Konsep Tuhan dan Agama Menurut Alfred North Whitehead

This article discusses the concept of God and religion according to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy. The main issue is how to describe Whitehead's concept of God and its implications for religious life. Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism is an entry point to understand the characteristics of his thought. This criticism leads to Whitehead's cosmology in which each actual entity is in the process of becoming. God is not excluded from this cosmological scheme. In this way of thinking, God is the source of eternal objects or values. God experiences every actual event that occurs in the temporal world. Thus, God can be understood from two perspectives: the former refers to a cosmological frame, while the latter refers to religious experience. In Whitehead's language, God has two distinct natures, a primordial nature, and a consequent nature. From the perspective of religious life, Whitehead's concept of God seems to put more emphasis on divine immanence.

Language about God in Whitehead's Philosophy

The way Whitehead speaks of God in his "philosophy of organism," and the evaluation thereof is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position—broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas—that one should not speak "carelessly" about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God's otherness and relatedness to the world in a new, intriguing way? In order to answer this question, an introduction into Whitehead's philosophy is given, and especially into his category of existence, the "actual entity." For Whitehead, God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main andfinal section of this article, these insights are used as tools to decrypt Whitehead's God-language. Here, I compare the status of Whitehead's and Aquinas's statements about God, discuss Whitehead's ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language, and argue that in Whitehead's philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the "ordinary" meaning of language

Reverence, Revision and Creaturely Life: Whitehead’s Political Theology of Enjoyment

‘The art of free society’, A.N. Whitehead declares in his essay on symbolism, is fundamentally dual. It consists of both ‘maintenance of the symbolic code’ and a ‘fearlessness of [its] revision’. This tension, on the surface paradoxical, is what Whitehead believes will prevent social decay, anarchy, or ‘the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows’. Bearing in mind Whitehead’s own thoughts on the nature of symbolism, this chapter argues that the figure of the creature has been underappreciated in his work as a symbol. It endeavors to examine and contextualize the symbolic potency of creatureliness in Whitehead’s work, with particular attention directed toward the way the creature helps him to both maintain and revise an older symbolic code. In Process and Reality, ‘creature’ serves as Whitehead’s alternate name for the ‘individual fact’ or the ‘actual entity’—including (perhaps scandalously, for his more orthodox readers) the figure of God. What was Whitehead’s strategic motivation for deploying this superfluous title for an already-named category? In this chapter, it is suggested that his motivation was primarily poetic (Whitehead held the British romantic tradition in some reverence) and so, in this sense, always and already aware of its rich symbolic potency.

Realisation of Self and Power

The process of individuation has an end. The passage from disjunctive diversity to the unity of a new entity embodied by the subject has a conclusion, namely, the effective realisation of the entity, its full actualisation. This end point of individuation is reached following the determination of every positive and negative prehension of the entity, that is, when all of its relations with other entities have been established. It is, then, fully a perspective, a being-situated in the universe, a junction between and a unity of everything that exists. It attains, in its final state of concrescence, what Whitehead calls ‘satisfaction’. This ‘satisfaction’ is not a common end, identifiable with all the others, as if there were a pre-existing finality in individuation that would be actualised in a particular manner. It is ‘a generic term: there are specific differences between the “satisfactions” of different entities, including gradations of intensity’ (PR, 84). In the same way that every prehension is singular and belongs to the subjective orientation of every actual entity, the end of an entity is specific, it is that end for that entity.

Revising Whitehead’s Notion of Society in the Light of Contemporary Physics

This article argues that Joseph A. Bracken’s revisions of Alfred North Whitehead’s derivative notion of “society” are plausible in view of developments in physics since Whitehead. In particular, Bracken argues that Whitehead’s derivative notion of “society” should rather be a category of existence equiprimordial with “actual entity,” and that contemporary actual entities in concrescence do influence each other as they directly prehend the society as a nexus. The article begins with Whitehead’s view of the metaphysical project as empirical, tentative, and subject to ongoing revision. Next, the essay explains Whitehead’s view of societies and contemporary actual entities. Following this is a survey of developments in physics since Whitehead that are relevant to his understanding of “society” and contemporary actual entities. The article then explains how Bracken differs from Whitehead on these points and argues that the physics developments corroborate Bracken’s proposed revisions to Whitehead. The essay ends with a restatement of Whitehead’s view of metaphysics as provisional and in need of ongoing revision.

Language about God in Whitehead’s Philosophy

The way Whitehead speaks of God in his ‘philosophy of organism,’ and the evaluation thereof, is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position - broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas - that one should not speak ‘carelessly’ about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God’s otherness and relatedness to the world in a new intriguing way? In order to answer this question an introduction into Whitehead’s philosophy is given, and especially into his category of existence, the ‘actual entity.’ For Whitehead God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main and final section of this article these insights are used as a tool to decrypt Whitehead’s God-language. Here the status of Whitehead’s and Aquinas’ statements about God are compared, Whitehead’s ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language are discussed, and it is argued that in Whitehead’s philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the ‘ordinary’ meaning of language.

Discussions and Applications

This chapter analyzes Part II of Process and Reality. It begins with a discussion of fact and form, and states that for Alfred North Whitehead, to be an actual entity is to be fully formed, fully definite, with no indeterminations left unresolved. From the welter of what it could be, an actual entity decides what it will be: realizing certain potentials and positively excluding others; taking a definite stance with respect to everything in the ideal and actual worlds. Its real essence, structured by its associative hierarchy, comprises the full particularity of its status in the universe and of the universe in it: its unique way of housing and pervading this world populated by these actual entities. The remainder of the chapter explains the extensive continuum; order, society, organisms, and environment; the modal theory of perception; and a theory of judgment.