Is There an Ethics of Creativity?

Ethics & the Environment, 2009

iifb.org

Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, 2008

In his brief preface to Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead provides a rare window into how he conceived of his own work. “The three books—Science and The Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas—are an endeavour to express a way of understanding the nature of things…. Each book can be read separately; but they supplement each other’s omissions or compressions” (AI vii). If I am correct, one of the most important concepts in process thought is virtually absent from Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality. I suggest that the single most important “omission” remedied by Adventures of Ideas is the claim that beauty is the one self-justifying aim of the universe, that “The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty” (AI 265). Creativity is in this sense “kalogenic”; it is inherently beauty generating. Though there are notable exceptions, surprisingly few process scholars have recognized and embraced the significance of this claim. Indeed, beauty is notable in its absence from most of the major works on process metaphysics, which tend to focus on Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. Perhaps fearing charges of aestheticism, those who do note the centrality of beauty have mistakenly sought either to minimize its significance or to explain it away as metaphorical embellishment. The goal of this brief essay is to defend the view that process thought, particularly process ethics, will be more adequate and applicable if it is “re-centered” around the concept of beauty.

Process Studies, 2014

International philosophical quarterly, 2005

The aim of this essay is twofold. First, I examine the role of Alfred North Whitehead and process thinkers in bringing about and shaping the field of environmental ethics. As we will see, our job is not so much to develop the connections between Whitehead and environmental thought as to recover them. Second, given this genealogical work, I invite process scholars to reconsider their generally hostile reception of Aldo Leopold and his land ethic. I suggest that a version of the land ethic grounded in a process axiology could make a significant contribution to contemporary environmental thought.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the consequences of Process Thought to the theory and practice of philosophically oriented life forming. One important element is to clarify the meaning of ‘art of life’ in a process sense. Art is not merely an imitation of nature, it is much more the continuation of the creativity of natural processes in bringing about new forms constantly. Thus, art of life consists not only of copying and repeating pre-given patterns, nor is it the realization of potentialities in an Aristotelian manner. Instead, it means the intensive work of creative forces to reestablish relations to other beings, and at the same time to redefine one’s own identity by this. Aesthetic values play a central role within these artistic activities, because former experienced beauty serves as motivation for our striving, while imagined beauty represents the goal toward which we strive. This differentiation together with some other considerations proves to be helpful for distinguishing more precisely between the ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ dimensions as diverse subcategories of the ‘aesthetical’. Moreover, this conceptual framework explains and underlines the intrinsically teleological nature of life shaping. Finally, the probably most significant point is the analysis of the nature of ‘self’ according to the principles of a non-substantialist metaphysics. The whole postmodern discourse on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ – that originates from the work of M. Foucault in the early 80s – is marked by an embarrassing ambiguity. Although it expressly refuses a substantialist interpretation of the human subject, and shares the heritage of existentialism and structuralism in this respect, it almost desperately seeks to constitute the same subject again, which seems to be a nearly impossible undertaking, based on this theoretical background. By emphasizing the superjective character of subjectivity, the philosophy of organism provides new conceptual means to resolve this apparent contradiction.

AbstrAct: This article argues that process philosophy and Hartmanian formal axiology are natural allies that can contribute much to each other. Hartmanian axiology can bring much needed order and clarity to process thought about the definitions of " good, " " better, " and " best, " about what things are intrinsically good, and about the nature and value of unique, enduring, individual persons. Process thought can bring to axiology greater clarity about and emphasis on the relational and temporal features of human selfhood. The nature and significance of personal endurance is emphasized throughout.

Université de Montréal, faculté des études supérieures, département de philosophie, 1994

A theodicy is an attempt to show with logical rigour that God, the creator of the World, can be considered to be morally all-good despite the evil that is in the World. Our aim is to show that because Whitehead‘s view on the all-goodness of God and related matters evolved, Whitehead in his final writings could not have a satisfactory theodicy. We begin by briefly examining Whitehead's early view that traditional theodicies are deficient because they fail to satisfy the intellect. We then proceed to see how a traditional theodicy such as that of Thomas Aquinas deals with the problem of God and evil. Here we find that what is fundamental to his position is that God is the source of esse through which both evil and good become defined. We then proceed to examine how Whitehead‘s view of value evolved to that of value as harmony. Subsequently, We find that evil for Whitehead is any actual entity that presents a threat of destruction to the harmony of a society of actual entities. We then examine some important reasons why Whitehead introduces God into his metaphysics after which we proceed to determine to what extent God is morally all-good. Here we find that in his initial writings, Whitehead attempted a simple theodicy but by his final more complex writings, we notice that God cannot be a moral entity although God can still be a source of good for the world. Our arguments are founded on the notion that morality for Whitehead presupposes freedom and consciousness. In Whitehead‘s final conception of God, God does not have these characteristics; hence God cannot be a moral entity, making Whitehead‘s theodicy unsatisfactory. We conclude by examining some of Whitehead's critics and we also look at some theodicies that are inspired by Whitehead's ideas. We finish by trying to find ways that Whitehead's doctrines could be improved so as to render his theodicy more satisfactory.