Process Philosophy and Political Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 473 hauer explicitly rejected; the key, too, to Nietzsche's critique of the Kantian and Schopenhauerian understanding of beauty, which with its emphasis on disinterest had to divorce beauty from love, thus overturning an older understanding going back at least to Plato's Symposium. I must, however, agree with Young's "Epilogue": despite such attempts, in the end Nietzsche failed to overcome Schopenhauer's pessimism, failed to overcome that ill will against time he named "the spirit of revenge" and in which he located the deepest root of all alienation, a failure that led him, as it did so many aesthetes, to trade reality for illusion. KARSTEN HARRIES Yale University Randall C. Morris. ProcessPhilosophyand PoliticalIdeology:The Socialand PoliticalThought of Alfred North Whitehead and CharlesHartshorne. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 289. $14.95. Morris notes that others (among whom he includes the author of this review) have attempted to discuss the ethical and political dimensions of process philosophy. He complains, however, that all previous attempts proved unsuccessful because each tacitly accepted the liberal democratic underpinnings of process metaphysics. Morris is especially critical of my attempts during the past decade to draw Kant and Hegel into the deliberations of process philosophers, on the grounds that such a historical contextualizing of process philosophy simply preserves the hidden ideological foundations and nuances of the original movement, unexposed and uncriticized. Morris himself is determined, by contrast, to deconstruct these hidden bourgeois-ideological biases in the metaphysical foundations of process philosophy. In order to accomplish this, however , he too turns to the historical background of both Whitehead's and Hartshorne's philosophy. Indeed, he characterizes his work as "at least on one level, a study in the history of ideas..." (1o). This appeal to history in the service of political exegesis proves quite bothersome. Morris pores at length over the voluminous writings of Whitehead and of Hartshorne in search of political pronoucements. He gathers these scattered and relatively unsystematic editorial comments together and declares that both of these prominent process philosophers were "liberals," since in these random opinions both philosophers appear to support the political goals of freedom, equality, and individual rights, and to believe (with some minor differences of emphasis) that such goals are most readily obtainable within the democratic capitalist state. Morris triumphantly declares that such endorsements--and Hartshorne's own stated opposition to Marxism--are no "happy coincidence" (211), but that these "political implications" of process metaphysics proceed directly as a result of the hidden ground of that metaphysics (and of the acculturation of its two distinguished proponents ) precisely in the ideology of modern liberalism that the metaphysics itself is ostensibly marshalled to support. Turning to political theology and to debates between 474 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:3 JULY I993 prominent Latin American liberation theologians and process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr., Morris finds for the liberationist plaintiffs (and against Cobb) that process theology is "generally blind to the ideology inherent within [its] philosophical tradition ," and that, in truth, process philosophy and theology constitute "one more 'religious accompaniment of free enterprise, liberal, capitalist democracy'" (2~ 1). The weight of these charges, however, is made to rest upon Morris's account of liberalism in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and particularly upon his interpretation of the thought of T. H. Green. Morris provides some interesting commentary on that history and discusses the influence of Green and of the "new liberals" on Whitehead (and indirectly on Hartshorne). Ironically, however, he appears to miss the significance of his own account (e.g., 8o ff.) of the dynamic transformation of liberalism during this crucial period in its history. Green, for example, is much more enigmatic than Morris's account suggests. On the one hand, he appropriated large portions of Edmund Burke's thought approvingly , while, on the other, he read Kant in precisely the same fashion as did the young Hegel and the young Marx: subordinating the social contractarian aspects of "republicanism " to an organic and historically progressive conception of what Kant first termed "imperfect duties" (in lieu of what we, following Green, now term "positive rights") to end misery and suffering and to promote...