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PROCESS SCIENCE OF MIND MEETS ERNEST HOLMES #2
Article 2: The Whiteheadian/Hartshornean Version of Process
By Rev. Dr. Arthur Chang
Process philosophy is not new. Its tradition dates back to Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. It is the tradition of Process to emphasize becoming and changing over static being. Despite its long history, “process philosophy” is currently associated with the particular work of philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000).
Whitehead was a brilliant English Mathematician and an Oxford professor who lived in the time of discovery of Quantum Physics. Whitehead was a polymath, excelling in philosophy, mathematics, physics, logic, and educational theory. He co-wrote “Principia Mathematica” with another other brilliant English philosopher, Bernard Russell.
At the university, when a class came to the end, depending upon how brilliant the professor was, the students would stomp the floor. On one occasion, when Whitehead finished a class at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, his students stomped so hard that some of the ceiling in the room below started falling apart. It was then the Logic Professor, whose class it was, remarked, “I’m afraid these premises cannot take the weight of Dr. Whitehead’s conclusion.”
At the time of Whitehead’s mandatory retirement in England, Harvard University invited him to become a Professor of Philosophy. At 64 years old, Whitehead told his wife, “There’s nothing in my life I would rather do than this.” In America, he wrote books that signaled the most important advances in Philosophy. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. If his work were brilliant at Imperial College in England, his work was astounding in America. His publications include Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas. “Process and Reality” is considered Whitehead’s tour de force. It is a small book, but difficult to grasp.
Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) is the second important process philosopher and considered a great American philosopher. He became Whitehead’s post-doctoral assistant. Hartshorne popularized Process and developed the theological ideas around process philosophy. He left Harvard for the University of Chicago and there, influenced a new generation of process philosophers/theologians. He taught there and at many important universities in American and abroad.
The second wave of philosophical/theological leadership is that of John B. Cobb, Daniel Day Williams, Lewis S. Ford, David R. Griffin, and Schubert M. Ogden and others. There was a revival of an indigenous natural theology under the name of "process theology.” Both Cobb and Williams took their degrees at the University of Chicago under the influence of Charles Hartshorne.
Whitehead and Hartshorne, the Founding Fathers of the current process thinking, are disciples of the European Enlightenment, but they are philosophical and theological innovators as well.
Whitehead and Hartshorne differ significantly from the classical rationalists in that they reject the traditional divine attributes of omnipotence, omniprescience, and immutability. Both thinkers also reject the Newtonian world-view, especially its mechanistic materialism. Whitehead in particular incorporates modern physics into his speculative framework. They also reject the idea of the self as a self-contained, autonomous subject. Instead of seeing the world mechanically, as did Newton, Whitehead saw it biologically and called his new philosophy “Philosophy of organism.” This included electrons, atoms and molecules. For him, biology was the study of larger organisms, while physics was the study of smaller organisms. In his view, even the smallest entities are social beings.
While Whitehead and Hartshorne’s natural theologies contain no appeal to special revelation, the new process theologians are Christians in the tradition of liberal theology. Cobb and David R. Griffin summarized this as, "We judge that Christian meaning can best be made alive today through a truly contemporary vision [viz., Whitehead's philosophy] that is at the same time truly Christian."
(To be continued)
In our next article, we will share the new views of God and some of its meanings for ourselves and the universe in which we live.
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