Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926 2nd Edition

by Alfred North Whitehead (Author), Judith A. Jones (Introduction), Randall E. Auxier (Contributor)

18 ratings

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Alfred North Whitehead
119
Paperback
$19.95
Alfred North Whitehead
66
Paperback
$16.49
Alfred North Whitehead
52
Paperback
$18.95
Alfred North Whitehead
18
Paperback
$18.52
Donald W. Sherburne
26
Paperback
$34.00
Jr. John B. Cobb
4
Paperback
$28.00

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Alfred North Whitehead
119
Paperback
$19.95
Alfred North Whitehead
66
Paperback
$16.49
Alfred North Whitehead
52
Paperback
$18.95
C. Robert Mesle
79
Paperback
$16.95
Alfred North Whitehead
18
Paperback
$18.52
Alfred North Whitehead
38
Paperback
$6.95

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Packed with learning and bristling with concise reasoning, almost every page of this book furnishes an opinion or a conclusion which could be developed into a lengthy chapter.” ― ―The New York Times

"This 1996 edition of Whitehead’s 1926 Lowelllectures offers a fresh opportunity to read and reconsider a seminal text in American philosophy. It contains an excellent introduction . . . Jones’s commentary is fair-minded, well written, and thought-provoking.” ― ―Religious Studies Review

Review

“Packed with learning and bristling with concise reasoning, almost every page of this book furnishes an opinion or a conclusion which could be developed into a lengthy chapter.” ― ―The New York Times

"This 1996 edition of Whitehead’s 1926 Lowelllectures offers a fresh opportunity to read and reconsider a seminal text in American philosophy. It contains an excellent introduction . . . Jones’s commentary is fair-minded, well written, and thought-provoking.” ― ―Religious Studies Review

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fordham University Press; 2nd edition (January 1, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0823216462
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0823216468
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.4 x 0.8 x 5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #941,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,198 in Religious Philosophy (Books)
- #3,125 in Religious Studies (Books)
- #4,336 in Philosophy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
18 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		80%
4 star		20%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Marion Bartlett

good quality paperback book

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

product was satisfactory

Helpful

Ansen Plopbundle

Whitehead's Take on 'Religion' Still Worth a Read

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2013

Verified Purchase

Whitehead believes the fundamental purpose of religion is ‘justification’ (5). A person develops the personality and character according to the doctrines they believe: “Religion is a force of belief cleansing the inward parts” (5). Religion is very involved in this inner aspect of humanity. It is “the art and the theory of the internal life of man . . .” (6).

In and of itself, there are four factors to religion: Ritual, emotion, belief and rationalization. All of these are put together differently in different religions and in different times, but there is also something of historical note to these four factors, as well. These four factors have a more general thesis in common -- that “The dogmas of religion are the attempts to formulate in precise terms the truths disclosed in the religious experience of mankind” (47). Whitehead believes these four to have arisen in humanity respectively. In its earliest seeds, religion is mere ritual, possibly with a tinge of emotion (9). At some point in the evolution of that religion emotion begins to play a larger part and eventually “takes the lead” (9). Emotion “waits upon the ritual” and provides a reason to continue the ritual. Emotion and ritual reinforce each other. Yet, emotion also can help to dispel ritual (10). Of this period, Whitehead writes, “It was a tremendous discovery – how to excite emotions for their own sake, apart from some imperious biological necessity” (10-11). To account for the combination of ritual and emotion, belief arises. Belief has an explanatory focus of this combination of ritual and emotion (9). Attendant with this belief is rationalization, which acts as a method of explaining the use of belief on the religious paradigm. The myth oftentimes is demanded by the arisen rationalization. The emotions that originated from the ritual, and which helped to continue and affirm the ritual explains both. So, the myth is a method of rationalization for the primitive religion. The myth may or may not be true. In fact, there are degrees of truth when it comes to the myth, for many of them are not remembered clearly. The myth has “various grades of relationship to actual fact . . .” (15). And at times, the myth can precede the ritual (15). The ritual in addition to the myth introduces hero-worship. This combination “is the primitive worship of the hero-person or the hero-thing” (15).

Hero-worship religion, Whitehead believes, marks a “new formative agent in the ascent of man . . .” (16). Religion now goes beyond the merely empirical, “beyond immediate sense and perception” (16). Rationalism introduces the purpose of religion: Solitariness (18). Christianity is the best example of rationalism entering into a religion (19-20). The purpose of this rational component in religion is what many now would term “worldview.” The rational component is concerned with “a coherent ordering of life” (20). This ordering should make sense of thought and have a role involved in ethics. It “appeals to the direct intuition of special occasions and to the elucidatory power of its concepts for all occasions (21).

As said earlier, dogmas are the outcome of religious experience. Particularly, rational religion is “founded on the concurrence of three allied concepts in one moment of self-consciousness . . .” (48). The first concept is “the value of an individual for itself” (48). The second value is the “value of the diverse individuals of the world for each other” (48). This is a value that speaks of the fundamental interrelatedness of all things – a metaphysical presupposition for Whitehead (or a conclusion of more basic metaphysical principles). Finally the third value is the “value of the objective world” which is made of these interrelated occasions (48). This rational religious consciousness begins axiologically, beginning from the value of the person to the value of the world, which the society (of actual occasions) as person is an objective part of (49). And if one returns to one of Whitehead’s descriptions of religion (that religion is a person in solitariness), we this axiological notion. “In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life?” (49). And if the individual has value in and of itself, and the individual is objectively interrelated with the rest of the world, then the objective world must have intrinsic value. Religion, therefore, “is world-loyalty” (49).

Thus, Whitehead’s “religion” and metaphysical worldview are highly axiological. “The metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the world in the aesthetic experience . . . and the moral order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order” (91). Thus morality is subsumed under aesthetics. God initiates this aesthetic order and the aesthetic order is “derived from the immanence of God” (91-92). Each occasion has aesthetic value. Freedom seems to be one of his qualities assumed in this aesthetic quality. For example, the mind “must be a route whose various occasions exhibit some community of type of value” (95-96). In other words, the grouping of occasions making up a particular mind exhibit the same type of value or exhibit similarity with one another, and offer value and freedom. Of course, Whitehead does not dismiss the effect of the environment on the occasion (the present has only so many choices for novelty and initial aims – because the present is the becoming of the past). He says, “. . . the environment will also partially determine the forms of the occasions. But that which the occasions have in common, so as to form a route of mind or a route of matter, must be derived by inheritance from the antecedent members of the route” (96). Nevertheless, freedom is an inherent quality in the universe. The universe “exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities” (106).

Contrasting Christianity with Buddhism, Whitehead aptly notes one difference between the two. Christianity “has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysic generating a religion” (39-40). In the context of discussing rational religion, he writes, “. . . religion bases itself primarily upon a small selection from the common experience’s of the race (20-21). So, Whitehead believes that Christianity is a rational religion – which is a religion primarily designed as a worldview – concerned with a “coherent ordering of life” (20). In this way, Christianity can be said to explain some things of life, and not others, “a small selection from the common experiences of the race” (20-21).

Christianity has kept “its metaphysics subordinate to the religious facts to which it appeals” (60). The problem for Whitehead, is that he does not believe that Christianity offers enough in the way of knowledge of the world in ‘adopting’ just the religious basics. Because “It is impossible to fix the sense of fundamental terms except by reference to some definite metaphysical way of conceiving the most penetrating description of the universe”, rational religion (Christianity) “must have recourse to metaphysics
for a scrutiny of its own terms” (66-67). Rational religion must be a complete metaphysical system; it “requires a metaphysical backing” because “its authority is endangered by the intensity of the emotions which it generates . . .” (71).

Religious dogmas are existentially defeated by the problem of evil, Whitehead believes. He writes, “All simplifications of religious dogmas are shipwrecked upon the rock of the problem of evil” (65). Any hint of determinism in the world makes God an agent actively involved in evil. “If the theory of complete determinism . . . holds true, then the evil in the world is in conformity with the nature of God” (82). Contrary to Augustine, who held that evil is not something itself positive (like darkness, which is the absence of light), Whitehead argues that evil is “positive and destructive”, and he links the good with what is “positive and creative” (83). Therefore, Whitehead builds a moral and axiological fortress around his own metaphysics. By defining the good with what is “positive and creative” he is thereby implying that any system which does not hold to creativity and novelty is inherently evil – or at least the responsible agent possesses some form of evil (i.e., God). Of course, as noted above, Whitehead subsumes morality under aesthetics, so that any other system than his seems to possess an inherent aesthetic, and therefore moral, flaw.

God and the world are the foundations of value for Whitehead. Since God includes the universe within himself, He must “include all possibilities of physical value conceptually, thereby holding the ideal forms apart in equal conceptual realization of knowledge” (137-138). God gives way or saves the world by his “harmony of valuation” (138). In this way God “gains his depth of actuality” (138). Whitehead believed that because God is actual, “He must include in himself a synthesis of the total universe” (85). God, by himself, is incomplete, the process theologian believes (85-86). For the process theologian, God is also infinite, but infinity is also redefined in a quantitative sense, rather than a qualitative sense. In other words if God is infinite, he is all. This is why Whitehead says “If He were [infinite], He would be evil as well as good” (138).

I think that RIM is another great work of Whitehead and anyone who seeks to understand his thoughts should read this work. Here Whitehead lays in a less dense fashion his metaphysic, the nature of the universe, God and the world's relationship and seeks to explain the phenomenon of religion in his terms.

However, his work suffers from some serious flaws. First, Whitehead does not succeed in his primary definition of religion (justification). In some eastern religions, the self is an illusion, and thus there nothing to ultimately better. Further, his simplistic definition would render various secular approaches to life as religion, such as humanism or modern-day liberalism (both of which function as a religion existentially). There simply has been no definitive work on what constitutes ‘religion’, and thus, as a broad outline of this work, it fails.

Secondly, his factors for the evolution of religion are unverifiable. This is all the more problematic given the empiricist bent of his approach to knowledge. His idea that religious dogma is based upon experience is not true for everyone. For example, the parousia is a widely held dogma of the Christian Church, yet it has yet to be experienced. It is 'pick and choose' empiricism. And his four factors in religion are often unverifiable in a similar way.

Finally, I would have to disagree with Whitehead’s accounting of the nature of evil and his idea of the infinity of God. I am unsure why Whitehead thought to give an account of the infinity of God in a quantitative sense, rather than a qualitative one. Further, this idea lends to some equivocation on the use the term ‘infinite’ - for when speaking of the ‘infinite’ freedom of the world, he does not use infinite in the same sense.

I think critiquing his metaphysics is better left to Process and Reality rather than here.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2017

Verified Purchase

EXCELLENT

Helpful

Whitehead's Religion In The Making

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2021

With his former student, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead (1861 -- 1947) wrote the three-volume "Principia Mathematica" (1910 -- 1913), an important work which attempted to show that mathematics could be reduced to the truths of logic. In 1923, age 63, Whitehead was called to Harvard University to become professor of philosophy. In America and in his old age, Whitehead's thought took a different direction. Rather than practicing an analytical philosophy which tried to reduce, say, mathematics to simpler components. Whitehead became a highly speculative, synoptic thinker who tried to build outwards from basic human experience. His thought became highly metaphysical, at a time when systematic thinking was and remains out of fashion among both analytical thinkers and existentialists. He developed a difficult way of thought known as process philosophy which argued for the interconnectedness of reality and tried to harmonize science, religion, and philosophy.

Whitehead's book "Religion in the Making" is based upon a series of lectures he delivered in 1926 at the Lowell Institute. The title aptly suggests the main theme of the book: religion and the search for God are not static or fixed but rather are in a process of continuous change and development. This book does not present the difficulties of some of Whitehead's other works. It is short, consisting of four brief chapters, and makes little use of a specialized vocabulary. Much of the book is beautifully written, eloquent, and quotable. Portions of the book, expecially in the two final chapters, develop Whitehead's speculative metaphysics and are highly dfficult. The book will bear several close readings, and I struggled with it. Still, "Religion in the Making" is a remarkable, suggestive work. The book is well worth reading for those with a strong interest in religion and in philosophy.

In the opening chapter, "Religion in History", Whitehead offers the first of several related definitions of religion, which emphasize its source in individual subjectivity. This is approach which owes much to William James, but it needs to be taken carefully as, for Whitehead, subjectivty cannot be separated from human, and indeed cosmic, community. Whitehead sees religion as progressing through four stages: ritual, emotion, belief, and rationalization. The last stage is the most important as religion become a matter for the intellect and of a universal scope.

In chapter 2, "Religion and Dogma" Whtehead traces what he sees as the growth of reason in religion, which he equates with both universality and individuality with the struggle to deal with among other things the problem of evil and the nature of wisdom Whitehead sees Buddhism and Christianity as the two leading representatives of universal religion and has many valuable things to say in comparing and contrasting their approaches to metaphysics and to the particular facts of human life.

In part 3, "Body and Spirit", Whitehead argues eloquently that metaphysics is necessary for a full understanding of religion. He defines "metaphysics" as "the science which seeks to discover the general ideas that are indispensably relevant to everything that happens." Then Whitehead develops his own view of metaphysics, a complex difficult system involving the interpenetration and interrelationship of God and the world and mind and matter. Although rationality is critical to Whitehead, his thought is based, he claims, on feeling, on the immediacy of experience, on its flow, and on its development towards good or evil and on the role of creativity or chance.

The difficult final part of the book, "Truth and Criticism" continues the development of Whitehead's metaphysics, which begins with a rejection of the substance-based thought derived from Descartes. He argues that reality is a flow and a process of change which lacks fixity. Dogma and belief result from reflection on immediate experience and are necessary and valuable; but they are always subject to change. Whitehead again turns to Buddhism and Christianity as showing two poles for understanding religious experience and the nature of God. He finds that both have become static due to their failure to learn from each other and due to their failure to accomodate the teachings of science. There is a need for reflection by each person and each group on the nature of experience for an increasing understanding of God. A key concept for Whitehead in this is individual sincerity and honesty.

The book works to an eloquent four-paragraph conclusion which begins:

"God is that function in the world by reasons of which our purposes are directed to ends which in our own consciousness are impartial as to our own interests. He is that element in life in virtue of which judgment stretches beyond facts of existence to values of existence. He is that element in virtue of which our purposes extend beyond values for ourselves to values for others. He is that element in virtue of which the attainment of such a value for others transforms itself into values for ourselves."

Americans have written more in the way of thinking about God and about questions of metaphysics than is sometimes realized. Whitehead's book while obscure in places offers a moving creative insights into the nature of religion.

Robin Friedman

Helpful

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926 2nd Edition

Buy used: $20.28

Buy new: $37.00

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review

About the Author

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Customers who bought this item also bought

Buy used:

$20.28

Buy new:

$37.00