PROCESS ECOLOGICAL ETHICS
(continued)
Gregory James Moses
Introduction
The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision
Process or Process Relational Metaphysics in all its versions is
blatantly revisionary rather than descriptive. It seeks to change our
thinking at a deep level rather than just explicate the way we typically
already think. Or at least it suggests such a change. It does this in the
name of adequacy to the totality of our experience, including scientific,
artistic and religious experience. It does this also for the sake of the
smoother attainment of the good and the beautiful in our lives, in our
relationships with each other and within the concerns we have as an
interacting part of Nature.
Connected Events rather than Substances
Process people suggest that the world consists in events, happenings,
processes in various kinds of connections or 'nexus'. This is the case,
rather than the world consisting in substances or enduring substantial
things with properties which more or less maintain their identity
independently of time and relation. Substances are cashed in as
certain kinds of connected systems of events. In some versions, these
events or processes may be nested inside each other. In other
versions all bona fida events are microscopic. (See Moses 1997 for
details.) For all versions time is of the essence, and everything takes
some time to happen.
Strongly Relational with Creativity
The Process universe is strongly relational, strongly connected rather
than either atomistic or totally holistic. It is also into creativity in a big
way. Everything is a more or less creative taking account of its total
past environment, and a giving of itself to be taken into account by the
future of the environment. This is broad enough to include electronic
events on the one hand and the event of you here and now reading this
paper. That latter is also a particular way of taking account of your
total social and natural environment, at a certain point in your life, for
the sake of the future of that environment. The same might be said
about my writing this paper. Striving to be less anthropomorphic in our
statement but rather more abstract: everything is reception,
transformation and transmission of something like energy and
information from total past environment to total future environment.
In other words, everything is an environmental event or else a
connected series or nexus of such events. But not only that.
Everything adds something to the process, everything makes a
difference, albeit oftentimes oh so slight. This latter conviction is one of
the features which stops the scheme being strongly holistic to the point
of being totalizing. Everything is an environmental event, but it is also
a little bit individual, it cannot be entirely cashed in terms of its
ensemble of social relations. The other feature is a differing relation to
past and to future. An event is internally related to its past, cannot be
described or conceived except as a particular way of taking account of
that past. But it is externally related to the future. What it is here and
now is describable and conceivable apart from the way things actually
work out. Certain futures are made probable by the present events,
but not entirely certain, at least not down to the last detail.
Different complexity of environment and different
levels of natural event
The kind and degree of connectivity is still rather important in the
scheme, however. As the universe evolves, there is a progressive
development towards more and more subtle and complex kinds of
environmental order, capable of supporting the existence of higher and
higher-grade systems of series of events, and eventually of those kinds
of series of events we call animal and human minds. In our cosmic
epoch, which is to say, in the world as we experience it today, there are
a broad variety of kinds of middle sized phenomena, ranging from
'aggregates', such as rocks, to 'compound individuals', such as koalas,
dolphins and human beings. Compound individuals are where there
appears to be a presiding or dominant more or less well connected
temporal series of high-grade events in the system providing for a kind
of global control. For example, in our case the human mind. An
example of an aggregate would be a rock or a pile of rocks. In
between would be crystals and also plants. Plants are rather more
organized and co-ordinated in response to environment than are
aggregates, but they do not appear to have a presiding series of events
as co-ordinating element. As Hartshorne puts it, plants are
democracies of cells. What this makes us I'm not so sure! What might
we say of a forest? Would this count as a democracy of trees and
other flora and fauna?
The metaphysical system thus postulates different levels of natural
events, the level being proportional to the quality of reception and
transformation and the consequent likely effectiveness and spread of
the transmission. The higher the grade event the more the capacity for
taking into account the environment and responding to it in a creative
fashion. On the other hand, as stated previously, what kinds of events
are possible is a function of the richness of the sustaining environment.
In a too poor environment the rich events might well be the first to go.
Meanwhile, the quality and effective extent of the reception, the degree
of creativity or self-initiative in the transformation and the likely
effectiveness of the transmission are taken as capable of almost
indefinite degrees in both directions, from the smallest sub-atomic
events in the midst of space to God. Human and animal
consciousness, in this scheme, is thus no big deal, just something
which may happen quite naturally in certain rich environments. They
are a particular intensification of what is going on all over the place.
Certain key people in the process tradition go on to talk in terms of
Panpsychism (Hartshorne) or at least Panexperientialism (Griffin), soul
or at least experience everywhere. There are other people, including
this writer, who wonder whether such expressions are worth their price
on the open market. What is essential to the scheme is a multi-layered
or multi-level or differentiated ontology: there are different species or
levels of natural event, albeit sharing the same basic structure.
Everything is a particular way of taking account of its environment and
a gift by nature to the future of that environment. There are no
vacuous actualities, nothing which does nothing. Though certain
aggregates of smaller actualities give the impression of being rather
vacuous in so far as the various contributions cancel out. But there is
no need to say that soul or even experience is everywhere.
Human beings as self-conscious interacting parts of nature
We human beings are high-grade natural events enmeshed in an
environment of natural events of various kinds. This is to say that for
process people we are very much an interacting part of the natural
world. What makes us, and perhaps some other animals and
creatures on other planets different, is that we can know that we are an
interacting part of Nature. More grandiosely, we are within that class of
natural events wherein Nature comes to know itself. What this does is
to give us something else to take account of in our self-constituting,
which thereby opens the way to ethics. But before we come to that, a
word on God and religion.
God as affecting all and affected by all
Process metaphysical systems are mostly theistic, though even in the
Whiteheadian camp there are also non-theistic versions (esp. Donald
Sherburne). For our purposes, we may distinguish a spectrum of views
from minimal religious naturalism' (Stone, 1993) to various maximal
possibilities. Minimal religious naturalism talks in terms of immanent
and transcendent resources for the task of living together in the natural
world, without specifying a single metaphysical source for these
resources. There is in our lives, for example, a lure towards goodness,
truth and beauty, and perhaps something analogous to this further
down the line.
There are a variety of maximal theistic versions, Whitehead,
Hartshorne, Cobb, Griffin, Suchocki, the Christian Trinitarianism of Joe
Bracken to mention some of them. Typically and deriving from
Whitehead, God is noted as principle of limitation providing a kind of
focus for the cosmic process; also as principle of possibility and of
novelty within the process. There is also a fairly common division made
between the Primordial Nature and the Consequent Nature of God,
with sometimes also a Projective or Superjective Nature.thrown in.
Roughly, this comes down to, God as Creative, God as Receptive and
God as Responsive. There is also the God as Primordial Qualification
of Creativity of the Belgian philosopher Jan Van der Veken, this last
being accessible as something religious people would recognize as
God only on the basis of particular religious experiences. This avoids
turning God into just another being amongst the beings as well as
recognizing 'God' as a specifically religious notion. What all agree on
is belief in a God who affects all and is affected by all, affected by the
fall of the sparrow in the silent spring and the flowers of the field or lack
thereof and the hair on your head falling out. This is, moreover, a God
who persuades and does not determine, not by any means an
overgrown absolute monarch or some kind of power-mad patriarch.
While a minimal religious naturalism may be sufficient to ground some
kind of broadening of concern and discerning of worth beyond the
human sphere (Stone 1993; see also Mesle 1993), theists propose that
they have rather firmer grounds (see esp. Cobb, in Mesle 1993).
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