The Concepts of ‘Subjectivity’ and ‘God’ as Related to Religious Experience in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Metaphysics

Abstract

In this paper, I will present some important ideas about the relation between religious experience and metaphysics in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. This endeavor is significant for the topic from two points of view: firstly, Whitehead's thinking is among the most comprehensive and widely extended from the 20th Century, the applications of his ˜speculative scheme™ covering issues from ecology, physics and the foundations of mathematics, to art and religion; secondly, the concept of ˜God™, with a meaning ascribed to it by Whitehead in relation both with the history of philosophy and with his own ideas, plays a key-role in Process and Reality, his most important treatise. For Whitehead, religion is linked, broadly speaking, to the most intimate inner evolution of a human person. Although this assertion may seem trivial, in the context of his thinking, which defines terms such as ˜process™, ˜value™ or ˜satisfaction™ as essentially bounded with the evolution of any actual being, to associate a kind of experience, the religious one, to the fact itself of inner becoming conveys to this experience a fundamentally profound and inalienable metaphysical character. It is this character and ˜definiteness™ which I will describe and analyze. Keywords: experience, actual entity, subjectivity, process, God, value, creativity, vision of ideals, everlastingness, life.