Whitehead's intellectual adventure

Abstract

This article traces Whitehead's own adventure of ideas, . especially the way in which he gradually worked out his concept of God. This adventure had its own dark side. Whitehead was impatient with the process of preparing his manuscript for publication. In Science and the Modern World, he left his original lectures intact, even though his additions espouse a very different orientation to time. The original lectures are about events, each infinitely divisible, while the additions examine occasions, which are atomistic and not further divisible without loss of actuality. This is often overlooked because we tend to assume a book should represent a single unit of interpretation. In this case the book is read as if it were all about occasions, when most of the book is about events. In Process and Reality Whitehead determined to leave everything he had written intact, even though he seems to have changed his mind on crucial points some 13 times. Because all these passages are simply placed side by side, they offer valuable clues as to his intellectual adventure, which is examined in this essay in terms of its three successive concepts of God: God as non-temporal, as the conceptual realization of all forms and as the temporal experience of the world.