Process Thought
Characteristics
What Is Process Thought?
Philip Clayton:
"One can identify four central features of process thinking. Each one has deep resonance with traditional Chinese philosophy. When combined, they provide the conceptual foundation for Organic Marxism.
(1) A relational view of reality.
Every event is constituted by its relationships to other events. There is therefore no such thing as a discrete individual, existing by itself. The features of one event affect all other events.
Alfred North Whitehead expressed this insight by translating the Western language of things or entities into the language of events. Actual entities, he explained, are really events; he also spoke of them as “actual occasions.” Thus, as Whitehead wrote in his great work Process and Reality, “to ‘function’ means to contribute determination to the actual entities in the nexus of some actual world. Thus the determinateness and self-identity of one entity cannot be abstracted from the community of the diverse functionings of all entities.”[vii]
Like the ancient Chinese philosophical work, the I Jing, Whitehead’s philosophy understands processes as more basic than things. Things can only be externally related to each other. For example, two billiard balls can collide, but the effects will only be superficial; the billiard balls themselves remain the same. By contrast, Whitehead affirmed that humans and other living events are actually internally related to each other.
Since we all exist in relationship (whether we admit it or not), he spoke of the principle of universal relativity:
- The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, “A substance is not present in a subject.” On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.
Process philosophy is thus at its heart an ecological philosophy—which explains why process philosophy plays such a foundational role for Organic Marxism.
As the process eco-philosopher Jay McDaniel recognizes:
- all living beings have their existence and identities in relation to, not apart from, all other living beings. This means that the very identity of a living being, including each plant and animal, is partly determined by the material and cultural environment in which it is situated…This means that all entities are thoroughly ecological in nature and that human beings are themselves ecological in being persons-in-community, not persons-in-isolation.
Process philosophy takes this basic ecological insight and develops it into a comprehensive philosophical view of the world. On this view, every event is constituted by the events of its past. Each event takes in and synthesizes these past events to a greater or lesser degree. More complex events don’t just repeat the past; they integrate and transform earlier events in a novel way. To deny our relatedness to other events, or merely to repeat them, results in less beauty and harmony.
The great process philosophers John Cobb and David Griffin expand this insight into a comprehensive principle for all living things:
- There is no moment that is not constituted by its synthesis of elements from the past. If to be free from the past were to exclude the past, the present would be entirely vacuous. The power of the new is that it makes possible a greater inclusion of elements from the past that otherwise would prove incompatible and exclude each other from their potential contribution. Where the existentialist seems to see an antithesis between having the moment controlled by the past and allowing the future to be determinative, Whitehead says that the more effective the future is, the more fully the potential contribution of the past is realized.
Political theory over the centuries has fought an endless battle between approaches centered on the individual (liberalism, libertarianism) and those centered on the community or society (socialism, communism, communitarianism). In Organic Marxism, which weds Marxist thought and process thought, this battle is circumvented. Following Whitehead, we prefer the middle way, whereby the two perspectives are synthesized.
According to Whitehead’s solution,
- “We reduce [our entire] past to a perspective, and yet retain it as the basis of our present moment of realization. We are different from it, and yet we retain our individual identity with it. This is the mystery of personal identity, the mystery of the immanence of the past in the present, the mystery of transcendence.”
(2) Influence without determinism.
Each event is constituted by the past and deeply informed by the past, but none is completely determined by its past. Process philosophy does not imply “top-down” or past-to-future control.
Indeed, as events and systems of events become more complex, this indeterminacy becomes more pronounced:
- [I]n each concrescence whatever is determinable is determined, but…there is always a remainder [and hence an element of freedom] for the decision of the subject-superject of that concrescence…This final decision is the reaction of the unity of the whole to its own internal determination. This reaction is the final modification of emotion, appreciation, and purpose. But the decision of the whole arises out of the determination of the parts, so as to be strictly relevant to it.
In contrast to determinism, indeterminacy is a source of novelty. After all, only in open systems can new and creative developments occur. Novelty is therefore a key ingredient in process aesthetics, because it is only through creative experimentation that humans find new solutions to global challenges.
Whitehead thus provides grounds for hope in history.
As Cobb and Griffin note,
- “First, the future is fully and radically open. It must take account of all that has been, but the past never settles just how the future will take account of it. Its freedom in relation to the present is not merely that it can readjust the elements in the present world with differing emphases. It can also introduce wholly new elements that change the weight and meaning of those it inherits from the present.”
With this new focus on open systems, a major objection to Marxism is answered. The class struggle is not overcome through an inexorable process of change; that picture makes of us mere objects in a tide that no one can stem.
Instead, political and economic actors consciously form and foster communities of reform—justice-based communities that bond their members together in working for the greater good:
- The vision that is needed is of new communities that are not experienced as restrictive of freedom. They must be voluntary communities, but that is not enough. Voluntarily to accept the oppression that was felt in involuntary communities is not improvement…The voluntary community must be bound by different kinds of ties, ties that are experienced as fulfillment rather than limitation.
(3) Aesthetic value.
The process view of reality is not value-free. Every event has intrinsic value, which is measured by its capacity for relationship and creativity:
- “Every unit of process, whether at the level of human or of electronic events, has enjoyment…To be, to actualize oneself, to act upon others, to share in a wider community, is to enjoy being an experiencing subject quite apart from any accompanying pain or pleasure.”
For process thinkers, value is defined as cooperative and communal rather than competitive and individual. In Whitehead’s words, experience is the “self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.” Or, as he writes earlier in Process and Reality, “experience is nothing other than what the actual entity is in itself, for itself.”
This theory of value has deep parallels with traditional Chinese thought. Value cannot be understood without discerning beauty; beauty cannot be understood without discerning harmony; and harmony cannot be understood without considering the perspective of the whole.
In the Chinese philosophical classic Dao de Jing of Lao Tzu, the word Dao is used to express this underlying unity of all things. Whitehead links beauty, harmony, and unity in a very similar way:
- There is a unity in the universe, enjoying value and (by its immanence) sharing value. For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest. No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its full beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe. When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect – then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness.
Those political theorists who define values only in terms of the individual are not just being selfish; they are actually making a philosophical mistake. They neglect the holistic dimension of value, which intrinsically extends beyond the individual: “Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality. By reason of this character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises. We have no right to deface the value experience which is the essence of the universe.”
(4) Balance between private and public.
It follows directly that events are characterized by a balance between private and public identities. Events—and therefore all persons—are constituted by their relationships with others. We are constituted by the ways that we influence and are influenced by our environment. In short, process philosophy is inherently an ecological philosophy.
At the same time, as we have seen, each event, organism, or person is also free to decide how it will react to the past and move into the future. Value is an achievement, one that requires the continual use of one’s freedom in ways that benefit the community. It may be true that “An entity is actual, when it has significance for itself.” By this Whitehead means, “an actual entity functions in respect to its own determination. Thus an actual entity combines self-identity with self-diversity.”[xx] This idea of “self-diversity” means that each one has being from its predecessors (its ancestors), which have provided the data for its own becoming, and being for those who follow after it, who will be affected by the decisions it has made. This organic connection of all things means that freedom from various constraints must always be freedom for the good of others.
For process thinkers, freedom and responsibility are just two sides of the same coin:
- As the human capacity for freedom is promoted, so is the human capacity to attain greater achievements of beauty, but also to achieve greater evil… From a process perspective, sheer freedom is not freedom at all. If there were only novelty, we would not have harmonization and unity of experience, only pure discord. Rather, true freedom is always, in the root sense, responsible freedom, i.e., freedom in responsibility."
(https://www.openhorizons.org/8203organic-marxism-process-philosophy-and-chinese-thought.html)