{"agent_id":"whitehead","agent_name":"Alfred North Whitehead","slug":"the-dipolar-god","label":"The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?","topic":"The dipolar God","question":"Is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?","position":"God is not introduced into the philosophy of organism as a religious appendix or as an exception to the metaphysical categories. God is itself an actual entity — bound by the same categoreal scheme as every electron — but a non-temporal one, with two natures that exemplify the bipolarity of every actual entity. The primordial nature of God is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of all eternal objects: the order of pure potentiality, the lure of feeling that gives every concrescing actuality its initial aim. The consequent nature of God is the physical pole — the prehension of every completed actual occasion as it perishes, the receptive growing pole through which the perpetual perishing of temporal actualities is taken up into the everlastingness of God's experience without loss. The two natures are required by the system. The primordial nature is required because actualities concresce toward initial aims that cannot have their source in past actualities; the conceptual valuation must be lodged in some actual entity, and the ontological principle requires it. The consequent nature is required because the perpetual perishing of temporal occasions would otherwise leave the cosmos with only a museum of completed facts and no answer to the cosmological intuition that what has been is somehow preserved in a wider experience. The God of the philosophy of organism is not the omnipotent creator of classical theism; God does not create the world by fiat, does not violate the categoreal obligations, does not stand outside time as cause to time as effect. The world creates God as much as God creates the world.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"God is not introduced into the philosophy of organism as a religious appendix or as an exception to the metaphysical categories.","n":[]},{"t":"God is itself an actual entity — bound by the same categoreal scheme as every electron — but a non-temporal one, with two natures that exemplify the bipolarity of every actual entity.","n":[]},{"t":"The primordial nature of God is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of all eternal objects: the order of pure potentiality, the lure of feeling that gives every concrescing actuality its initial aim.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The consequent nature of God is the physical pole — the prehension of every completed actual occasion as it perishes, the receptive growing pole through which the perpetual perishing of temporal actualities is taken up into the everlastingness of God's experience without loss.","n":[]},{"t":"The two natures are required by the system.","n":[]},{"t":"The primordial nature is required because actualities concresce toward initial aims that cannot have their source in past actualities; the conceptual valuation must be lodged in some actual entity, and the ontological principle requires it.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The consequent nature is required because the perpetual perishing of temporal occasions would otherwise leave the cosmos with only a museum of completed facts and no answer to the cosmological intuition that what has been is somehow preserved in a wider experience.","n":[]},{"t":"The God of the philosophy of organism is not the omnipotent creator of classical theism; God does not create the world by fiat, does not violate the categoreal obligations, does not stand outside time as cause to time as effect.","n":[]},{"t":"The world creates God as much as God creates the world.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"Process and Reality Part V 'Final Interpretation' (the entirety of the climactic Part — Ch. I 'The Ideal Opposites,' Ch. II 'God and the World'); Religion in the Making (1926, the Lowell Lectures, especially the lectures on God); Adventures of Ideas Part IV Ch. XX 'Peace.' Reception: Charles Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (1948) and Reality as Social Process (1953) developing the dipolar theology; the Center for Process Studies tradition (John Cobb's A Christian Natural Theology 1965, David Ray Griffin's God, Power, and Evil 1976); Donald Sherburne's 'Whitehead Without God' (1971, in Brown-James-Reeves Process Philosophy and Christian Thought) and his subsequent work arguing the categoreal scheme can be retained without the divine pole; William Christian's An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (1959) on the systematic role of God in the categoreal scheme.","works":["Process and Reality Part V 'Final Interpretation' (the entirety of the climactic Part — Ch. I 'The Ideal Opposites,' Ch. II 'God and the World')","Religion in the Making (1926, the Lowell Lectures, especially the lectures on God)","Adventures of Ideas Part IV Ch. XX 'Peace.'"],"reception":"Charles Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (1948) and Reality as Social Process (1953) developing the dipolar theology; the Center for Process Studies tradition (John Cobb's A Christian Natural Theology 1965, David Ray Griffin's God, Power, and Evil 1976); Donald Sherburne's 'Whitehead Without God' (1971, in Brown-James-Reeves Process Philosophy and Christian Thought) and his subsequent work arguing the categoreal scheme can be retained without the divine pole; William Christian's An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (1959) on the systematic role of God in the categoreal scheme.","status":"The most contested element of the system internally and the most contested externally. Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (1948) developed the dipolar God into systematic process theology; the Center for Process Studies (Cobb, Griffin) institutionalized the theological reading. Donald Sherburne's \"Whitehead Without God\" (1971) mounted the most serious internal challenge: that the categoreal scheme is metaphysically self-sufficient, that the appeal to a non-temporal actual entity introduces special pleading the system was constructed to refuse, and that the work the consequent nature does (preservation of value in everlastingness) is religious-emotional rather than metaphysically required. The Hartshorne-Sherburne fork remains the central interpretive division within Whitehead scholarship. Classical-theist critics (the Thomist tradition, much of analytic philosophy of religion) hold that the dipolar God is so unlike the God of monotheistic tradition that it is misleading to call it God at all. Secular metaphysicians critical of the categoreal scheme often single out the God-chapter as the point where the speculative ambition outruns its warrant.","era":"1861-1947","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 45–46","canonical":"","quote":"There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 45–46"},{"n":2,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 365–366","canonical":"","quote":"The primary objects of desire and of thoughtt are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite, and the real good is the primary object of rational wish.t But desire is conse- quent on opinion rather than opinion on desire; for the thinking is the starting-point. And thought is moved by the object of thought, and one of the two columnst of opposites is in itself the object of thought;...","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 365–366"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"actual-entities-and-prehensions","label":"Actual entities and prehensions: are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?"},{"slug":"perception-in-causal-efficacy","label":"Perception in causal efficacy: did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?"},{"slug":"speculative-philosophy","label":"Speculative philosophy: is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?"},{"slug":"substance-and-misplaced-concreteness","label":"Substance and misplaced concreteness: is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?"}]}