What Did Whitehead Mean By That?

"It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World."- From PROCESS AND REALITY

Our last discussion of Whitehead had to do with co-transcendence, here we talk about co-imminence. As we've said before, in Whitehead's schema God interact with the world by seeding it with ideas or rather ideals. God gives each epochal occasion (thing, event, activity; which are all the same thing to Whitehead), an ideal to which it strives. This ideal serves three functions: 1) it helps attenuate reality towards a singular goal, thereby making larger systems possible, we'll call this the 'organizing function' 2) it sets an actual direction that turns chaos into freedom we'll call this the 'ordering function' and 3) it limits the possibilities an epochal occasion can actualize, we'll call this the 'limiting function'.

The organizing function is what makes larger units of order possible. By giving things an ideal that maximizes their own personal good and yet contributes to a whole, the world adds up to groupings that are more than just aggregates but are actual, functioning systems. God seeds into my soul a vision or idea of what I should be and should do. This vision is both for my own good (indeed my own 'best') and for the good of a larger group. By doing this with a variety of individual epochal occasions, large numbers of occasions can be organized into larger occasions. Organisms make up larger organisms (this is why Whitehead's philosophy is sometimes called 'the philosophy of organism'). Thus the ideal given to individual occasions is the very ground for order in the universe.

Further, the giving of an ideal is what makes an individuals novel and unique action an act of freedom rather than chaos. A person dropped into the middle of the wilderness with no compass and no directional sense may make a decision which way to go, but this decision is arbitrary and in a real sense random for what else could it be? There are no standards by which a decision is actually made, and so one is not really 'deciding' at all. One's behavior is pure chaos. Even if a person decides to rebel morally, that decision to rebel is only a 'decision' because one has some order against which one is, indeed, rebelling. Without some 'directional baseline' from which to decide, no being has freedom in any sense of the word. The ideal provides a 'north', a baseline from which one can decide to deviate or to which one maintains. This baseline gives reason to decisions, and so turns behavior from chaos into genuine freedom. 

Finally, the ideal serves a limiting function. No being can deviate too far from the ideal. It creates an absolute limit on what one can do. One can only stray so far from it. Without this limiting function, any particular occasion could overtake the whole at any time, and what you would get would be a shifting pattern of chaos and evil in the world, rather than order and value. If everyone and everything could do absolutely anything, then the world would be a complete and total mess. 

Now these ideals, are not just created ex nihilo by God. Each occasion's particular ideal is based in part on the decisions other occasions have made before. In fact, they are partly defined by the totality of all decisions made in the past. God's stock of particular offerings is limited by what decisions other occasions have made. I cannot be called to give a million dollars to a charity if I've not earned a million dollars beforehand. A particular occasion has a limit of power placed on it not only by the ideal, but by the past behavior of other occasions. 

So with this understood we can start to grasp why Whitehead says that the universe is imminent within God and God within the universe. For God's own mind contains within the following: it remembers all objective facts and all experiences that add to the total attainment of value for God. So every good moment, and every moment that can help the world learn, is remembered by God. This is the objective immortality we spoke of when we talked about Whitehead's concern with Kant's moral argument. 

Every positive experience or constructive experience is remembered by God. God remembers what it was like to be me, in the moment when I got married. He also remembers the suffering of every holocaust victim, for suffering contains within it the seeds of overcoming (suffering can be turned into something of value, if responded to correctly). He does not remember the joy of the torturers, or the joy of theft from a bank robber. These experiences are lost to oblivion, for they have nothing positive to offer the world. So God's very mind is made up of the experiences of the world. It is made up, too, of the objective facts of the world. This is one of the consequences of saying that the world plays a limiting function in terms of God's experience and knowledge (which we discussed when talking about co-transcendence): God knows and experiences what happens within the world, learning along the way. God also contains within Himself the momentary ideals of the present moment, based on past experience. He presents the world with a vision of what it could be, in this moment, if the facts responded positively to the best possibilities open to it. But these ideals are indeed partly determined by the world. They are the facts of the world conditioned by the changeless character of God. The world then responds to this vision, lurching closer to it or farther from it, and that new reality then becomes the clay God uses to shape the next vision for the next moment.

These ideal images, then, have no immortality. They are constantly 'passing away' as the world responds to them. The only permanent content of God's mind and experiences are the knowledge and experiences of the world itself. These facts and the ideals God shapes from them are not only the content of God's memory, but of His very being, for Whitehead. I am not completely and strictly Whiteheadian in this sense, so please don't take this as strictly my own view. But I am not here to critique or argue, simply to report what Whitehead is trying to say. God's transcends the world in His Character. But the expression of that character, that part of God that is truly substantive and immortal, is made up of moments and experiences from the world. And so, it is simply true that the Universe is imminent within God. For God's character is expressed eternally in retained moments from the universe.

But it is equally true that God is imminent in the universe, for every moment, every experience, contains within it the ideal image God presented to it. Every moment is graded and evaluated from the point of view of the ideal. Indeed, the ideal is contained within the moment, for the movement of time is simply the seeding of these ideals into the present. A things continuation through time is the result of this constant infusion of the ideals of God. Everything is a greater or lesser reflection of some ideal born of the mind of God. And what are those ideals? They are the past infused with God's changeless character. Since every epochal occasion is an expression of those ideals, and the ideals are in a very real sense the momentary and passing expression of the eternal character of God, God truly is in every moment, to a greater or lesser degree. And so it is simply true that God is imminent within the universe. 

And this is what Whitehead means when he says, "It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World."