The writer of these pages vividly remembers Whitehead's visit to Princeton University in March, 1929, to deliver the Louis Clark Vanuxem Lectures under the title The Function of Reason (published the same year). 170-1.) In other words, for Whitehead God is Love, both in his nature and in his activity. 520.) there was a 'revelation in act, of that which Plato divined in theory' - namely 'a revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world', a disclosure of God not 'as the supreme agency of compulsion' but 'as a persuasive agency'.(Quotations from Adventures of Ideas, 1933, pp. Nor can there be any doubt, as we shall also show, that Whitehead believed that in what he styled 'the brief Galilean vision'(Process and reality, 1929, p. We shall see, in the sequel, why Whitehead spoke disparagingly of 'the Hebrews' and their idea of God but that he believed firmly in the reality of 'the divine, God', is beyond question. The key words are in the second paragraph: 'creative principle', 'continuing process' or 'creative process', 'the divine, God', and man's 'true destiny as co-creator'. 296-7.) Whether or not Price has given Whitehead's exact words - we may assume that he has - this quotation provides a good starting-point for understanding the position which is taken by contemporary process-thinkers and the Christian theologians we have mentioned. His true destiny as co-creator in the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.(Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price, 1954, pp. In so far as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives death of the body to an estate of irrelevancy. ![]() But this creation is a continuing process, and 'the process is itself the actuality', since no sooner do you arrive than you start on a fresh journey. ![]() This creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. But that tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things is by no means omnipotent. There is a general tendency in the universe to produce worth-while things, and moments come when we can work with it and it can work through us. various forces, some good, others bad for both sorts of forces are present, whether we assign personality to them or not. The Hellenic religion was a better approach the Greeks conceived of creation as going on everywhere all the time within the universe and I also think that they were happier in their conception of supernatural beings impersonating. An all-foreseeing Creator, who could have made the world as we find it now - what could we think of such a being? Foreseeing everything and yet putting into it all sorts of imperfections to redeem which it was necessary to send his only son into the world to suffer torture and hideous death outrageous ideas. According to his friend Lucien Price, who wrote down a report of conversations with the Whiteheads during the years from 1934 to 1947, the last, or almost the last, remarks of the philosopher (noted by Price as spoken on Armistice Day, November II, 1947) were these: It was a mistake, as the Hebrews tried, to conceive of God as creating the world from the outside, at one go. Whitehead published ten books during those years in the United States, the last of them appearing in the year of his death it was Essays in Science and Philosophy, a collection of various papers and lectures which had not been included in any of his earlier books. ![]() It is these, beginning with his Lowell Lectures, Science and the Modern World, in 1925, which have exercised an enormous influence on an increasingly significant movement in Christian theological circles. His 'third life', in the United States, was the period in which his major philosophical works were written and published. was at Harvard University, to which he went at the age of sixty-three to become Professor of Philosophy, retiring from active work in 1937 but continuing to live in Cambridge, U.S.A. The second was in London, where he had taught at London University, serving for a time as President of its Senate. The first had been spent in Cambridge, England, where he had been a Fellow of Trinity College and a lecturer in mathematics in the university. He had lived 'three lives', as he liked to say. The Concern for Reconception Alfred North Whitehead died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States of America, on December 30, 1947, in his eighty-seventh year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |