1. Basic concepts of process philosophy

1. Basic concepts of process philosophy

Like the categories of existential philosophies, they refer to our existence as acting, feeling, deciding, responding subjects.

The process philosophy sees it as a high-level exemplification of reality in general.

Process

      Process is fundamental. Anything which is not a process is an abstraction from process, not a full-fledged actuality. //anything 이 God 일 수 있다. 그러나 not actuality여서 Jesus가 필요하다.

      The bare assertion that the actual is processive has religious significance even by itself. Since the world as we experience it is a place of process, of change, of becoming, of growth and decay, the contrary notion that what is actual or fully real is beyond change leads to a devaluation of life in the world. Since our basic religious drive is to be in harmony with the fully real, belief that the fully real is beyond process encourages one or another form of escape from full participation in the world. But to understand that the process is the reality directs the drive to be with into immersion in the process.

      The Religious implication of reality as processive is in harmony with one of the chief consequences of the Judeo-Christian vision of reality. In this tradition, God has been viewed as active within the historical process. 

      The temporal process is a transition from one actual entity to another. These entities are momentary events which perish immediately upon coming into being. The perishing marks the transition to the succeeding events. Times is not a single smooth flow, but comes into being in little droplets.

      Real individual

      The boundaries of most things which ordinarily called events are arbitrarily imposed from without, of course. Events sch as elections, wars, storms, graduations and dinners are of this type.

      Events that have a unity of their own.  → experiential unity. → actual occasions or occasions of experience.

      Personal human existence is a serially ordered society of occasions of experience. → individual (the sorts of things that endure through time) are not true individuals, but are societies of such.  Personal existence is a serially ordered society of occasions of experience. → opening up new possibilities for theological reflection.

      another type of process→ the real individual occasions of which the temporal process is made are themselves processes. Taking that bit of time to become→ concrescence which means becoming concrete.

      At this point the analogy of the motion picture breaks down, since the individual pictures are static, whereas our individual occasions of experience are dynamic acts of concrescence.

      The dual emphasis on the process of transition and the process of concrescence opens the way for the understanding of a variety of religious experiences.

1)     Transition establishes importance of time → one occasion succeeds another. The past is composed of those events that have occurred; the future is radically different since it contains no occasions; and the present is the occasion that is now occurring. The present is influenced by the past and it will influence the future. Time flows asymmetrical from the past through the present into the future. There can be not denial of the reality of time nor can there be any doctrine of its circularity. Every moment is now and none can be repeated. The sense of history is undergirded.

2)     In the process of concrescence itself, there is no time. The experience of the eternal now is also intelligible. This means not that there is static actuality, but that the successiveness of transition does not apply. Every moment is a now, which in this sense is timeless.