Process Philosophy

Origin

Process philosophy is the view that the fundamental character of reality is becoming rather than being: that the world is not a collection of enduring things but a stream of events, and that change, growth, and novelty are not illusions to be explained away but the very texture of what exists. Its origins are ancient. Heraclitus, in the sixth century BCE, taught that everything flows (panta rhei) and that the world is a fire kindling and extinguishing in measures; his fragments — "you cannot step twice into the same river" — are the founding texts of process thought. Against the Eleatics and Plato, who located reality in changeless being, the process tradition has always insisted that the river, not the bank, is real.

The modern systematization of process philosophy came in the early twentieth century, in the work of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907) argued that evolution is a creative advance that cannot be captured by the analytic intellect, and that the deepest reality is duration (durée) — time as lived, continuous, and inventive. Whitehead, a mathematician and logician who had co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, turned in his later career to metaphysics, publishing Process and Reality (1929), the most complete statement of a process worldview in the history of philosophy.

History

The history of process thought runs through the history of philosophy as a counter-current to the metaphysics of being. In antiquity, Heraclitus was opposed by Parmenides, whose doctrine that being is and non-being is not became the foundation of the Eleatic school and, through Plato, of the Western tendency to locate reality in the changeless. Aristotle mitigated the opposition by making form the principle of both being and change, and his account of actuality and potentiality is a process-friendly element within an otherwise substance-based ontology. In early modernity, Leibniz revived a dynamic metaphysics with his monads — centers of force and perception that unfold in time — and his principle of sufficient reason. Hegel made becoming central to his dialectic: being passes into nothing, and the truth of both is becoming. But it was Bergson and Whitehead who made process, rather than being, the starting point rather than a complication within a substance metaphysics.

Whitehead's mature system, developed at Harvard after his retirement from Cambridge and Imperial College London, is the fullest expression of the program. In Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead replaces the category of substance with the category of "actual occasions" — the drops of experience that constitute reality. The world is a society of actual occasions, each of which "prehends" the others; becoming is the creative advance into novelty; and God is understood as the principle of concretion, the ground of the order within the process rather than a static first cause. The book's famous formulation — "the many become one, and are increased by one" — condenses the entire metaphysics: reality is the continuous unification of the many into new unities.

Core Principles

The core principles of process philosophy can be stated with precision. First, the priority of becoming: change is not a modification of unchanging substances but the fundamental mode of existence; being is a derivative abstraction from becoming. Second, events over substances: the basic units of reality are events or processes, not things; a "thing" is a pattern of stability within a flow. Third, internal relations: what a thing is depends on its relations to what precedes and surrounds it; entities are constituted by their processes of becoming rather than possessing a fixed essence. Fourth, novelty and creativity: the world is genuinely creative; the future is not fully determined by the past, because each occasion of experience synthesizes what it receives in a new way. Fifth, process in science: the static, reversible time of classical physics is an abstraction; the real time of the universe is irreversible and cumulative.

These principles distinguish process philosophy from its main rivals. Against materialism, it denies that the ultimate reality is inert matter: the "stuff" of the universe is activity, and even the simplest entities are processes. Against idealism, it denies that reality is a product of human consciousness: the activity is ontological, not psychological — every actual occasion is an event of self-creation, and human experience is a high-grade instance of a universal pattern. Against the metaphysics of substance, it denies that there is a fixed inventory of things with essential natures: the world is a society of processes, and stability is a rhythm, not a bedrock.

Important Figures

Heraclitus is the ancient founder. Leibniz is the early modern precursor whose monadology anticipated the process view of reality as centers of activity. Hegel made becoming central to the dialectic, though Whitehead and Bergson both insisted that their own systems were closer to the pre-Socratics than to the German idealists. Henri Bergson is the great theorist of duration and creative evolution: his account of the élan vital, the vital impetus that drives evolution beyond mechanism, made him the most famous philosopher in the world in the early twentieth century. Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is the systematic founder of process metaphysics, and his school — Charles Hartshorne, Ivor Leclerc, John Cobb, and the process theologians — has developed his ideas in philosophy of religion, ecology, and social theory. William James also belongs to the tradition: his "radical empiricism" and his account of the stream of consciousness are process views of experience.

Modern Influence

Process philosophy has had a significant influence outside the mainstream of analytic philosophy. In the philosophy of science, Whitehead's insistence that process, not substance, is fundamental anticipated the way contemporary physics describes the world in terms of fields, events, and structures rather than enduring particles. In theology, process theology — developed by Hartshorne, Cobb, and others — has been influential as an attempt to reconcile theism with evolution and with the reality of suffering: a God who is part of the process, not a changeless ruler over it. In environmental philosophy, the process view of nature as a community of subjects rather than a stock of objects has supported ecocentric ethics. And in the philosophy of mind, the emphasis on event and process connects to contemporary theories of consciousness as a stream or process rather than a state. The philosophy of change and the philosophy of time both draw on the process tradition.

Criticism

Process philosophy has been criticized from every direction. The defenders of classical metaphysics argue that "becoming" is unintelligible without "being": change is change of something, and an ontology of pure process cannot explain identity, continuity, or the stability of the world. Critics of Whitehead's system, from Russell to the analytic mainstream, have found its obscurity and its neologisms an obstacle, and have argued that the elaborate apparatus of prehension and actual occasions is unnecessary once the insights are separated from the system. Scientists and materialists object that the attribution of experience or "feeling" to all actual occasions — Whitehead's panpsychism — is a category error: the appearance of mind at the level of the organism does not justify projecting it onto the fundamental level of physics. And the logical positivists and their heirs dismissed the whole enterprise as unverifiable metaphysics. The persistence of the process tradition suggests that the questions it poses — about time, change, creativity, and the place of experience in nature — do not go away, whatever the fate of its systems.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Process Philosophy" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy)
• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan, 1929.
• Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Alfred North Whitehead" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead)