Does Process Thought Allow Personal Immortality?

Abstract

If by personal immortality one means that the soul is naturally eternal and passes as a substance through physical death to another life, then the answer to this question is a firm No. Both Alfred North Whitehead and his most famous student Charles Hartshorne disavowed such personal immortality as philosophically incompatible with the basic tenets of process thought. For Whitehead, and all philosophers who claim to follow him, process is the ultimate metaphysical generality describing how actual entities (occasions) instantiate themselves from the causality of entities in their past to then become objectified as they influence successor actual entities. To claim that there are multiple exceptions to the sway of universal process in the form of eternal souls introduces a radical and unacceptable philosophical incoherence into the Whiteheadian metaphysical system. Hartshorne held that a belief in eternal souls was not only incompatible with process thought but also compromised the philosophy of Berkeley, Descartes and Kant. In addition, he considered such belief bad religion and argued forcibly against it.