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The
Importance of Whitehead for Contemporary Theology Donna Bowman March 3, 2005 Thank you so much for the chance to speak to you today. It
is a dream come true, and a humbling experience, to address this audience on
the subject of Whitehead and theology. Let me state my thesis immediately.
Whitehead is important for contemporary theology because Whitehead offers us
a metaphysics of contingency. To explain what I mean by contingency, and why a
metaphysics of contingency is crucial for the survival of theology, I’ll need
to offer a few generalizations about fairly recent history. We’re all familiar with the crisis of liberal theology in
the twentieth century. The 1917 influenza epidemic, World War I, the rise of
fascism, and the Holocaust, serially and collectively undermined the
nineteenth century’s postmillennial faith. This sea change in the fortunes of
Christian theology coincided with dramatic developments in other disciplines.
Idealist philosophy was being pushed aside by existentialism, with its
adamant refusal to speculate about ultimate meanings. At the same time, the
humanities were all being transformed by the rise of the historical
consciousness. With the recognition that we are trapped in the curve of time
and shaped in all our facets by the accident of our location in time and
space, came the abandonment of progressive and hierarchical notions in all
realms of culture. And finally, postmodern thought’s first stirrings
synthesized these new views by calling for the end of appeals to
metanarratives. During this twentieth century revolution, during the
decline and fall of modernism, theology was summarily pushed to the sidelines
of intellectual life. We are all aware of the giants and heroic thinkers who
advanced theology in the twentieth century, including the founders of the
process movement. But the centrality of theology to the academy, to culture,
and to the life of the mind was nevertheless gone, seemingly for good. We
might be tempted to attribute this decline in theology’s fortunes entirely to
the ascendancy of secularism or the recognition of religious pluralism. But
at least in part, the marginalization of theology resulted from theology’s
own failure to find a way out of its addiction to essentialism and
abstraction. The perception of theology in the rest of the disciplines
– and to a large extent, the reality as well – was that any nods toward the
new intellectual situation found in twentieth-century theology were not
central features of theological thinking. Theology was finding it harder than
other disciplines to extricate itself from foundational appeals to necessity,
transcendence, and eternity. How could a way of thinking still dependent in
its mainstream forms on metaphysics, with its claims about what must be true
always, everywhere, and to everyone, possibly remake itself into something
other than a metanarrative – a claim to ultimate, transhistorical truth? Theology did make the linguistic turn along with the rest
of the humanities. It became integrated with the philosophy of language and
recognized itself as a particular kind of speech act, a language game, a
system of meaning dependent on the assent of a particular community. But it
did not make the historical turn as successfully. Theology did not
consistently find a way to speak about God, doctrine, and the life of faith
as fundamentally concrete and contingent realities. When it did move toward
doing so, the speech often turned out to apply specifically to one site, one
location in time and space. Its success was due to its refusal to generalize
or abstract from that single instance to larger universals. However, this
very refusal made it difficult for this thought to be recognizable as
theology. Theology needs to find a way to work with the dominant
systems of thought that assume radical contingency and the absence, or
unavailability, of a transcendent realm either as foundation or authority.
This need is urgent for two reasons. First, the vitality of Christian
theology has always been its ability to make creative use of the best thought
of its time. Theology may never again be central to intellectual life in the
way it was in the premodern or even the modern era. But it will never have
the chance of gaining a hearing in the academy if it is perceived to rely on
the same systems of thought as it did in the days of its ascendancy. Second,
the experience of radical contingency and immanence is central to
twenty-first century lives. A phenomenology of contingent existence could
lead us to a revelation that such a system has depth. Deep contingency can be
a resource for theology, rather than an obstacle to be overcome. Contemporary theology must find a way to celebrate
contingency as such. It must develop methods to see the depths not only in
concrete particulars but in concreteness itself and in particularity itself.
In this address I will argue that Whiteheadian process thought provides such
a method. Whitehead forms a generally applicable system of thought out of
attention to the ultimate reality of individual particulars. If theology can
utilize this framework and model itself after this foundation of
particularity, it will be able to make creative use of contingency as
reality. I’d like to give two examples of the type of contingent
thinking I’m talking about. One illustrates the power of a large-scale,
transcultural view on ideas often taken to be essential. The other reverses
the focus in order to look at the depth and complexity of a single contingent
event. This latter focus, I will suggest, indicates some bias in the way
gender affects one’s perspective on what is ultimately real. Then I want to
explore how Whitehead’s system reveals the connections between particulars
that constitute our experience of contingency. These connections – the
patterns of flow and collection that they create – unite the social and
personal viewpoints on contingent events. My argument is that the
phenomenology of contingency shows us that it is crucial for theology, which
in turn leads us to Whitehead, who provides a metaphysical system that
encompasses and contextualizes contingency itself. My first example comes from Alaskan Inuit culture. Similar
examples can be found in communities elsewhere in the world – In our society, the division of individuals at birth into
binary categories – male and female – is so natural and obvious that most of
us take it entirely for granted. But that taken-for-grantedness itself is a
factor in the hidden existence of millions of people for whom such
categorization is more problematic. In fact, the binary categories do not
simply order themselves, as we so often assume: babies with male genitalia
over here, babies with female genitalia over there. The child pictured here,
for example, does not fall into these categories. We rely on a doctor to make
some definitive determination of sex at birth and record that determination
on a birth certificate. Often, of course, the determination is made even before
birth based on ultrasounds or genetic testing. All the many and varied combinations
of genotype and phenotype are collapsed at that moment into those binary
categories that we live with for the rest of our lives and take for granted
as nature’s categories, too. The need for medical and governmental record-keeping,
therefore, hides the reality that there are millions of intersex individuals
among us. Until recently, doctors and nurses often intervened surgically to
assign a single sex to intersex newborns without parental knowledge or
consent. Now, most often, doctors suggest to parents what sex the child
should be assigned, and what surgery, hormone treatment, or other therapy is
needed to “normalize” the infant. In the Inuit societies studied by Bernard Saladin
d’Anglure, some of the infants are believed to have changed sex at birth –
two-thirds of the time, from boy to girl. Such children are brought up as
girls, and may (or may not) revert to their “biological” sex at puberty. A
mother is believed to determine the sex of her baby during pregnancy, through
dreams. Whatever sex of child is needed to complete a family unit, that is
the sex of the child that is born -regardless of its genitalia.1 In a South
American group with a similarly high incidence of intersex births, sex isn’t
assigned until puberty; children are not designated as boys or girls, but
simply children. What would our society be like if intersexuality were out
in the open – if, like the Inuit, we carried more categories around in our
heads than male and female? Our experience of gender – one of the most
taken-for-granted, intimate, obvious, “natural” experiences we have, one that
we use as an assumption for so many arguments, decisions, and behaviors –
would be completely different. The deep and significant contingency of our
binary view of gender is revealed by contrast with a society that ours could
have been – a society that does not engage in constant categorization for the
purposes of control, as Foucault has described. Recent data suggest that a
different contingent view of gender is on its way; Time magazine reported in 2004 that as many as two percent of
live births in the U.S. exhibit some intersex characteristics, much higher
than anyone has ever thought. As these realities emerge from a cloak of
secrecy, a rethinking of gender is inevitable. The contingency of our practices concerning sex assignment
is only visible from a historical view, or even better, from a transcultural
view such as that afforded by the social sciences. The application of
Cartesian rationalism within our culture is of no avail in distinguishing
between contingencies and necessities here. As Western thought has
demonstrated for centuries, and continues to demonstrate, when we merely
reflect on gender, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that there is something
essential and real about the distinction between male and female. Why doesn’t theology make better use – and more use – of
the data gathered by sociologists of religion? For some time sociology and
anthropology have been the growth areas within the religious studies field.
Yet one can read theological journals for months without coming across any
references to their work. No doubt there are many reasons for this neglect.
But it’s possible that theologians find this data second-rate precisely
because it reflects contingencies – interesting as curiosities, perhaps even
useful for community practice, but not the material for deep theological
reflection. Now I don’t want to misrepresent the state of theology in
the twentieth century. There is no doubt that theology has reflected in a
significant way on historical and cultural contingencies, perhaps most
notably in Paul Tillich’s advocacy and practice of a theology of culture.2
Tillich made use of such diverse cultural forms as the Cold War, the space
program, and psychoanalysis as the raw material for theological work.
However, his view was that religion derives from the human encounter with the
ultimate – with something that both transcends us and puts us in contact with
a particular, privileged point of view. At the same time, religion is a part
of culture. Tillich felt that religion is uniquely placed to uncover the
transcendent source of the greatest works of human culture, a connection to
the ultimate that is revealed in their disproportionate impact and grip on
our imagination. There is an “unconditional” waiting in the phenomenological,
for Tillich. The theology of culture is an uncovering of the transcendence or
ultimate within and behind cultural products. When we engage in a Tillichian theology of culture, then,
we are certainly paying attention to particular concrete cultural moments.
But we are also looking behind or beyond them to a transcendent source. To
someone looking for evidence in theological thought of attention paid to
contingency as such, this move will appear to be an attempt to have it both
ways – to have our historical cake and eat it, too. The twentieth-century
intellectual movements I have described reject any move away from contingency
and toward ultimacy that is too quick, too programmatic, too methodologically
standardized. Those formed by this recognition of radical contingency,
including the entire practice of history and science, will rightly exit
Tillich’s highway as soon as he begins his unveiling. We need, then, another approach to a theology of
contingent particulars. Let me illustrate the material, the matters of fact, for
such a theology through another example.
Recently, reading a moving book by the non-fiction writer
Paul Collins called Not Even Wrong,3
about his son Morgan’s autistic spectrum diagnosis, I came across a passage
which discussed the difficulty autists have taking tests. Test-taking
requires a set of skills that all of us have mastered: the ability to focus
on a series of tasks, one at a time; the ability to move from task to task
without getting hung up or stalled; the ability to concentrate attention on
the test items as a group for a reasonable amount of time without becoming
distracted. All of these abilities are exactly what autists generally lack.
Autists focus intensely on a few preferred activities. Attempts to redirect
them to new activities, especially unfamiliar activities, usually provoke
anger or stubborn refusal. They do not move smoothly in sequence from one
task to another. To focus on a task, for autists, is to be unaware that there
are other tasks waiting to be done. They are unresponsive to instructions
generally, especially if fully engaged in a preferred activity, and are usually
unable to follow multi-step instructions. If engaged in an activity they
don’t particularly favor, they are easily distracted That night I lay awake, wondering if Archer would ever be
able to take a test. Now, there is nothing about test-taking that reaches down
through the layers to the eternal verities. It is completely an artificial
activity, created by humans to meet specific, contingent purposes, namely the
demands of the post-Industrial Revolution societies for standardization,
rank-ordering, tracking, and record-keeping. Prior to 150 years ago, a scant
minority of human beings, even in the West, ever had to take tests. There’s
nothing intrinsically valuable about tests and test-taking skills. They are
worthwhile only because we live in a tiny blip of human history in which they
have been deemed essential, purely for the instrumental purposes of a
peculiar set of institutions (memorably described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish).4 So was I worrying about something unreal – or at least
less real than other things truly worthy of my concern? Is the question “will
Archer ever be able to take a test?” worth worrying about? If the answer does
not reach to the level of anything really real, how can it be worth lying
awake for? My husband often has said to me – and I know he means this
sincerely, from the bottom of his heart, and that he believes it – “The only
thing that matters is that Archer is happy.” There is a statement about the
eternal verities, about the absolutely real. Aristotle would whole-heartedly
approve. Test-taking is only important because it is a means to an end –
education and advancement – the final telos
of which can only be happiness. Only happiness is the end that is not a
means to any other end. If Archer can achieve happiness through other means
than test taking and all its accompanying structures, then my worries are not
about reality. They are merely about contingent surface frameworks. Yet my worries are about reality. They are about a reality
as deeply and as fully effective as any universal or any mathematical
abstraction. To a generic male perspective – and here I’ll pick on my
husband, who knows I don’t take offense at his attempts to speak the truth –
contingent surface frameworks, operative only in a particular time, place,
race, social class, et cetera, are troublesome but ultimately ineffectual, if
we can simply will ourselves to see through their fundamentally unreal
nature. Historically speaking, it was felt that if women sometimes insisted
on the reality of the contingent and the contextual, it was because they were
unable to muster up the intellectual energy to extract themselves from the
world of appearances.5 But to me – and I submit, in reality – those
contingent frameworks are not just on the surface. They have depth. They go
all the way down to the base of reality. Just because they are impermanent
and could be otherwise doesn’t mean they aren’t as real as the realest things
there are. Butting my head up against them will give me bruises – not on my body
but in my self -as surely as butting my head up against the reality of a
brick wall. I must take account of them in plotting my future course as
surely as I must take account of God’s eternal purposes, willed since before
the beginning of time. What does Whitehead have to offer in my search for the
truly real? I have already suggested that he is going to support me in my
attempts to find meaning in contingencies. He was certainly concerned with
reality – it’s half of the title of his greatest work. At first glance, the
approach to The Real in Process and Reality appears to be a typical male
“onion-peeling” approach: moving as fast as one can from the world of
appearances to the foundational layers of true actuality, the categories that
apply everywhere, to all entities, at all times. But there are important
differences between the description of reality that emerges from Whitehead’s
method, and the Greek-influenced discovery of the necessary, absolute, and
ultimate that is the culmination of a stereotypical philosophical/theological
search for The Real. For one thing, Whitehead did not discard time as one of
those less real layers that needs to be drilled through to get down to what
is truly real. For another, reality in each new moment is constructed by actual
entities, not solely or even primarily with reference to atemporal eternal
objects, but out of the previous moment’s contingencies. The reality thus
constructed is not a passing, temporary arrangement, but The Real itself,
“brute fact,” “immortal,” as Whitehead puts it,6 gathered into the consequent
nature of God everlastingly. Finally, the aspect of divinity that most aptly
corresponds with the necessary, absolute, and ultimate for which philosophers
have usually searched is the primordial nature of God; yet Whitehead
describes this pole of the divine nature as “deficiently actual.”7 Surely
something “deficiently actual” cannot be “more real” than the actualities
with which we contend on a daily basis. In what remains of this address, I
want to connect the phenomenological description of contingent reality,
especially social reality, to Whitehead’s description of reality in his
philosophy of organism, and make a few comments on how this matters to
theology. I beg your indulgence to allow me to introduce these ideas with
another story. Computer scientists tell the story of Paul Baran, an
engineer with the Rand Corporation in the 1950’s who came up with an idea
while eating a steak dinner.8 He began to ruminate on the components of a
steak dinner: steak, potato, carrots, green beans, buttered bread. This same
list of ingredients, he realized, could have been a stew instead of a steak
dinner. If it had been a stew, the ingredients would have all been mixed
together, and their flavors would have interpenetrated. The meat would have
tasted a little like carrots, and the carrots would have tasted a little like
potatoes. Looking to the right of his plate, he saw a salad, and realized
that this is yet another way the same ingredients could have been used:
tossed together so that the ingredients and flavors remained distinct, but
not segregated.
But notice that “steak dinner” reality is merely nominal.
The centralized, hierarchical nature of a steak dinner depends on the concept
of a steak dinner – a concept brought into being by the linguistic creation
of the phrase “steak dinner.” Sure, once that phrase is coined and joined
with a nascent concept of steak, potatoes, et cetera, the reality thus
described is hierarchical. But the hierarchy is dependent on the name “steak
dinner.” Call it “dinner” and the hierarchy disappears. The concept “steak
dinner” is hierarchical, but aside from concrete instantiations of steak
dinners that are created consciously in response to the concept, there is
nothing “real” about the abstraction “steak dinner.” By contrast, we might look at social reality as a
decentralized form of reality – like a stew. It is composed of parts, but the
whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A decentralized network is made
of up several networks that, within the nodes, are arranged hierarchically;
but there is no hierarchy among the networks. Everything penetrates into
everything else, but through a particular point or medium.9 It may seem that Whitehead’s description of reality is
best characterized as decentralized in this way. The idea of interpenetration
of flavors seems to capture the internal relations that constitute entities
in the Whiteheadian system. But this is the case only at the simplest level.
In a stew no hierarchies emerge. But hierarchies do exist in reality. They
are not essential; they are instead temporal, contingent, and relative to a
particular set of circumstances. But they are real. Whitehead says that reality is distributed community –
like a salad. All the ingredients are participating in constituting that
reality (unlike the steak dinner). All the parts are more or less equivalent
(like the stew). There are no status differentials between the objects in the
set at the most basic level. All entities are performing the same function –
the function of constructing reality. And all entities are capable of
performing all the basic functions of the system. However, each entity is
unique, because the position it occupies within the system and the
connections that are made to other entities are unique. (This is the basic
concept behind the Internet: there are no command and control centers, but
there are distinctions between terminals having to do with position in the
network.)
So sets of values and standards – the basis for hierarchy
– emerge not out of the bedrock nature of the distributed reality, but out of
the particular contexts of local nodes of cooperation. The values are only
contextually real, in other words. But on the far side of the node, this is
as real as real can be. Now this description of reality is far truer to my
experience. This is the reality with which I grapple when I lie awake at
night and worry about Archer’s ability to take tests. The test-taking
structures in my social reality – educational and vocational – are concrete
expressions of the values of my node. These structures affect me, and they
will affect Archer. I did not choose the node in which I find myself – but
nevertheless, I am in it. It is my reality. In the node in which I live, I
have no choice but to respond to the values that sit atop this contingent,
unnecessary, but truly real hierarchy. I might choose to ignore the
institutions that administer and interpret tests. I might do my best to label
them illusions and thereby wish them away. I might call this reality “steak
dinner” and talk about the truly real, truly important things at the top of
the reality hierarchy – and test-taking would be far down the pyramid, of no
real importance and therefore deficiently real. Yet despite the fact that the
educational concept governing my reality is just as nominal as “steak
dinner,” the hierarchy of values created by that educational concept is
eminently real. What I mean by “real” here, you will have noticed, is what
Whitehead means by real. To be real is to be efficacious. To be real is to be
important. To be real is to matter. All of these descriptions of reality are
descriptions of worth, of value. And I submit that all descriptions of
reality in fact reduce to descriptions of worth and value. This fact is
betrayed by the way we contrast contingent realities as “not mattering” like
necessary realities. In fact, what we are saying when we say that the
absolute, necessary, and eternal realities are “more real” than other
realities, is that they matter more. This assertion is belied, however, by experiences like my
concern about Archer’s future. Archer’s test-taking skills, or lack thereof,
will matter as much as any other conceivable factor when it comes to his
experiences, opportunities, and interactions with his society. His ability to
achieve happiness through other means may be important on a personal level,
to himself and to those who love him, but it will not matter as much, in
terms of changing the future, as his ability to perform the tasks his society
values. There are some important words elided, of course, when I
say that Archer’s test-taking skills really matter and that they will really
change the future. Perhaps I should add that those skills matter “in the
context of an industrialized society with rigid standardization procedures,”
and that it will change the future that is achievable in that context.
However, such an elision is also taking place when my husband talks about
Archer’s happiness as what really matters. Perhaps he should add that
happiness matters “in a limited, personal sense related to freedom from
suffering or anguish.” The value of happiness, or of the lack of suffering,
is important, and its achievement or embodiment is efficacious for
individuals and their close social circles. But nearly every context that I
can imagine values other things than happiness, and not simply as means to
achieve happiness. Those other things are valued because they are efficacious
in changing the future for individuals and intimate communities like the
family, as well as the larger and more diffuse communities to which everyone
in a node is expected to belong. Allow me to continue to draw out a few more implications
of this model in connection with Whitehead’s description of reality. What my
husband is saying when he says that Archer’s test-taking abilities (or lack
thereof) don’t really matter, is that if I understand reality correctly, the
standards of my community that place great value on tests won’t be able to
hurt me. Like Neo in The Matrix,
through the power of my mental grasp on reality, I will be able to stop the
bullets fired at me by this ultimately illusory construct. If the brick wall
is an illusion, and I run into it, it won’t hurt (as long as my brain doesn’t
expect it to hurt so powerfully that it creates pain impulses out of thin
air). I contend, on the other hand, that the social constructs that surround
me have a visceral reality. When I bump up against them, they hurt – and not
simply because I have been conditioned to think that they will hurt. The
visceral, quasi-physical nature of these constructs arises from the fact that
they are instantiated in a particular physical location – a physical location
that I happen to share. My location limits and influences the values with
which I come into contact, the values I must adopt or somehow respond to
because they mediate the world for me (on this side of the node). Further, my
location within the node limits and influences the chances I have to affect
this hierarchy of values. For Whitehead, the uniqueness of each non-divine actual
entity consists of the physical location of that entity in space-time and the
intersections of feeling created by that location. God’s uniqueness, on the
other hand, is that God has no physical location. So the limitations of my
location in a hierarchy of values I didn’t choose do not apply to God; God is
not limited in that way. God is proximate to every entity, in or out of nodal
hierarchies. But God’s lack of physical location constitutes a different kind
of limitation. My social framework, being physically located, surrounds me
with concrete manifestations of its values, creating a physical matrix
suffused with a hierarchy of importance and therefore of reality. It
configures space and time in a number of physical ways: through architecture,
transportation networks, timetables, and institutional infrastructure. God,
not being physically located, cannot surround me with concrete manifestations
of what God values. Nevertheless, the reality of a social value framework is
not reducible to its physical manifestations – the physical constructions
that surround me. The visceral reality is not equivalent to the physical
reality. The visceral reality, the reality I feel and experience, is mediated
by social systems of value – by the interactions of feeling, confirmation,
rejection, reinforcement, and other transmissions of value within the node.
God is at every point in the node, and God is omnipresent within the social
system. Therefore God has a unique opportunity to mediate alternative values
to me, even stuck as I am in my physical location. God is an outlet for every
point in the node, a window onto a world of possibilities. It does not make
the situation in my society any less real if I am aware of other
contingencies. Instead, it simply means that this particular reality is not a
prison. It is not necessary, permanent, essential, or absolute. Nevertheless,
there can be beauty, complexity, and truth to be found in this particular
reality; there is meaning, there is value; this particular reality matters. I
need not deny the reality of my context and escape to a context-less reality,
as if such a thing could exist, in order to touch the depths of The Real. Theology is rightly concerned with meaning and value. We
as theologians seek to ground our claims for meaning and value in some
stable, justifiable location to which we can all appeal. Unlike other
disciplines in the humanities, that stable, justifiable location still tends
to get pushed out of our world. It tends to require us to venture into the
realm of the eternal and transcendent. But if theology makes that move in
search of stability, justification, and objective access, it sacrifices its
ability to reflect meaningfully on the reality of contingent particulars.
There are rich, deep, and undeniable meanings and values that cannot be extricated
from the web of contingency in which we dwell. A theology that bases itself on Whitehead’s discovery of a
system of contingency, a metaphysics of contingency, will be able to find
meaning without generalizing beyond our warrants. From the opposite perspective,
it will be able to describe and assess value in contingent sites without an
appeal to a privileged and singular source of value, an appeal that threatens
to relativize and trivialize the contingency we are actually trying to
assess. A metaphysics of contingency, based on Whitehead’s description of
distributed reality, can account for the power of communities, institutions,
all kinds of social nodes to mediate and channel values down to individuals.
Most importantly, it will provide a framework for a new theology of
contingency – a theology of immanence, adequate to concrete experience,
particular experience, deeply contingent and real experience. Such a theology
releases me from the prison of my own contingencies, but is grounded in and
reflects the ultimacy of contingency itself. Theology’s task in the
twenty-first century is to discover the depths of this new world. Notes 1 Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, "Le 'troisieme'
sexe," La Recherche 23:245
(1992). 2 Paul Tillich, Theology
of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 3 4 A lecture by my colleague Richard Scott helped
shape this set of ideas. 5 See for example: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York:
Fountain Press, 1929); Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?,” Women, Art, Power, and Other
Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 147-158; Elizabeth V.
Spelman, “Woman As Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 109-131. 6 PR 210. 7 PR 34. 8 I am indebted to Phil Frana of the Charles
Babbage Institute at the 9 Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications,” Rand
Corporation Memorandum RM-3420-PR. |
