5. Human existence

5.      Human existence

Process theology and existential anthropology

   During the formative period of recent process theology, the thought of Rudolf Bultmann was in the ascendancy. Theologians influenced by Whitehead and Hartshorne found much of Bultmann’s work highly congenial. process theologians too, wanted to demythologized inherited forms of thought and to translate them into modern terms. They, too, believed it particularly important to avoid treating the human subject as an object, and to employ categories appropriate to human subjects. They, too, found the existenzialien of Heidegger persuasive and fruitful for this purpose. They objected only that Bultmann did not develop his theology in tandem with his anthropology, and that God also should be spoken of as subject in appropriate ways.

    Existential thought → existence precedes essence. What we are as human beings is not decided for us by God, by society, or by our personal past. We decide in the act of existing.

       Our existence is radically contingent. There is no preexistent plan that includes us and assigns us a role in the scheme of things.  We experience ourselves as thrown into the world.

       Our existence is a being in the world. The world belongs to it as it belongs to the world.

       Two modes of being in the world. One is the inauthentic mode in which one’s projects are set for one by others - by social expectations or past conditioning or the hope of reward. The second is the authentic mode in which one chooses one’s own projects.→

       All above Whiteheadian agrees. 

       Heidegger pictures human existence or Dasein as being toward-death. → whitehead pictures human existence as a sequence of moments. We are perpetually perishing.  ??

       For Heidegger, the other human being appears only as the one who shares the world (Mitsein)

       For whitehead, affirms that we exist first of all in community and establish relative independence within it. With Tillich he holds that participation and individuality are polar, so that the more we participate with others in community the more we an become individuals and the more we become individuals, the more richly we participate in community.

       For whitehead, the future has this openness not simply because human decisions are not predecided, but because the radically new cannot be anticipated. The Whiteheadian can live with a hope or expectancy foreign to the existentialist but close to Ernst Bloch.

       For whitehead, the new possibility is the opportunity to incorporate the past in a new way. Where the existentialist seems to see an antithesis between having the moment controlled by the past allowing the future to be determinative, whitehead says that the more effective the future is, the more fully the potential contribution of the past is realized. 

       Bultmann can affirm that the Christ event changed the situation for human existence only by introducing ad hoc the idea of a unique act of God. Whitehead can agree with what is said of human existence as geschichtlish, but for him it is also evident that the human existence we know emerged through several stages from prehumen animal forms of existence.

       Whitehead considers the emergence of the human from its animal background in terms of the role of novelty, language, and religion.

       Animal life can face conventional novelties with conventional devices. But the governing principle lacks large power for the sudden introduction of any major novelty. But when we come to mankind, nature seems to have burst through another of its boundaries. The central activity of enjoyment and expression has assumed a reversal in the importance of its diverse functions.  The conceptual entertainment of unrealized possibility become a major factor in human mentality.

      Language is also distinctive of human beings. Mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. There are prehumen anticipations. Speech in its embryonic form varies between emotional expression and signaling.

      Religion since religion is not simply one aspect of human existence among many, but the organization of the interior life, the history of religion is the inner development of human beings that supervenes upon the completion of the biological evolutionary process.

      Four factors in religion are ritual, emotion, belief, and rationalization.

      Ritual: can be discerned in the animals. → it is the primitive outcome of superfluous energy and leisure.

      Emotion: ritual excites emotion and mankind became artist in ritual.  Emotions sensitized the organism. Thus the unintended effect was produced of sensitizing the human organism in a variety of ways diverse from what would have been produced by the necessary work of life.

      Belief supervened upon ritual and its accompanying emotion. Myths arose to explain the ritual and the emotion and to accentuate the emotion. Religion marks a new formative agent in the ascent of man. → religion begets thoughts divorced rom the mere battling with the pressure of circumstances.  Imagination secured in it a machinery for its development; thought has been led beyond the immediate objects in sight

      This emergence of thought initiated in its turn the rationalization for belief, which has occurred within the past six thousand years.

      Rational religion is religion whose beliefs and rituals have been reorganized with the aim of making it the central element in a coherent ordering of life – an ordering which shall be coherent both in respect to the elucidation of thought, and in respect to the direction of conduct towards a unified purpose commanding ethical approval.

      Four points can be noted from these observations.

Structures of human existence

      Existentialist have provided a powerful and illuminating analysis of the post Christian structure of existence.

      The role of historical figures such as Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus can be seen as bringing new structures of existence into being.

      The earlier stages of evolutionary development were traced in terms of the emergence of new structures or organisms. Most important is the emergence of animals with central nervous systems supporting higher-grade occasions of experience. The evolutionary function of this dominant or presiding occasions was to unify sensory data about the world external to the animal organism, data relevant to the survival and well-being of the organism, and to trigger appropriate motor responses.

      The evolutionary direction was toward increased centralization. Whitehead describes the animal with a central nervous system, and hence a series of presiding occasions, as a monarchical society.

      It can become the major end of the self-actualization of the occasions of psychic experience, and the well-being of the body can become its aim chiefly as that is instrumental to its own enjoyment. This is the situation that prevails the human species.

      The shift from a psyche primarily serving the body, to a psyche primarily using the body for its own purposes is a major threshold crossing in the evolutionary-historical process. Once that threshold is crossed, primary interest attaches to the structure of the inner life of the psyche itself rather than to that of the psychophysical organism. From this point on we can speak of structures of existence.

      Animal experience introduced consciousness into the world.

      Consciousness tests the results of the free play of psychic activities against the world it highlights in sense experience. In this way it disciplines the nonconscious imaginative life. this disciplining of the imagination is rationality, and it is this rationalizing activity of consciousness that finally establishes itself a primary for some segment of the human population.

      The ascendancy of the rational consciousness and the reordering of the inner life to conform with it constituted the crossing of another major threshold in the historical development of structures of existence. → whitehead calls it the emergence of rational religion. Karl Jaspers calls it the axial revolution.

     

      But when the long process of rationalizing experience reached its completion in the axial revolution, the self was estranged from this wider community. The sense of the divine reality faded or disappeared from consciousness.

      In India,

      In Israel

      The ethical structure of existence

      Primitive Christianity

           

      Rational will

     

      Hence, Christianity rejected the identification of the ultimate center of existence with the rational will.  The self can exist only as a distancing of itself from the will, as well as form emotion and reason, and this implies a sense of responsibility for all of these dimensions of experience. This self can be called spirit.

      The spiritual structure of existence is more difficult to articulate that the ethical one. One avenue to understanding it is to note the rise of autobiographical accounts of the inner life in the sphere of its effectiveness. The self as spirit examines itself.  Self-examination both expresses the sense of responsibility for self and produces that responsibility. But the self cannot control itself in the way that the rational will can control outward behavior. Thus, the self-aspiring for a new righteousness is frustrated in its efforts to transform itself into what it should be. “Ought” does not imply “can” in spiritual existence in the direct way that is true of ethical existence. Just for this reason the sense of “original sin” or natural depravity comes into play to describe the resistance of the spirit to the realization of its own aspirations.

      The structure of spiritual existence can be actualized in two modes. Authentic, inauthentic, the alternatives for the Christian are love and self-preoccupation.       

      The peculiar danger of spiritual existence is that the self that objectifies or transcends itself becomes preoccupied with itself in self-enclosed way.  It narcissistically wallows in its own guilt and its own achievements. Spontaneous affection and spontaneous ethical obedience give way to actions motivated by reflexive concern for their effect upon the spiritual person. By continually asking whether its motives are pure, the self destroys the possibility of this purity.  In this way spirit can make of itself an isolated existence intolerable to itself and to others. This the peculiar possibility for dis-ease introduced by spiritual existence.

      The alternative is the Christian mode of spiritual existence in which the spirit is open to the creative-responsive love of god. the sense of responsibility for one’s self is retained in its fullness, but the self is also open to receiving that which it cannot attain of itself.  In its openness to the creative love of God, the self receives new possibilities for its own existence that point it away from itself toward wider horizons of interest. Through its openness to the responsive love of God, it receives assurance of its acceptance in spite of its sin, is freed from preoccupation with itself and is enabled to turn to others with a disinterested concern for their welfare.  The openness to God’s love also enables the Christian to be sensitively responsive to the feelings of others. In all these ways spiritual existence, freed from self-preoccupation by openness to God, is peculiarly capable of reflecting the creative-responsive love of God in its relation to others. This loving mode of existence is the peculiar possibility for increased enjoyment introduced by spiritual existence.