November, 1999
THE GROWTH OF WHITEHEAD'S THEISM
Lewis S. Ford
Preface
Ordinarily we can only know what philosophers have
produced without having much insight into how they arrived at their conclusions. If we can
chart some progression, it is only with respect to the differences between successive
dialogues or books. We rarely have the opportunity to observe the creative activity that
goes into the construction of a complex system of thought that a book represents. The book
as a whole is all we have. In the case of Whitehead's Process and Reality, however, we
have the opportunity of determining its composition, and thereby gaining some insight into
its creative development.
Earlier Whitehead had given a series of Lowell Lectures
in February 1925. Before submitting the manuscript in June for publication, however, he
had the idea of indivisible epochal occasions. This contrasted sharply with the Lowell
Lectures just delivered, which conceived of events as infinitely divisible, in accordance
with his earlier philosophy of nature. Rather than thoroughly revising the manuscript for
Science and the Modern World, Whitehead elected to publish the lectures as presented
"with some slight expansion" and the addition of four chapters, including those
which explored some implications of temporal atomicity: "Abstraction" and
"God".
Though presented to the world as a single work, Science
and the Modern World is really a composite of two essays, each with its own systematic
integrity. Most read it, however, in terms of a single interpretive whole, for this is the
way most books are designed to be read. Many of the difficulties it generates could be
resolved by realizing that its compositional analysis reveals that it makes more sense on
many issues to treat it as two units of interpretation.
Perhaps thinking he was successful in his first endeavor
in producing a composite text, Whitehead tried it a second time in writing Process and
Reality. It suited his own thinking admirably, for his philosophical system was very much
in the making. Fresh unexpected insights calling for major conceptual revisions were
frequent. Whitehead explored the implications of these insights with vigor, but he was not
about to make full-scale textual revisions every time this happened, particularly as
undertaking such revisions might lead to further insights, ad infinitum.
He resorted instead to the use of insertions expressing
new insights placed within conceptually older material, often (though not always) with
explanations designed to smooth over the gaps between these disparate materials. Moreover,
he seems to have determined to keep all the material intended for publication, even when
it had been superseded by other passages. It may be impossible very difficult to show that
something had been left out, but some passages can apparently only be explained in this
manner.
Given these idiosyncrasies, it is possible to treat
Process and Reality as a composite text. It is not composite in the sense in which the
Bible is composite, where the book of Genesis may be seen as an interweaving of three
different sources traditions. Process and Reality is all written by one author, but by
that author in different stages in his philosophical development. By compositional
analysis, that is, by attending to discrepancies, "ghost" references, shifts in
conceptuality and terminology, arranging the texts in their probable sequence, it is
possible to trace the stages of Whitehead's formulation of his metaphysics. Moreover, once
these stages have been ascertained, it is usually possible to make very plausible
conjectures as to why he modified his earlier position. In this wise we can obtain a more
intensive picture of Whitehead's creativity than for almost any other major philosopher.
Many have observed that Whitehead as a philosopher is
often deficient in giving arguments for his claims. It is not because no arguments could
be given; his commentators have little difficulty in furnishing acceptable reasons and
arguments. Perhaps the fact that Whitehead piled layer upon layer and yet tried to
disguise the whole as a single unified treatise had something to do with this. Any
justification of a revised point of view would be a criticism of its unrevised form, and
call attention to the discrepancy between the two.
In this essay I shall explore the concepts for God
Whitehead employs. As we shall see, there are three: God as nontemporal and
nonconcrescent, which is the notion of God employed in the first version of his work,
before he worked intensively on the final chapter. The final chapter presents the concept
most characteristic of him: God as temporal and concrescent. In between, however, there
was another concept: God as nontemporal and concrescent, which is to found in some 26
insertions.
I have arranged those insertions in their probable
genetic order, for they provide rich clues for the progression of Whitehead's thought.
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