Bowman, Donna. "The Depth of the Contingent: What Really Matters in Whitehead's World."Process Thought and East Asian Culture: Process Theology, (May 2004): 145-162.

Abstract

The history of Western idealist philosophy has been a search for the changeless, the eternal, and the universal underneath the temporal, contextual, and contingent. I argue that to some extent this emphasis on “peeling back the layers” of the world we inhabit in order to reach the “really real” is a function of the way gender and intellect have interacted in Western history. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the male search for truth has been standardized as a retreat from the temporal and changing, into the realm of statements true everywhere, for everyone, and at all times. The temporal or specific world was seen as deficiently real, and eternal or abstract world was seen as really or truly or absolutely real. If women at times insisted on the reality of context and contingency, they were seen as unable to muster the intellectual on the reality of context and contingency, they were seen as unable to muster the intellectual energy and abstract thought necessary to divorce their minds from the lesser realities. Whitehead’s system appears to be a typical male “onion-peeling” approach to the discovery of the truly real, especially in Process and Reality, with its categories and careful construction of a complete description of the real from the bottom up. However, since (a) reality is inescapably temporal for Whitehead; (b) each new moment is constructed as much (or more) from events and meanings on the contingent, contextual level as from the atemporal eternal objects; and (c) the primordial nature of God, that eternal and abstract aspect of divinity, is described by Whitehead as “deficiently actual,” it appears that Whitehead does not in fact concur with the identification of the truly real as that beyond or behind our contexts and contingencies. Using a phenomenological approach based in a female experience of the deep reality of socially-constructed contingencies, I argue that Whitehead’s definition or reality in terms of the valuing activities of actual entities coheres with this data and these long-unheard voices. The real is not so much what is ultimately or timelessly true, as what matters in the here and now. Reality is measured in terms of consequences engendered by the fabric of values in a particular time and place. By attending to Whitehead’s description of the real, a bridge between female and male experiences of the real can be sketched, the philosophical enterprise can take seriously the full reality of the contingent.