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At this point, the process metaphysician agrees with the existentialist philosopher in taking our own human existence as temporal, changing, and really related to be what is ultimately real. But, unlike the existentialist, or, at any rate, many existentialists, the process philosopher by no means conceives of metaphysics to be exhausted merely by a new philosophical anthropology. On the contrary, the process metaphysics of Whitehead and Hartshorne takes our experience of ourselves to be paradigmatic of reality as such, and so generalizes the insight into our own existence as temporal and relative selves who are continually changing as also to develop both a new cosmology, or theory of the world, and a new philosophical theology, or theory of the strictly ultimate reality that in theistic religious traditions is called "God," as well as a new ontology, or theory of reality itself. Thus process metaphysics is able to understand all that is actual, from the most insignificant particle of so-called matter all the way up to the God than whom none greater can be conceived, in terms of the same set of fundamental categories or transcendental concepts--namely, as an instance of process or becoming of which time, change and relativity, are more concrete and inclusive features than eternity, changelessness, and absoluteness.

Wiki MarkupIn other words, process metaphysics is, in one important sense, monistic. Although it is definitely pluralistic in asserting that there is more than one ultimate subject of predication, it is at the same time monistic in asserting that there neither is nor could be more than one ultimate or irreducible +kind+ of such ultimate subjects of predication. It is, in Whitehead's words, "a one-substance \ [metaphysics\]," which explicitly denies all forms of dualism or pluralism with respect to actual kinds.

As for the moral position that is taken by process philosophy, it can be readily characterized, given what has now been said about its metaphysics. As the express denial of any form of metaphysical dualism or pluralism that would assert an irreducible difference or differences between kinds, process metaphysics undercuts the metaphysical justification for any homocentric self-understanding and morality. All actual things, from the least to the greatest, are ultimately of one and the same kind, and so there can at most be a relative, not an absolute, difference between one level of actual things and another with respect to how one is to act and what one is to do. Because anything actual is really related to other real things, which can make a difference to it, for better or for worse, it has an intrinsic as well as extrinsic, or merely instrumental, value. At the same time, because process metaphysics allows for the recognition of different emergent levels of actual things, which differ from one another in their degrees of variety and unity, and thus in their degrees of internal harmony or complexity, it enables one to make all of the relative differences that a sound morality requires between one level of things and another--say, between human beings and the other nonhuman animals who coinhabit our planet.

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