Process philosophy

Metaphysics from Plato onwards usually posits a "timeless" metaphysical reality. Process philosophy, on the other hand, identifies the 'real' (i.e. metaphysical reality) with change and dynamism. Process philosophers would include Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and Nicholas Rescher, to which some would add Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Whitehead's Process and Reality
The most famous work of process philosophy is Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Whitehead's background was a very unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship of Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity rivaling Einstein's. He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.

The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience. According to this notion, what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience. Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience. According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing. However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead&rsquo;s emphasis on experience).

Whitehead&rsquo;s philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz&rsquo;s monads, Whitehead&rsquo;s occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead&rsquo;s conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.

Process philosophy gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Because free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead&rsquo;s metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.

Whitehead was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson.