Whitehead’s Transformation of Pure Act

Abstract

WHITEHEAD'S TRANSFORMATION OF PURE ACT IN AN EFFORT to avoid any final bifurcation into two realms of being and becoming, as in Plato, Aristotle argued that only concrete particulars were fully actual, with forms only derivatively existent as the forms of these actualities. Yet under pressure from his understanding of the basic contrast between matter and form in terms of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle was driven more and more to identify form and actuality .1 Thus the immaterial reality of God becomes a pure, unchanging actuality not readily distinguishable from Plato's form of the Good, although Aristotle seeks to endow it with an interior life of ceaseless activity of "thinking." As pure actuality God is thus conceived as pure form, without matter. How pure form can engage in ceaseless activity of any sort is not clearly explained. Thomas Aquinas was able to explain the activity of immaterial being primarily by freeing the basic polarity of potentiality and actuality from its exclusive identification with matter and form. It was also possible to apply this contrast to form and esse or the act of being. Purely immaterial forms, such as angelic intelligences, could not create themselves by their own power, but were dependent upon the creative act of God whereby they received their own act of being. Thus pure form was in potency to this act of being. As infinite esse, God was pure actuality without any admixture of potentiality, and by the same token he was pure activity in no wise limited by any element of form.2 1 Here see Ivor Leclerc, " Form and Actuality," pp. 169-89 in the book he edited, The Rdevance of Whitehead (London: George Allen &Unwin, 1961). Pages 169-71 summarize this problem for Aristotle; the rest of the essay shows how Whitehead successfully maintains the distinction between form and actuality. • The nature of the act of being is ably explained by Etienne Gilson in his Being and Some Phuosophm-s (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 381 382 LEWIS S. FORD This solution was not without its difficulties. God's relation to form is not clarified thereby. We have the formula, that his essence is his existence, i.e. his infinite esse, but this seems to have the force of making him sheer existence devoid of any essence whatever, since any element of form would in him represent a potentiality not fully enacted. Then God becomes radically unknowable, except insofar as it is possible to know him without the mediation of form. The most acute difficulty, however, emerges from religious concerns. The perfection of God is expressed as pure act, but pure act appears to be devoid of all receptivity. Receptivity is understood in terms of passive potentiality, which pure act emphatically excludes. Besides, divine perfection must be unchanging, for that which is already perfect can only change for the worse. Yet receptivity to the world and to our sorrows and achievements is undeniably part of divine perfection, as Charles Hartshorne has eloquently shown us years ago.8 He speaks for a widespread contemporary sensitivity, a sensitivity implicitly acknowledged hy ingenious attempts to affirm such personal receptivity while at the same time preserving the classical immutability of God.4 In addition, if none of our achievements are received into the divine life and have an effect upon his, they seem lacking in any ultimate significance . Though in itself pure self-giving activity, the Thomistic God of pure act, because utterly devoid of all receptivity, strikes many of our contemporaries just as static and unyielding as the unity of pure form. Thomas succeeded in transforming pure act from pure form to pure activity. We must now complete the transformation by reconceiving this activity in a way so as to include receptivity. 195~), chapter five, and The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), chapter one. •The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale Univerity Press, 1948). •See particularly W. Norris Clarke, S. J. "A New Look at the Immutability of God," in God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth, S. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978) , and my response, " The Immutable God and Father Clarke " in The New Scholasticism, 49...