1530.According to Hartshorne, "the principle of process"...

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According to Hartshorne, "the principle of process" is that "the togetherness of what-does-not-become-and-what-becomes itself becomes ... with the consequence that reality in its inclusive sense coincides with process (as something indicated, not merely named; process-now, not just process taken generically) and the further consequence that God, or reality itself, is Process-itself, our God now, more inclusively than [God] is immutable or eternal Being-itself" ("Tillich's Doctrine of God": 194).

But why should this principle of process be affirmed? Aside from the dialectical argument that the alternative principle--that fixed being is inclusive-has the consequence of denying the reality of process altogether (169), there is the appeal to our direct experience: "[O]ur experience, itself a process, discloses only processes and what can be abstracted therefrom[.] A 'being' which is neither any process nor any datal constituent of process, but something simpliciter more inclusive than all process--this cannot, it seems, have literal meaning, for nothing of the sort appears in experiencing!" (195).

March 1998