By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
According to Hartshorne, lithe 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-itselt 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: H[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