Transcript
As personally friendly and cordial as Professor Gilkey is, I think it has to be said in all honesty that he has been something of a terror to recent theological movements. If one recalls the movements of the '60s like secular theology, death of God theology, theology of hope, theology of revolution, one also immediately recalls the often devastating reviews and critiques that Professor Gilkey brought to bear on these movements. At the same time, I think one must appreciate
the way in which Professor Gilkey has been able to sympathize with the motifs and emphases of these movements and to incorporate them into his constructive theology. It may very well be that whereas in his earlier works, Professor Gilkey was operating somewhat like his fellow Chicagoan Dick Butkus of the Chicago Bears in his devastating treatment of those who tried to get through the holes in the line. Now Professor Gilkey, perhaps by a call destiny, finds himself in
the quarterback spot calling the signals. In any case, we look forward now to the third lecture in this series entitled, "Philosophical Reflections on Historical Experience". Thank you very much. That was an exceedingly accurate picture of the problems of a person who has spent far too much time criticizing his colleagues and then is called upon to make his own rather feeble efforts and finds to continue your analogy that the rather light runners that he tackled with ease
have turned into tremendous guards and that he's lost little weight himself. Another problem with that method, I may say, is that if you do criticize and learn from other points of view, which I find myself somewhat weakly doing, that by the time you incorporate them, they're out of date. In this, our third lecture, we shall consider some non-theological ways of dealing reflectively with our subject, historical passage, the nature and aspects of social change, man's place
and role in this process and the future as terror or as goal, as anxiety or as hope. Our discussion of these non-theological ways of dealing with this will, as will be obvious to you all, be by no means exhaustive. Many important analyses of social change, especially those provided by the social sciences, are here omitted as are interesting, modern and often important contemporary, more philosophical interpretations of history, for example, that of Marcuse or Norman Brown. The
reasons we have chosen as we have is partly the very limited scope of our own learning and reflection and partly our interest in those which seem to advance our theme. The first group of views we wish to talk about really shouldn't be included under philosophical views. Rather, I'm labeling them scientific views of the future, but we shall distinguish rather sharply two different approaches or two different views within this wide field. For the scientific community has and
does say a great deal to us about the future, and what they say on this subject is very important, almost authoritative, one may say, in our wider culture. The first approach we shall call non-scientific views of the future by scientists and by the scientific community. That is to say, here scientists are speaking to us on the whole informally about the future, of what sorts of changes, new knowledge, new techniques, new controls and so on can
be expected to effect in our history, and what new opportunities and demands this scientific knowledge will bring with it. Without making the future itself an object of scientific inquiry, they in the name of the scientific community try to tell us what our future may be like. These views represent a vision of the future as a large part of the community of physical and life sciences view that future, and this is important in a scientific and technological
culture. We are all familiar, I'm sure, with many examples of these. Julian Huxley is probably the originating one. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Victor Firkus and a host of others have spoken frequently on what the future will bring from the scientific point of view. Perhaps the main theme of this vision is its sense of the utterly new situation of man in history because of science. Now man knows how to know, and this is crucial to a change in history,
for hence through his knowledge he knows how now to control. What he does not yet know, he will know soon enough, and thus what he does not yet control that he will soon find out how to control. Thus potentially and in much actually, he can direct for his own ends and purposes the forces that heretofore determined him from the outside, determined him blindly, so to speak. He can, as Huxley and Dobzhansky reiterate, take evolution, biological and
cultural, into his own hands and so make of himself and his history what he will make of them. Knowledge has therefore given him immense, man-mance (sp?), potential freedom over destiny and certainly over fate. Through physical science and technology, he can make of his natural environment a place that serves him. Through biological science and psychology, he can remake himself into a more effective instrument of his own ends. And through social science and its developments, he can in
principle reshape his economic and political environment into a rational society. Thus, controlling nature, science and society and man, man can control his own destiny at last, if he will. Of course, as they recognize, man may choose to act foolishly and greedily, but at least it is now up to him and not to the blind processes that produced him. Knowledge, one may say, has transformed destiny, not into fate, but into almost total freedom. A new historical eon
is upon us, dominated by knowledge and by human choice, and so one in which objectivity, tolerance, responsibility and integrity, the scientific virtues, are all important. Here in this vision, surely is the perfectionist optimism of the 18th century rendered up to date by donning a white coat. Two aspects immediately impress the more cynical, or you can put the word Calvinist in there if you wish, observer of these views of history and of the future. First of all,
that man's problems in history are understood here to be predominantly problems in knowledge, in knowing enough to be able to control what up to this point controlled us. So that radically more knowledge means a radically new history. This is, one may say, I think, a modern Gnosticism in this sense, and typically academic. Secondly, that while it is recognized that freedom, man's freedom, which is growing in this situation, is not utterly dependable, they realize very well, and
all these books do, that we may choose wrong. Still the main issue in history is, so to speak, that of freeing freedom, of rescuing man from destiny, from forces that control him beyond his intentions, and from all that does so determinism. If we can, so to speak, put man and not chance in control, then man can create a new world, according to his intentions. The sense that the real problem of history lies in man's inability, or
apparent inability, to control himself, and thus is not so much the lack of his knowledge as his misuse of his knowledge, does not appear in any of these views. In any case, it is interesting to note that when the scientific community, thus informally, views history from the perspective of its own community, and the powers of that community, it sees history not at all as essentially determined by blind necessitating laws and factors, as somewhat ironically, it sees
nature, or even sees society in the self, when it studies them scientifically. Or, in philosophers of science representing this point of view, is it thinks historians ought to see history. Rather, here, scientists see history, that is a history dominated by science, as a realm of almost unconditioned freedom, and thus a realm of infinite possibilities of the new in human history. Here, history has science as its subject, that is its agent, not science, history, as its object
of inquiry. And thus, everything in the future can be different from the past. History is wide open, utopian, and I must say to me, utterly unreal. Here, I would suggest, is real mythology, a totally utopian picture of our scientific future. And I've often thought there's lots of ironies, I've spoken of the irony of being biblical and then climbing on a plane, the irony of the technologist who delivers a lecture such as this and goes home coughing
in the smog is also a small irony. A most interesting parallel, if not contradictory, development among scientific circles is the rise of the new discipline called futurology. The deliberate effort to make the future an object of scientific scrutiny and if possible of scientific prediction. Beleaguered clerics and theologians have long complained that science has taken over all the functions in society that we used to fulfill. We hardly thought that they would claim one of the most ancient
of our roles, one in fact which we have long since relinquished, namely prophecy. I'm sure you are familiar with the many committees, governmental, commercial, and academic here and abroad, committed to this effort to clarify, as one put it, the last barrier of mystery, the future. Daedalus, the very fine journal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, devoted an issue a few years ago to a scientific study of the year 2000. And as you undoubtedly know,
Herman Kahn, especially, and Albert (sic) Wiener have in this country pioneered the method, the initial research, and tabulated the early results of this inquiry into the future. These men are well aware of the difficulty of prediction in history and consequently that all predictions, even scientific ones, are radically tentative and hypothetical. They resolve this problem of contingency in future history by picturing alternative futures, as they put it. So to speak, granted something else happens than we think might,
then what will be the case? And they rank these alternative futures in order of probable preference. Obviously, however, not everything can be contingent if prediction is to be possible, even as not everything can be negations if God talk is to be possible, and not the similar issue, it seems to me. So certain, quote, long-term trends, unquote, or continuities in history are assumed in economic, political, social structures generally, in the general character and movement of our
cultural life as a whole, and in the developments of science and of technology. On the basis of these long-term continuities and the probable directions they will take, the picture of our alternative futures is composed. One can see this very clearly, methodologically worked out in Kahn's book, "The Year 2000". And so, like the businessman concerned with developing new markets or the general concern with future moves in a particular war situation, we can, on the basis of
these probable futures, stare into the murky darkness ahead and make our plans. Surely, they argue, if science can tell us what really is probable and what improbable in our future, we will be greatly helped. But can it? Perhaps I am too skeptical, but this seems to me a fruitless endeavor lost in a maze of issues it never raised. These issues are largely historical and philosophical in character, issues really of philosophy of history. Thus, to raise them
is to leave the security and the certainty of science. I had the feeling as I read these documents that scientific predictions to these men based on philosophical premises are really no better than oracle bones or even Ezekiel. And yet, not to raise these, at least to unpack and elucidate the presuppositions of the predictors, leaves the whole enterprise haphazard, utterly ungrounded, and therefore fundamentally irrational. For example, there was no discussion of what the central causative factors in
historical change, in fact, are. A discussion necessary if we are to know what is to affect what, and so what is in fact probable or improbable in the future, and so what might arise there. Correspondingly, the depth of contingency in historical experience was and could not be plumbed. For our culture, it seems to me as a free, technological, democratic, scientific, secularistic society, not only faces its own alternative futures, that is alternatives within its general scope. One
historical possibility surely never remotely considered is the demise of that cultural whole as a whole, and thus of most, if not all, of its own long-term trends and continuities. Also, the influence of non-technical, what one might call spiritual matters in cultural life, was never taken seriously. Fundamental alienation or dissolution, a revolutionary spirit based on massive injustice and disaffection, a basic change of attitudes and values, these too and surely have been real possibilities in history,
and they too destroy the easy continuities on which predictions might be based. I kept thinking of such a survey based on long-term trends in Berlin or Vienna of 1910, or in Richmond of 1950, let's say, and the alternative futures for the Austrian Habsburg Empire and the Empire of the South that might have been developed in those two dates, and wondering how predictions so grounded could possibly have envisioned the new that appeared in each one of
those two histories. What is manifestly lacking in both these scientific views of the future is, I suggest, a sense of the depth and complexity of history, and the radical differences that as a subject matter for reflection, history manifests in comparison to the usual objects of the physical and the life sciences, or even a difference from an abstracted and radically delimited aspect of the social scene like a market or a war. In history, as Tillich insisted, freedom
is polar to destiny, a deep contingency to continuity, and here also spiritual continuities are as important as our economic and technological ones. None of this was considered, and thus sheer abstractions, incidentally quite antithetical to one another. One might say various or contradictory scenes resulted from these two scientific endeavors, either that of a mythical engineer freely and purposefully determining the future flux in an utterly new direction, or that of a stable continuity with moderate variations moving with
discernible probability into a clearly seen and knowable future. What is lacking in these secular attempts to deal with a veritable mystery is reflection upon and so symbolic thematization of precisely those dimensions of ultimacy, destiny, fate, and their strange relation to freedom and contingency, which we tried to explore last night. If history be as we experience it, reflection on the nature of temporal and passage, on man and his freedom and unfreedom, on destiny and fate must be
carried on if there is to be a rational basis for scientific thought about history. So now let us turn to philosophical reflection on history. This is, as we have just argued, certainly necessary if we are to understand history even scientifically. And it is, as we have tried to emphasize all along, also essential to a theological view of history and its hopes. When we look at philosophy of history in our own time, two very diverse groups appear
on the scene. The critical philosophies of history here and in England and the Marxists in the rest of the world. That picture was meant to be humorous. I don't, didn't get a laugh out of it. It may be overdrawn, but I don't think it's too much. I would say critical philosophy of history is dominant in the Anglo-Saxon countries and Marxism elsewhere. History as a word has always had two different but interrelated meanings. It can refer
to the objective course of events in which men live and about which they may inquire. The history historians write about. Or it can refer to the inquiry itself to men's knowledge and understanding of that course of events. In this case, the history historians write. The first meaning, namely history as the course of events, reflected upon in philosophy results in what is now called speculative philosophy of history. An attempt to understand that total course of events with
regard to its fundamental patterns, if any, its basic dynamic and causative factors, and its goal or meaning, if there be one. Here, philosophy is to history as science is to nature, seeking to uncover its rational structure, its patterns of change, its most fundamental form and goal. The paradigm case is, of course, that of Hegel. Although before him, on this subject, and there are many back in the theological past, as you know, Marx, Spencer, Spengler, Toynbee, all
of them were, in a sense, speculative philosophies of history. And Marxism and the present represents the dominant form. In the Anglo-Saxon world, this has been wildly out of fashion. And wildly is too mild a word, it seems to me. And most philosophical reflection on history has therefore been critical by nature. That is, reflection on man's knowledge of history. Asking the questions, what sort of knowledge is it? And how is this knowledge that we have of
history related to science and its modes of knowing? This is the historical inquiry, what philosophy of science is to science? Philosophy of science doesn't tell us what nature is like, but what science is like. So here in this case, philosophy of history doesn't tell us what history is like, but what historical knowledge is or should be. Let us note here that philosophy is, in accordance with the tendencies of analytic and linguistic philosophy, not itself posing as
a it accepts the empirical canon that only the special sciences are cognitive. That only the special sciences can make assertions about what is or what has been the case. And that the role of philosophy is not in the sense to be cognitive or to make assertions about reality, but to inquire into the logic, the epistemology, and the language of the special sciences. And common sense, of course. In this case, what we know of history is what
historians say about history, or possibly also what social scientists may say. And philosophy's role is to talk about their talk. It is a second order, not a first order discipline. Now this does not mean that what critical philosophy of history has said, is it all trivial or uninteresting in itself or to in theology. Though as we shall know, it seems to me at least, much like the scientific views of history just dealt with, to leave unreflected
upon a vast number of important issues. In any case, the main subjects of discussion are of great concern to us here. First, what is a historical explanation? Is it like science in terms of general necessitating laws? Is it in terms of the particular conditions or causes necessary for a particular event to transpire, for example, in explaining the First World War? Is it a matter of understanding or uncovering the motives or intentions or even the moral aims
of the actors in the event, as Collingwood was inclined to say? Or is it a question of bringing to light the massive hidden social factors, economic, technical, cultural, racial, what have you, that lay back of the event and its actors and brought the event to be? Such debates are important for theology. Here they are, so to speak, empirically conducted, by empirical I mean, by examining what historians in fact do in trying to explain an event. But
these issues, it seems to me, fundamentally reach towards ontology, that is, towards a decision about the fundamental factors or causes at work in historical change, an issue which historians can hardly avoid, at least presupposing, and also critical philosophers of history, but which, let us note, is not itself a direct object of the historian's inquiry. Debate is also centered, as I'm sure you all know, about the objectivity of historical inquiry. Can the historian discover what really happened,
the actual facts, or is his reconstruction so determined by his own values, his own weltanschauung, his own view of social and historical change, that his history, the history he writes, reveals as much of his own perspective and that of his own time as it does of his object? As has been frequently remarked about Gibbon's great work, that it tells us almost as much about the 18th century, or at least an 18th century gentleman, as it does
about Rome. And if we grant that another age has a vastly different worldview than our own and different values, how are we to understand what they said, their texts, so as to lose neither the integrity or uniqueness, that is, the difference from us, of what they said, or, on the other hand, our sense of its relevance and significance to us, the continuity with what we are and think? Here, the historical problem of fact and interpretation, which
we spoke of a moment ago, merges with the hermeneutical problem, the problem of interpreting texts, and the relevance of these discussions in critical philosophy of history to theology and its concerns become self-evident, illustrated by the remarks in our first lecture on the depth of that problem of interpreting the scriptural texts. I am, however, inclined to agree with both Tillich and Pannenberg, who've written a good deal on this subject, that critical philosophy of history and hermeneutical
philosophy, if restricted to reflection on historical and hermeneutical inquiry alone, remain abstractions in the sense that they have implicit and yet effective presuppositions as a background that have not yet been clarified, and so which call, if they are not to be irrational or arbitrary at essential points, for appropriate further reflection, for, if you will, ontological foundations. As both of these men have argued, no understanding of an event or a period can be projected by the historian
without an implicit and yet effective view of connections in history, of causes in history, and what is or what is not significant, therefore, in cultural change. Nor can any important periodization of history into definite periods necessary for thinking about it be made or any statements about the influences and importance of an event after its time, unless a general history theory of the course and structure of history is implied. Correspondingly, if hermeneutics requires, as Gadamer has said,
a fusion of the horizon of the text with our horizon, this likewise implies a view of general history, of the relation of horizons or cultural epochs to one another. Tillich adds that any historical explanation requires a view of human motivation, of human freedom in relation to causes and to destiny, a theory of the relation of moral norms to action, and a political and social theory on the part of the historian. If, for example, we are to
say that a society was oppressive or crumbling or decadent or alternatively creative and healthy, we assume a normative view of society on which those judgments are made. And what historical judgment of causes or explanation can possibly be projected without these normative judgments about a society? Thus, history and hermeneutical inquiry and the philosophy that reflects on them seem like our experience of history itself, which we examined last night, to point beyond the surface level of events, intentions,
actions, and even texts to a deeper understanding of the dynamic factors in historical change, the structure of the historical continuum, and even the patterns of universal history if their own deeper presuppositions are to be aired. Again, the pension of our wider culture to study the immediate and diverse and to leave the underlying structure un-thematized by reflective thought threatens to make our reflection on history as well as our life within it irrational, that is unqualified and therefore
unjustified and therefore incoherent at its foundational level. And thus, the speculative philosophies of history are to us of interest. As I've said, the most important form of speculative philosophy of history in our age, that is a serious reflective attempt to understand the nature of the course of history as the basis for intelligible, intelligent, and creative action in history is unquestionably Marxism. In this country, the intellectual elite has not regarded Marxism as blasphemy or unclean and therefore
quite undiscussable. It is, so to speak, merely regarded it as obviously wrong, as an ideology, as not worthy of serious discussion. But as one might study paganism, one studies this. This is, I think, a vast mistake. One cannot hazard understand mature European intellectual life without Marxism any better than one can understand mature American intellectual life without Freud. And the penetration of psychoanalysis in our culture is roughly comparable to the continent, it seems to me. And one
meets it everywhere. And almost no younger thinker or student in my acquaintance, but is even more influenced than that by these categories. And the significance of this philosophy mounts very greatly as one moves out of Europe into the rest of the world. I was not joking when I said there were two types of philosophy of critical philosophy of history in England and America and Marxism and the rest of the world. Our attitude is parochial, unrealistic, and
dangerous. And I'm talking here about the intellectual elite, not the John Birch Society. We've taken Stalin as the paradigm of this philosophy. If anybody dealt with the history of Christianity in the same way, they wouldn't study it either. The most influential Marxist philosopher in Europe, Marcuse possibly accepted, is, I believe, Ernst Bloch. One could mention Habermas, but Bloch is, I think, a more serious philosopher rather than social critic. His influence on contemporary European theology has been
immense. And it is the measure of the parochialism of our philosophical departments that Bloch's thought, like that of Heidegger, has come to us through his theological interpreters. We shall isolate only a few themes in Bloch which directly relate to our theme, and to the theologians he has influenced, of whom we will try to speak more fully tonight. The first point or theme is his radical and, I think, very refreshing rejection of empiricism and verificationism. The notion,
as he puts it, that thought to be significant or true must accommodate itself to the visible and present facts. On the contrary, as he puts it, almost all important thought, religious, philosophical, and social, has done just the opposite. It is implicitly or explicitly sought to present what is not the facts, what is the not yet, what might be the ideal that is not yet actual, utopia. These daydreams, visions, messianic theologies rendered reflective into ontologies have, for
Bloch, been crucial to historical process. Creative thought directs rather than is directed by the facts. Man is not a slave of the present but the creator of the future. Creative thought transforms the given rather than is conformed to it, and thus is the ideal possibility the most important object of serious thought, and thus is the new in history and in historical process possible. As he ironically remarks, the statement, quote, a thousand years of injustice do not
justify one hour of injustice, as he says, is an insight so little in accord with the facts that it brought about the English, the American, and the French revolutions. He is also critical in part of Marxism and Marx for being too scientific, materialistic, and bourgeois, for concentrating on the economic and political conditions of a new world, which are important, but leaving man, the humanum, the soul of man out. The point of political reform, Bloch continually says,
is to develop the inwardness, the spirituality, the ultimate concerns of man, and this Marx, at least in his later writings, forgot. The spirit or soul is the locus of value in man. Marxism, as he defines it, is a social and political philosophy in search of humanistic development. Thus, the essential nature of historical man and of his world is process, the movement into what is not yet, what might be, but is not yet there. To understand in
terms of what is, is to miss the whole point, humanly, ontologically, and rhetorically. The essence of something is only what it can and will be, its fulfillment. The essence of man and of history is only what they can become. Thus, the hidden name and truth, this is the hidden name and truth of religious myth and of theology. It is what makes ontology important and literature itself, that is to portray in images what is not but what
can be, the utopias that are the essence of what really is. For this reason, the future, where what is can be realized, where essences will be manifest, is the most important category of reality and of philosophy, and the future determines the present. For all human action and so the course of history itself is determined by men through their intentions and aims, by the dreams and images of possibility which action can realize. Again, what is is rectified
by utopia. Thought can never and should never seek to refute possibility in terms of present facts. Empiricism, as he says, is the hidden ideology of conservatism and fascism, and thus the major ideological tool closing an open history. He fund a lecture in a university on Ernst Bloch. The main active factor in historical process is subjective or human. Man's dreams and utopias expressed in myth, philosophy, and theology, and the hopes for the future which these dreams embody.
As expressions of possibility, religion and ontology are vital to human life, something Bloch says materialistic socialism never understood. Bloch believes and seeks to show in his detailed examination of the myths, the literature, the philosophy, and theologies of the past, that utopia, unrealized possibility, is the center of cultural creativity and so of ongoing process. These imaged possibilities determine the course of history, for it is on their basis that men act in history and create the new. Thus,
through imaged possibility, the future determines the present. Inevitably as at war with what is, this not yet future creates a dialectical pattern of contradiction and of conflict in the process of history. However, beside these subjective or human factors, there are also, Bloch says, necessarily objective external non-human factors necessary to the future realization of possibility and process. Though Bloch, one must admit, has not explicated these as did Marx in his material dialectic of the social process.
Bloch refers to these objective factors as latencies, objective latencies, trends, real possibilities in the world around us. The cosmic incognito, as he calls it in one place. Or as he says, everything that arises demands an exploration of the being of the world itself, as potential being on the ascent. As matter that objectively might allow itself to be, or could be, raised above its own alienation. Then in a wonderful formula, the universal formula for philosophy at its
beginning is, S is not yet P. No subject already has its adequate predicates. The world process then, for him, has a tendency or latency to find what is redeeming and whole. An instability, a built-in instability to remain in its present dismal state. Hence, the future and hope are utterly significant as is action towards the future and on the grounds of hope. Bloch is a staunch atheist, though more on Feuerbachian than on Marx's terms. For religion
for him is not at all conservative as it was for Marx, but radical in its meaning and so essential and creative. Religion that is, without God. God, the omnipotent ruler of what is and what has been for Bloch, is superstition and a demon. The enemy of every freedom, of openness and of possibility in history. Thus what is needed, he writes, is a messianic kingdom without God. The hope for an ideal but one that is solely human.
Religion then can become creative insofar as it is humanized, made into the dream of men and realized by men's free acts. When the transcendent attributes that in the past have distinguished deity from man are transformed into future attributes, distinguishing the kingdom, the truly human world, from what is. Thus the sense in traditional religion of mystery, of depth, of possibility, of the sacred are for Bloch essential for cultural life. That there is a sacred space of possibility
in the future, as he puts it, and that man can become redeemed, divine. This is what religion adds, and this is strangely from a Jewish philosopher, what the Christ figure meant as for Bloch the final form of religion. Preaching the coming kingdom and affirming the identity of his humanity with any conception of deity. Bloch is an exciting and inspiring philosopher. His sense of the vast possibilities of process and of history, of its movement into the new,
of the dominance of the future, of the mystery and spiritual depth of man, and so the sacral character of the not yet are very relevant in a revolutionary age, and self-consciously an apocalyptic spirit. No wonder he has had such influence on modern theology. However, as his theological followers, Pannenberg and Moltmann particularly point out, his atheism is at some point inconsistent with his rest of his views and crippling to the genius of his own thought and
the credibility of his very real hopes. What are, they ask him, the real grounds for hope in your vision? How can a blind, naturalistically interpreted process be the hope basis for our hopes and the realization of the good? In giving up Marx's ontology of history, have you not given up the basis for hope? Are mere latencies enough? And if we count solely on human autonomy and action to create the new world, Bloch is very real hope.
Can really alienated man so recreate and redeem himself in his world all alone? Thus they argue, both of them, the sacred space of possibility in Bloch's future, the objective ground of the not yet that will be someday and that now determines the present from the future. This space, this numinous space must become God, not the traditional God of the past and present, but the God whose being like Bloch's possibilities is future and who brings in his
new world from the future. And in this rather simple transformation appears the modern eschatological theology of Pannenberg and Moltmann. The last philosophy we shall consider and only briefly this afternoon is Whitehead. I must say, I should say, I wrote or at least conceived these ideas in Leiden and not in Chicago, although writing on Whitehead, one would think that perhaps I was forced by the Jesuit committee that lets you out of the gates to write on Whitehead,
but that's not the case. Although he was not, as Bloch is, directly a philosopher of history, he dealt creatively with many of the same historical themes as Bloch did. And one may say that as Dewey and the Marxists are at one, as I pointed out, with regard to the instrumental theory of knowing, as knowing, resolving human problems, so in a very interesting way process philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world gives possibility the same crucial role that
this other kind of Marxist philosophy in Bloch gives. But Whitehead is, as I shall try to argue, a better guide in thinking out a theology of history and of eschatology than is even Ernst Bloch. Reality for Whitehead as for Bloch is process, as you all know, a flux of events rather than the endurance of unchanging substances. Events come to be in pass away, each arising out of its own past, repeating certain characteristics of that past. There
are a multitude of events involved in every one of my spoken sentences and every one of the sentences you hear. You are a series of events for Whitehead in each passing sentence. And thus are there, because of these repeated continuities of events of the past, there are continuities, societies, things and persons in the world around us. But each event also enacts or is able to enact a new form, a new possibility. Thus is there change in
reality. And thus is possibility, what is not yet, central to the understanding of what is actual. Order is there, else there could be no real things in our world, no societies that make up persons and things, and so no vivid experience. But order for Whitehead is continually qualified by novelty, by higher ranges of order, by new possibilities, else the flux be cramped and deadened by a mere repetition of what has been. Thus as for Bloch, possibility
in the new are essential for creative being. But in Whitehead, they arise out of order in continuity with what has been rather than as opposed to it. Whitehead in this sense represents the liberal world and perhaps a providential view of existence rather than the radical world and an eschatological view. Events as they arise conform to their past and so in part repeated or manifest its influence. And so the categories of substance and causality are important for
our experience. They are affected in this way by their past because they feel that past, says Whitehead, and in feeling it reproduce it in their own being. These conformal feelings that make me like my own past instant ago, Whitehead calls physical prehensions. But events also enact new possibilities, new forms not yet characteristic of achieved actuality. Thus they also have what Whitehead calls conceptual prehensions. They feel and enact novel possibilities and forms that never have been before.
Thus each event is in as direct relation to what is not yet the case as it is to what has been the case. Possibility, change, and novelty are crucial to being. Events are also free, self-determining. How they feel their past and so how much they conform to it and how they feel new possibility and so how much they enact it are finally determined by the entity or event for itself. We are ultimately determined, Whitehead asserts,
by nothing outside of us, neither by the shape of our inheritance nor even by the objective possibilities presented to us. Autonomy and self-creation are ingredient in all process and thus is the future really open and thus are we free to enact it. In this metaphysical situation, as Whitehead calls it, there are then three fundamental and universal factors. What he calls creativity, the ongoing flux of events, eternal objects or forms, possibilities for the flux and the
freedom of each entity to create itself out of this its world. So far I would suggest we have before us a more universal, that is cosmological, more subtle and intricate elaboration of Bloch's general theme or something like it. But says Whitehead, there must be a further factor present in the metaphysical situation to explain process as we experience it, a factor he calls God. For he argues possibility must be somewhere in actuality. It can't float in as
effective from nowhere and so there must be some real entity or being that envisions all of possibility, orders it and relates it to the ongoing flux of events. Furthermore, we cannot explain the relative order of process that there are things and persons in our world, that is societies that hold together, unless there is some objective order to the possibilities open to every event. Unformed creativity plus the infinite realm of possibility plus the freedom of every entity
to form itself, altogether Whitehead argues cannot form a definite world or a social order which we experience and especially a world whose increasing value is created. Bloch's latency or cosmic incognito is not enough. It cannot explain the order we know or provide an objective ground for the hope in the not yet which he himself envisioned, so Whitehead would argue. Thus there is an entity God, the ground of order and so of advance in the novel possibility
in our world. He is, Whitehead says, dipolar as are all entities. He is everlasting and changeless in one aspect of his being. He is changing, developing and dependent on the world in another aspect of his being. His primordial nature, that is the changeless aspect, is the conceptual prehension of all possibilities that gives an eternal order to the possibilities relevant to process. Thus does each event on arising get its appropriate ideal from God. God is the continual
ground for all the novel possibilities of history, possibilities which lead to the achievement of the creative new in life. His consequent nature is God's prehension of achieved actuality. Each entity as it has become is experienced by God, influences God's experience and is thus brought into the unity of God's life. Thus, Whitehead says, nothing that is of value is lost and the passingness and transience of ordinary becoming are rescued by the permanence of God's being. This is
a magnificent philosophical vision of process as characterized both by destiny and freedom, by change and by permanence, by order and by novelty and, as you well know, of immense theological relevance. More than Bloch, it seems to me, it provides modes of understanding useful in making intelligible in contemporary terms the nature of historical experience and the modern meaning of some of our important biblical symbols. Two problems remain for me with this vision as Whitehead explicated it. For
Whitehead, creativity is formed by God, not created or produced by him. He provides the existing flux with its possible forms. He is not the source of that flux. Thus, so to speak, the formal aspect of life is further from God or is closer related to God than is the dynamic aspect. Thus, our experience of our own being is only partly indebted to God. Both our existence and our freedom are elements he merely molds, shapes or lures.
They are not his creatures. But as we saw and as I would argue, our contingent being and our freedom themselves point to intimacy and so to their own dependence on God. And this is, I believe, the clear biblical witness on this subject. Secondly, it is hard, though possibly not impossible, to comprehend the principle of the demonic, of a bound and fallen freedom in Whitehead's universe of orderly advance into novelty. Or how God, so understood, can act
in radically new ways to redeem a lost world. Again, these aspects of historical experience as we tried to analyze it and of biblical symbolism seem to fit uneasily in this essentially progressivist ontology. Thus, as we shall suggest somewhat brazenly, Whitehead's thought like that of Bloch must be used, not adopted by theology for its self-understanding. Secular philosophy, I believe, cannot provide the fundamental vision elucidating our historical experience. For as non-speculative philosophy is emphasized, we do
not stand yet at the end of history and thus its most basic structures are not clear to our empirical reason. But in clarifying the significant factors in our present, philosophy can illumine and clarify those fundamental theological or religious symbols by which we may think out the wholeness of experience in all its creativity, its vast contradiction, and its hope. And thus, we are driven beyond philosophy to raise questions about a theology of history. Let me remind you
that Professor Gilkey will lecture again this evening here at 7:45.