I should send you a copy of an unpublished article from which these comments come (Derek Malone-France’s “Between Hartshorne and Molina: A Whiteheadian Conception of Divine Foreknowledge”). Althought the article is about divine foreknowledge, there are some interesting application to our debate, D.

From the article:

First…

As I have already indicated, according to Whitehead’s understanding of the metaphysically basic character of subjective freedom, the expression of ‘creativity’ in the formation of the actual occasion’s ‘subjective aim’ is a substantive, rather than merely formal, element of the ontological event of concrescent becoming (indeed, creativity is the ontological ‘substance’ of the becoming event). For, Whitehead agrees with Plato and Locke that to be an actual individual is to exercise ‘power’. There can be no merely passive, or purely receptive, actuality.

D, you see what I see here don’t you? Do you see what attracts me? Yep. Apply this to our debate. Ahuh.

Again…

Indeed, what we see here, it seems to me, is Kant (somewhat unreflectively) developing the fundamental underpinnings for an ontology of serially-ordered occasional selfhood. The problem, of course, is that Kant fails to perceive the full implications of this potentially epoch-making shift and, therefore, attempts to graft this revolutionary insight about the self-constructive character of each moment of empirical subjectivity onto a traditional enduring-substance conception of the noumenal self.

In other words, Kant articulates a serially-ordered phenomenology that fundamentally contradicts the logic of traditional enduring-substance ontology—to which he clings, rather than taking the next logical step and resolving the contradiction in favor of a serially-atomic ontology of temporal endurance. Hence, he fails to see that his insight regarding the necessarily active—that is, agential—character of selfhood implies the essential incoherence of ontological determinism (and so, it seems, have most contemporary analytic philosophers, the majority of whom have, in one way or another, maintained Kant’s nonsensical notion of the symmetricality of time).

It remained, therefore, for Whitehead to recognize and develop the full implications of Kant’s insight.  Whitehead saw clearly that freedom—or, more precisely, ‘creativity’—must be immanent within, rather than transcendent of, the temporal order of subjective experience.  This is why Whitehead’s insistence on the substantive character of the act of creativity as constitutive of the actuality of the concrescent subject—as that which is required to manifest an abstract determinate possibility in the concrete superjective determination of a concrescent actuality—is so crucial to the ultimate coherence of his account of creaturely freedom.

On the Whiteheadian view, God’s primordial envisagement of the eternal possibilities for actualization that are relevant to some future individual’s choice in a given situation does not (indeed, cannot) include (certain) knowledge of which will in fact be actualized (assuming that the given situation itself is realized in the course of actual events), precisely because such knowledge would imply that the apparent “freedom” of the individual in question is logically reducible to a merely formal component of God’s temporally transcendent imagination, rather than being the very substantive essence of the contingent temporal process of concrescent becoming that constitutes the actual individual as such.

Thus, according to Whitehead, the relevant possibilities in the divine primordial apprehension are known only qua possibilities, each of which has some relative probability of actualization—and, thus, none of which can be identified with the actual outcome, qua actuality.  This understanding preserves both the logical and the ontological distinction between the identity of the subjective-agential determination of the individual through its exercise of its own creative freedom and the identity of any and every particular primordially envisaged possibility (including whichever one of these the individual does, in fact, actually manifest).

D, you see how I’d like to apply this to our debate, right?

Kant’s system manifests this implication in his appeal to the notion of a noumenal or ‘intuitive’ intellect and in his treatment of the real unity underlying the apparent temporal diversity of all past, present, and future phenomenal objects and states of affairs, which defines ‘actuality’ in his system.  Hegel recognizes and seizes upon this implication in Kant’s thought in his reframing of phenomenal reality as the deterministic unfolding of the eternally predetermined dialectical representation of the one, all-encompassing noumenal reality of ‘the Idea’—which is (at least by implication, if not Hegel’s intent) the only being that is really ‘real’ in his system [this is D’s problem too; D isn’t deterministic throughout—he grants us freedom now—but in spite of taking different trains, both D and Hegel get off at the same final destination]. 

Only if creaturely freedom is understood as the essential, substantive characteristic that differentiates temporal actuality from eternal ideality—such that it cannot be logically reduced to, nor adequately represented in terms of, the formal constitution of the order of eternal ideality—can we maintain the logical and ontological distinctions between Creator and creatures, as such, without which the notion of ‘free will’ (on both sides of this distinction) is rendered nonsensical.

Yep. We need an indeterminist model of theosis which views ‘logoi’ as “creative packages” that human beings unpack in ways NOT determined by the divine will (though the divine will determines the possibilities).

T

Post Edited (HumanHypostasis) : 1/13/2008 11:52:10 AM (GMT-6)