Whiteheads filosofie Van de creativiteit: Samenhang Van de grondcategorieën

Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 42 (1):11-47 (1980)
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Abstract

This article wants to give the European reader an insight in the coherence of the basic categories of Whiteheads philosophy of creativity. It is important to show that Whitehead wonts to philosophise within the European tradition. Whiteheads philosophy is by no means „typically American”. Nor is process philosophy just a philosophy of becoming. Whitehead accounts both for the stable elements in the universe and for newness. The main trust of his philosophy is that the permanent and the fluent are not to be conceived as substances, or as parts of the real. All reality is both permanent and transient, being and becoming. Whitehead reacts against the three-substance theory of Descartes . He shares the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy, and even radicalises it : for him it is not only true that all we know are experiences of a subject , but all that is has to be conceived as a subject. In this sense Whitehead comes close to Leibniz, who accepts psychic monads as the ultimate realities. The ontological principle states that actual entities are the ultimately real units out of which the universe is made : they are all the actuality there is. Whitehead calls the ontological principle also the principle of efficient and final causation. This has to be understood correctly. 1. The most basic way in which an actual entity is is its concrescence : this is final causation. An actual entity becomes itself in reaching its satisfaction. 2. On the other hand, actual entities, once they have reached their satisfaction do not simply disappear out of reality : in a very real sense, they are active. To be is to be an element in a further becoming. They enter into the selfconstitution of a new actual entity, not just as prehended, but as exercising causal efficacy. Here Whitehead goes further than Kant, and transcends the difficulties of phenomenalism : what is given in the experience of a new actual entity is not just a former actual entity as represented, but the real actual entity itself is present in the selfconstitution of the new actual entity. After the elucidation of the notion of actual entity and of the relationship between actual entities, attention is paid to Whitehead's doctrine of societies. It seems to us that this aspect of Whitehead's philosophy deserves further elaboration. A last problem to be solved is this : does the ontological principle imply that there is nothing else than actual entities ? There are also, in Whitehead's system, the „formative elements” : creativity, eternal objects and God. Eternal objects are not actual without their ingression in actual entities. Creativity is not real outside of its instances. Should not the same be said about God ? In Whitehead's system, God is an actual entity. The relationship between God and creativity is not as clearly elaborated in Whitehead's philosophy as we should wish. Yet it is dear that for Whitehead God is not the ground of the metaphysical situation, but its first qualification. The reasons that Whitehead advanced to make a distinction between God and creativity have often been overlooked in most forms of classical theism. If all there is, is the result of divine creativity, how can God not be held responsible for the disorder as well as for the harmony ? We want to stress the importance of Whitehead's earliest metaphysical text on God, in Science and the Modern World. Metaphysics has to be extremely reserved in what it says about the further qualification of the Principle of limitation . It can be equated with the God of religion , but other metaphysical systems may prefer to qualify the Principle of limitation in other, less theistic ways. They will call it, e.g. Order, First Cause or even Chance. What further can be said about the Principle of limitation, does not derive from metaphysics, but from particular e. g. religious experiences. Hence, a distinction between the God of philosophy and the God of religion should be made. This distinction is congenial to Whitehead's metaphysics, although he himself does readily make the transition from the metaphysical Principle of limibation to God as principle of harmony and beauty, luring each new becoming to its best self

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