine simple words describe what Whitehead was perhaps the first to glimpse: that actual entities are where the real action is. Actual entities are the creative heartbeats of the universe, and underlying all reality is the twofold rhythmic work done by these robust “units of process.”

“The many become one” describes how an actual entity integrates the many influences flowing in from the past to self-actualize as a new quantum individual. How it passes on to future actualities what it has thus achieved is described by “and are increased by one.” These two kinds of universal process Whitehead calls concrescence and transition, and it is chiefly in reference to them that Whitehead’s system is called process philosophy.

Every throb of actuality is not only a present achievement to be enjoyed in and for itself, but also a thrust beyond: into the future. The whole point of the process is to achieve actuality over and over and over again—and, each time, to introduce the possibility for novelty, for adventure.
 

Creation Continues

On the creative path of evolution, from the initial chaos to the first micro-individuals such as electrons and protons, from electrons and protons to atoms, and then on to molecules, living cells, multicellular animals, animals with a central nervous system, and finally to the human body and soul—note how each creative advance is not only a good in itself, but lays the foundation for, and makes possible, a greater good in the future. Atoms, for example, make it possible for molecules to later emerge, and so on. And thus we have the emergence of ever higher levels of actuality, and these evolving actualities are capable of ever higher intensities of experience.

As creation continues, as it has now for over 15 billion years . . . as creation continues, from one end of the universe to the other, and in every new moment . . . as creation continues within the countless myriads of actual entities in effervescent pulsations of spontaneity—shining through all the variety, the diversity, all the multiplicity of the vast universe is the unity of this incessant twofold process.

“The many become one, and are increased by one”—this single sentence, though simplicity itself, is a “skeleton key” that unlocks the universe and the metaphysical treasure chest of Whitehead’s idea of universal process.

This is beautifully illustrated in that paragon of creation, the human body.
 

What’s It All About, Alfie?

From a process understanding, the central nervous system of all vertebrate animals, including the human animal, has two main functions, one practical and the other aesthetic.

For practical purposes, the central nervous system enables a complex organism (with a multitude of cells) to achieve the same dynamic unity of experience enjoyed by more primitive individuals such as, in descending order, single living cells, molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles. The complex organism can act and react as one, but on a much higher level.

As for the aesthetic purpose: Did you ever stop and wonder about the many causes that flow into the creation of one unitary moment of human experience? It is an astonishing multiplicity! Consider the past impinging on the present with the vast saga of personal memory; consider the vivid presentations of all five senses. Merging also into the new moment are millions, billions, even trillions upon trillions of micro-experiences contributed along the neural nets by bodily cells and, finally, by the streaming neurons of the brain—the human brain itself the most complex structure in the known universe.

Through a process of emergent synthesis this vast multiplicity becomes one of the most beautiful, fragile, and fleeting of flowers: an efflorescence of novelty known as a single moment of experience.

The human body, with what Whitehead calls its “miracle of order,” makes possible astounding adventures, beauties, and complexities of experience. And, indeed, on the process view this is the whole thrust of evolution, and explains why we humans can be happier than clams.

But the good news, the really good news, is that the evolutionary emergence of the human body makes possible the experience of a whole new dimension of reality. For it is the higher synthesis, or higher unity, made possible by the body, that enabled some primal human pioneer, maybe a million years ago, to soar through the most adventurous threshold of all and consciously feel, for the first time ever, a numinous Presence in the world of nature.

We have here our first Buddha, or Awakened One, our first mystic, and the prototype of Cosmic Consciousness whereby we humans can experience, through the creative matrix of the human body, the Holy Reality we call God. Was it something such as this that the apostle Paul glimpsed when he said that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?
 

IV

Whitehead’s philosophy is called process-relational because it presents a robust “social conception” of reality. It is “social” because we socialize on many levels that, hopefully, will be more obvious after you have read this essay.

Our relations with the natural world, on all levels, are with other individuals, other centers of experience, and not with mere inert matter, as the materialists would have us believe. These other individuals are the “natural unities,” or the primary units of reality, that I have mentioned more than once: atoms, molecules, living cells, vertebrate animals, human souls. We live in a world that, at every level, is teeming with sentience.

In this social structure of reality, there is a continuous sharing of experience, both receiving and giving, an interweaving ebb and flow of mutual influence. Unlike classical metaphysics which exalted such abstractions as the absolute and disparaged the merely relative—in a metaphysics of process, “relativity” is a positive word and simply means that we are abundantly “rich in relations.”
 

The Body as Social

Your relationship with your body is a social relationship: a relationship of the one self, or soul, to the many micro-individuals that make up your living body—the hundreds of thousands of different kinds of cells whose total number ranges in the trillions. Each cell in turn is a vast society of molecules wherein each molecule in turn is a teeming society of atoms, and each atom a society of elementary particles. All of these micro-individuals are, to some degree, taking account of one another, or “socializing.”

Any moment of human experience is a highly complex social event. Consider stopping for a moment to behold a beautiful rose. This is a “social” event made possible by the contribution of many individuals: photons of light, living cells in the eyes, optic nerve, and brain. All sense perception is entirely dependent on the prior functioning of our bodies; what we experience is derived from extensive and interconnected chains of antecedent experiences that occur within the body.
 

No Thinker Thinks Twice

What is this invisible entity we call the human self, or soul? How does it endure over time? Is it always there, day and night, underlying all our activities? The process answer is No.

As one of the emergent natural unities in the universe, the human self is no exception, but is quantum in nature. It is made up of actual entities: discrete drops or buds of experience. There is no self that is first somehow already there and then has these experiences. The experiences themselves are all there is. Whitehead puts it in a way to make you stop and think—he says, “No thinker thinks twice.”

The concrete life of the psyche is in discrete moments of experience, one after the other, each sharing elements of a common character, but with no two exactly alike. The human self, in process terms, is a temporally ordered “society” of momentary occasions of experience.

A temporal society is unique in that, rather than having many coexisting members, only one member exists at a time. As a temporal society, each member enjoys close relations with the preceding member, reenacting the common form that characterizes members of the society, and passing on this pattern to the succeeding member. Continuity is thereby established but a discontinuous continuity, thus satisfying the quantum requirement while also supporting social solidarity between discrete events.

If there are about 12 such experiences per second, then each 24-hour day adds more than a million new actualities to this society. Walt Whitman’s poetic intuitions were right on the mark when, in Song of Myself, he said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
 

The Kingdom Within

A moment of experience begins with a social or public phase, with influence flowing in from other sources, and is completed by an individual or private phase wherein the self, alone, decides how to integrate this influence. Indeed the basic rhythm of the universe is a perpetual oscillation between the social and the solitary, the public and the private, the receiving of influence, and the private “processing” of that influence. Both are required—one is necessary for the underlying solidarity of the universe; the other, for its creative advance.

By interweaving a contrast between actuality and possibility, between what already is and what might be, this biphasal unit of action breaks the impasse of sheer continuity. Rather than being determined by the past, the self, in the private phase, decides what to make of the past, and, in its split second of sovereignty, self-actualizes as a new quantum individual.

In that moment resides freedom, creativity, and all evolutionary advance. It is the most minute of moments, small like a mustard seed, and yet, as the matrix of creativity and adventure, it provides a fresh perspective on “the kingdom of heaven within.”

This “kingdom of heaven within” is God’s most precious gift to all creatures, for what it makes possible, in addition to the above, is selfhood itself.
 

Atoms as Social Beings

In this social conception of reality, even atoms are social beings. Consider the simplest case: the hydrogen atom with its one proton and electron. Did you ever stop and wonder what holds such an atom together—that is, what holds the electron and proton together, and at the same time apart, in dynamic and elegant unity? The new physics has revealed that what holds atoms together are virtual photons that are said to “carry” a fundamental force called the ElectroMagnetic Interaction.

The photons are called “virtual” because they arise on the electron and, after an incredibly brief life-journey, almost instantaneously vanish on the proton, thereby creating “a tie that binds.” How many photons are busy at work “holding together” a hydrogen atom? Physicist John Jungerman places the number at a mind-boggling trillion billion each second: that’s “1” followed by 20 zeroes!

And so the hydrogen atom, far from simple, is a buzzing hive of social activity. It takes astonishing creativity, from almost countless micro-entities, for a “simple” hydrogen atom just to be a hydrogen atom. If this is the case for a mere atom, pause for a moment and consider the underlying “social activity” required for you . . . just to be you.
 

V

If our knowledge about the universe is growing, it would be strange if our knowledge about God were not also expanding. In fact, since there was so major a revolution in physics that it represents “a cosmic leap into a new universe,” it would be strange if no comparable revolution had occurred in metaphysics or theology. Were there no thinkers, of comparable stature with Einstein and Planck, who accomplished revolutionary work in metaphysics and in our human musings about God? Indeed, there were, and the seminal figure was Alfred North Whitehead.
 

The Einstein of Religious Thought

But of equal importance is one of the most gifted minds of the twentieth century: the American philosopher Charles Hartshorne, a thinker of such brilliance that he has been hailed as “the Einstein of religious thought, someone whose discoveries and insights will be influential for centuries.”

Not only is Charles Hartshorne my personal hero, he truly made the hero’s journey. He was the Indiana Jones of philosophers; but, rather than daring escapades, books and ideas were the great adventures of his life. The sheer fertility of his thought is astonishing. In addition to a vast correspondence, he published twenty books and over 500 essays and reviews in professional journals. Hartshorne lived to the age of 103, and was especially prolific in his eighth and ninth decades. So far as I know, he is the only philosopher to have published a major new book in his hundredth year.

He credited to his longevity, which he called his secret weapon, some of his most important insights. As Hartshorne put it: “With Plato I strongly believe that philosophy, of all subjects, requires maturity. One of my advantages over most of my contemporary rivals is that, decade after decade, in eighty or so years I have gone on gaining additional clarity on a number of topics which interested me from the start.” Among 20th-century philosophers, Hartshorne stands out as a premier metaphysician and the most influential proponent of a process conception of God.

Here in Part Five I will focus on one of the most distinctive features of this new process understanding: the dipolar nature of God. Traditional ideas about the nature of God derive largely from medieval theologians who replaced a relational understanding found in the Hebrew Bible with what has been called the “icy absolutes” of Greek thought. According to this view, which is called “classical theism,” God is said to be a perfect being (complete in every way) who is immutable (devoid of change or process), impassive (impervious to influence), eternal (nontemporal), and simple (excluding diversity or distinction). This is a prime example of the human tendency for oversimplification. And so the basic process critique of these ideas is that they tell only half the story.
 

Is God Relative? Absolutely!

In the table below are two columns of polar terms, or what Hartshorne calls ultimate contrasts:
 

The classical ideal is to characterize God exclusively by the A-terms, with the clear implication that R-terms were unworthy of God. Hartshorne called this the monopolar prejudice, a prejudice that has reigned as the dominant paradigm in Western theology for some twenty centuries. When the wheels of thought run in deep ruts, it’s hard to get them going in a new direction. To designate God by strictly abstract terms also tears asunder the unity-in-diversity of polar contrasts exemplified in the yin-yang symbol [, an ancient symbol reflecting the wisdom of dipolar wholeness. Modern science reveals the same open secret with a new and more complex mandala: the yin-yang beauty of the double helix. Also note the classical theism requires that we value the abstract over the concrete, and this entails that we value the map over the territory, or the menu over the meal.

Classical theists were doubly wrong in assuming the absolute to be wholly good, and the relative, altogether bad. Hartshorne shows how the idea of absoluteness, like that of relativity, has both good and bad aspects. Whereas classical theism oversimplifies the issue thus:

        bad - Relative          Absolute - good

process theism invites us to see it as:

       good                                      good
                > RelativeAbsolute <
        bad                                       bad

This is yet another variation on the dipolar theme.

By affirming both R- and A-terms together, instead of one to the exclusion of the other, Hartshorne attains polar balance and discovers a new way of thinking about God. True, he follows Whitehead on this, but, as George Allan wrote, “Hartshorne’s axiom of dipolar divinity is surely his most distinctive . . . contribution to philosophy. He follows Whitehead’s lead, but has elaborated the notion and its implications in ways that carry him far beyond his sometime mentor. The Divine Relativity, his first book-length presentation of the matter, has rightly become a classic in the philosophy of religion.”

Moreover, it is not enough to simply say that God is relative, and leave it at that. It is necessary to stipulate that God, as relative, enjoys a unique metaphysical status that makes crystal clear the radical difference between human and divine relativity.

Remember—to be relative simply means to be rich in relations. As the individual most rich in relations, God is so robustly relative that he enjoys mutual immanence with all actualities throughout the universe. This is surely a positive excellence not only to rival, but to infinitely surpass, the negative attribute of bare absoluteness. As the only omni-relational individual, God is, as Hartshorne says “unsurpassably influencing as well as unsurpassably influenced.” To describe this special case of God as the most relative of all individuals, and the goodness of this relativity, Hartshorne coins a new term: surrelative. God is supremely relative.

As supremely relative, God is, contrary to what Aristotle thought, the individual most subject to change. With his idea of God as the “Unmoved Mover,” Aristotle has had a “mesmerizing influence” on theistic thought for well over two thousand years. The doctrine of divine immutability reveals both a Greek and a male bias, and a long habit of thinking in substance rather than in event or process terms.

The Thomas Edison of Philosophy

Charles Hartshorne’s writings scintillate with so many new ideas, so many new “metaphysical inventions,” that he indeed rivals Edison on this score. To overturn one long-standing error, Hartshorne invented a new logic that he called The Logic of Ultimate Contrasts. This new logic corrects, and reverses, centuries of upside-down thinking about how the absolute is related to the relative—in fact, about how all A-terms are related to their corresponding R-terms. The relative is the inclusive category, which means that A-terms are related to R-terms as part to whole. This is clearly seen in the relation holding between the abstract and the concrete where, by definition, the abstract is abstracted from the concrete.

Using this as a standard, Hartshorne invites us to reverse centuries of ossified thought that exalted the absolute over the relative. To get things right, we are to think just the opposite of what the classical theists would have us think. This means that the relative is primary, and inclusive of, the absolute, rather than vice versa. Thus the divine relativity, God’s concrete actuality, is inclusive of what is absolute: God’s abstract essence. And the same pattern holds with such contraries as effect and cause, becoming and being, finite and infinite. In other words, the classical theists, in their intoxication with abstractions, got it exactly backwards. Their topsy-turvy “logic” implies that we should value objects over subjects and that the movement from cause through effect is a descent from better to worse, from more to less. As Hartshorne says, if this indeed is the case, then “pessimism is a metaphysical axiom.”

Another innovation by Hartshorne has to do with the following question, How can we think adequately about the idea of God and the relation between God and the world until we know all the options? It was not until after his 90th birthday, after many years of reflection, that he finally solved to his satisfaction the arrangement of a 16-fold matrix that presents an exhaustive list of the formal options for thinking about God and the world—in terms of permutations of contrasting pairs such as necessity and contingency.
 

Hartshorne’s Matrix

Key to Interpretation

I. God is wholly necessary
II. God is wholly contingent
III. God is diversely necessary and contingent.
IV. God is impossible or has no modal status.

1. World is wholly necessary.
2. World is wholly contingent.
3. World is diversely necessary and contingent.
4. World is impossible or has no modal status.

Since, of all his metaphysical discoveries, Hartshorne felt that this was the most original and the most important, it will surely repay our efforts to understand what it means.  In Hartshorne’s matrix, capital letters designate divine and lower case letters the worldly attributes. Take, for example, N.c—this means that God is wholly necessary; the world, wholly contingent. The use of capital and lower case letters (as well as the reversal of order: NC ~ cn ) symbolize the categoreal difference between God and the world.  Careful analysis of the matrix reveals both elegance and subtlety: Just as column III includes what is positive in the first two columns, so does row 3 include what is positive in rows 1 and 2. The diagonal (running from top left to bottom right) includes only those cases where the variables display a symmetrical pattern. This suggests, especially to the mathematical eye, that something significant occurs at the point where these three intersect. To be clear on this, imagine three lines superimposed on the matrix: one straight down through column III, one straight across through row 3, and one through the diagonal running from N.n to O.o. Note the position where these three lines intersect: NC.cn—the most complex, and the most positive, of all sixteen views. This is Hartshorne’s position, the dipolar or social view of reality that he calls “neoclassical theism.” NC.cn also neatly represents his doctrine of dual transcendence. It is Hartshorne’s claim that, of the sixteen possible views or positions, only one can be true. If this is accurate, then the other fifteen will all be false, with varying degrees of implausibility. The candidate for least plausibility is O.o which, as most simple and most negative, denies reality to both God and the world. If O.o is the least true of the formal options, then should not its opposite be the most true? Hartshorne argues, convincingly I think, that this is indeed the case, thereby showing that his position, NC.cn, as the exact opposite of O.o, is the one true option on the matrix. The following table illustrates how Hartshorne compares with some other theistic (and atheistic) positions:

classical theism ......................N.c
Spinoza and the Stoics ..........N.n
acosmic Advaita Vedanta .....N.o
William James ......................C.c
John Stuart Mill ....................C.n
mechanistic worldview* ........O.n
atheism (à la Sartre) ..............O.cn
Aristotle ...............................N.cn
Jules Lequyer .......................NC.c
Charles Hartshorne ...............NC.cn

 (*the MAD version: materialistic, atheistic, deterministic)

A point to notice is that the matrix reveals far more formal options than 16. As Donald Wayne Viney, a notable Hartshorne scholar, observes, “comparable tables can be constructed for any pair of metaphysical contrasts, such as infinite-finite or eternal-temporal. For any pair of metaphysical contrasts there is a 4 x 4 table (= 16), and hence, for any two pair in conjunction, the number of formal alternatives is 16 x 16 (= 256). To generalize, if n equals the number of pairs of contrasts to be included, the number of formal options is 16ⁿ.”  

As seems fitting for a cosmic leap into a new universe, Hartshorne’s matrix is light-years ahead of the what was offered by classical theism. These are just a few of his many innovations and discoveries. Indeed, in an Addendum to this essay, I list 42 Examples of metaphysical and philosophical truths discovered by Hartshorne, ancient truths that he revealed in a new light, and intellectual errors he helped to overturn.
 

Variations on a Twofold Theme

The dipolar idea finds expression in the new physics where, to tell the full story of the nature of light, the polar concepts of particle and wave are both required. Although both are “true,” either taken separately tells only half the story. As primary as yin and yang, this dipolar or twofold theme is pervasive throughout the universe, and is so basic to a process understanding of reality that I have mentioned it several times in the course of this series, especially in terms of “the many and the one.”

Indeed, if dipolarity is a fundamental principle, and if Whitehead is correct in holding that God can be no exception to such principles, then the divine nature must be dipolar. Moreover, not only is God conceived as dipolar, but as doubly dipolar.

One dimension of the dipolar idea involves what Hartshorne calls God’s abstract essence and his concrete actuality. To get an idea of what this distinction means, consider the following: What factors or elements enter into any concrete state of human experience to make it just what it is? One major factor is a person’s “character,” that collection of enduring traits a person embodies that for the most part, but not wholly, determine the specific acts of behavior. These concrete acts themselves are not the person’s character; but, from the general patterns these various acts display, the character, or essence, of the person can be inferred or abstracted. So character is an abstract essence that is expressed in various ways through the concrete actuality of specific actions. Taking this as a clue, process theism draws an analogy: just as we have characters that play a decisive role in our everyday activities, so too does God have a “character” that is exemplified in all divine actions. The difference is that, whereas our characters can and in fact do change, God’s character, his abstract essence, does not change. In terms of unsurpassable power, goodness, wisdom, and love, God is always perfectly steadfast and reliable. But, in response to an ever-changing universe, God’s concrete actuality does change.

In contrast to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, God is also dipolar in how God relates to the world: both exerting influence upon, and receiving influence from.

Here’s how process theism understands this as working: Because of the quantum nature of things, all individuals, including God, endure as “societies” that exemplify the two types of process (concrescence and transition) discussed in Part Three. This means that all actualities perpetually oscillate between two phases: as subjects experiencing other objects, and as objects experienced by other subjects. All experience, including God’s experience, is social in nature and has this irreducible duality of structure. One big difference is that God enjoys the unique double distinction of being the only subject who experiences all objects, and the only object who is experienced by all subjects. In each momentary divine concrescence, through an unimaginably complex “intuition whose datum is the universe,” God receives or prehends, and perfectly knows, all that the world cumulatively has become—both individually and collectively. This then becomes the basis, in the transitional phase, for God to pour back into the world, and to each quantum occasion throughout the universe, relevant ideals or possibilities for that occasion’s best future. In this way God is said to provide “particular providence for particular occasions.”

Some critics charge that the God of process theism is not transcendent enough. To this charge Hartshorne has made a witty reply: he said that the God of process is twice as transcendent as the God of classical theism. He was able to make this reply through his doctrine of dual transcendence. By this, Hartshorne means that only God has uniquely excellent ways of being both absolute and relative, necessary and contingent, immutable and capable of change. As the one and only universal individual, God enjoys not one, but two kinds of perfection: absolute and relative. God is perfect being, yes, but also perfect becoming; moreover, becoming is primary, that is, inclusive of being.

Hartshorne is only one of many who have pointed out serious defects in classical theism; where he does stand alone, however, is in revealing how nearly all of these are related to a neglect of divine relativity, or a truly social conception of God. How important is all this? Hartshorne’s view is that “The future of theology depends . . . above all upon the answer to this question: can technically precise terms be found which express the supremacy of God, among social beings, without contradicting his social character?”

You Take It from Here!

A perennial intuition in religious experience is the idea of Deus est caritas, or God is Love. But, as many over the centuries have wondered, how can this be if God is wholly immutable and impassive? In an effort to answer this, the writings of some classical theists offer laboriously contrived convolutions of thought. But, far from making sense, these pretzels of logic merely make your head swim. No God conceived strictly in terms of the icy absolutes of classical theism can enjoy the reciprocity of love, but only a God conceived concretely and socially, that is, as a living person with the balance of a dipolar nature, a nature capable of both giving and receiving influence.

Process theism teaches that every momentary occasion of experience throughout the universe begins with the touch of God. In human terms, and to use an analogy from the NASA space shuttle, God provides “lift-off” and an initial aim in the right direction. But it is then up to us to make the in-flight decisions that take us to our destination. God is always reliably there in the beginning to help us get started, but at a crucial point in the creative process, God says, “You take it from here!” We complete what God initiates.

What we and all creatures achieve in this process of self-actualization then becomes a part of God’s concrete actuality. Our achievements are “cells” in the body of God. God and the world are thus sources of novelty one for the other, and, to some degree, constitutive of one another. Without this mutual immanence, made possible by the divine relativity, both God and the world would be completely static. All that can be surveyed in the vast saga of evolution, all the glory, all the grandeur, is the result of this mutual immanence of God and the creatures, of God and the world.

As a concluding statement, and to summarize some of the ideas presented in this essay, here’s a “process” poem I wrote for just this occasion:

Process and Presence

In the beginning, once upon a void,
A pulse, first quantum throb, felt and enjoyed:

From the many random emerges one,
In dipolar rhythm where before was none;
One after another now, pulsing free—
A social process of self-creativity.

If, in nature, consciousness be the crown,
Experience, at least, goes all the way down.
In people, yes, but in photons too we find,
As in all natural unities, the light of mind.

And now a Presence—silent, soft as air,
Flowing within, without, and everywhere.
Through renewal from this divine connection
Life endures by constant resurrection.

Every new moment, in a twinkling of eyes,
Numberless minds perish, and as quickly arise.
Fresh in the flow of this interweaving stream,
Mutual immanence is the universal theme.

Rhythmic adventures, process ever new,
A quantum world where time is quantum, too.
Each quantum a threshold, another chance
For beauty, goodness, creative advance.

In the beginning, God and creatures meet;
What God begins, the creatures then complete.
This, alone, the way of God’s creation—
Not through fiat, but by evocation.

Power is relational, not only from above:
Not almighty force, but all-persuasive love.