From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: what is religion and why should we bother?
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 08:16:26 -0600


Hugh,

The full quote is from Alfred North Whitehead in his book 'Religion in
the Making';

"Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. It runs
through three stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction.  It is
the transition form God the void to God the enemy, and from God the
enemy to God the companion....Accordingly, what should emerge from
religion is individual worth of character."  

Whitehead was a philosopher, but he certainly inspired a good deal of
theological thinking; in fact he gave rise to a school usually named
Process Theology. His philosophical god, however, is very different from
the god of Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther. For one thing it lacks
omnipotence. Like Plato, whom he follows, Whitehead's god is only the
author of the good, not of everything.  In his cosmos the principle of
creativity becomes something of a Gnostic demiurge, equally shared by
humans as co-creators with the deity. Whitehead also hated the book of
Revelations in the bible. He once suggested, how seriously I don't know,
that the Revelation of St. John the Divine should be replaced by the
speech of Pericles to the Athenians as this was imaginatively
reconstructed by Thucydides.

Such idiosyncratic musings meant Whitehead's thought could not really be
utilized by mainstream theology, with its emphasis on collective dogma
that seems to carry forward the residues of tribal consciousness into
these contemporary times in which we have never been modern. That is the
whole problem with philosophy vis-à-vis faith. Its intellectual
character ensures that philosophy must remain minoritian.

Which brings me around to Deleuze. Just as with Bergson, I think
Whitehead's philosophy of organism is one that shares some affinities
with that of the nomadic thinker of multiplicities. (Deleuze also
acknowledged Whitehead in these terms, I think.) Consider the following
quotes:

"All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral order is merely
certain aspects of aesthetic order. The actual world is the outcome of
the aesthetic order, and the aesthetic order is derived from the
immanence of God."

"1. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve
some identity of character with the ground.

2. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve
some contrast with the ground in respect to the same identity of
character.

The two principles are derived from the doctrine that an actual fact is
a fact of aesthetic experience.  All aesthetic experience, is feeling
arising out the realization of contrast under identity."

As a philosopher Whitehead is still concerned to privilege identity, but
he must do so in a way in which difference situates itself in the heart
of this identity like a worm. One of the hidden consequences of his
process philosophy of organism is the way in which difference subsumes
identity as a consequence of the establishment of this very principle of
creativity. Difference as both change and repetition becomes paramount
as the surprising result of our entrance into novelty.
 

eric 

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