Bohm and Whitehead on Wholeness, Freedom, Causality, and Time

Bohm and Whitehead on Wholeness, Freedom, Causality, and Time

David Ray Griffin

Whitehead distinguishes between God and Creativity and yet makes them equally primordial.  God is not simply Creativity; God has determinate characteristics:  God knows the world, envisages primordial potentials with appetition and purpose, influences the world, and is in turn influenced by the world.  God loves the world actively, seeking to influence it toward its good, and receptively, responding sympathetically to its events.  But God is not a derivative emanation from Creativity; God is the primordial embodiment of Creativity.  (Creativity is that which is instantiated by all actualities; it is not an actuality that could exist by itself, unembodied.)  Whitehead refers to God as the “eternal primordial character” of Creativity (PR 225, cf. 344).

I suggest that Bohm has thus far wavered between these three visions.   Sometimes he speaks in a Vedantist-Neoplatonic way, as if the ultimate reality, the ultimate implicate order, were totally formless.  For example, he says in an interview: “We must have some form—we can’t live entirely in the implicate order” (RV 36).  In this mood, he speaks of all “measure” as created by human insight, denying that “it exists prior to man and independently of him” (W 23).  Reality as such would be formless, Brahman without attributes.  All form and measure would be maya, illusion.  In line with this vision, Bohm can legitimately say that we have freedom, for each of the explicate parts, each of the events of the world, would be an embodiment of the whole, which is a holomovement, dynamic activity.  But if he were to carry out this vision consistently, he would not be able to talk of the influence of the whole on the parts (except as the “whole” in the sense of the totality of the parts, and this is the mechanistic vision he wants to avoid), nor the influence of the parts back upon the whole (i.e., of the enfoldment back into the implicate order as somehow altering it).  It is not for nothing that consistent visions of this sort stressed that the ultimate reality was impassible.

More characteristically, Bohm seems to equate God and Being somewhat in the Thomistic fashion (at least as I am interpreting Thomas) and to see this somewhat determinate reality as the ultimate implicate order.  Accordingly, Bohm speaks of the ultimate implicate order as having intelligence and compassion.  But this vision, if carried out consistently, would lead to determinism, for if all energy, movement, or activity as such is equated with a concrete being (and only a concrete, determinate being can have attributes such as intelligence and compassion), then the creatures have none of their own.  In this vision, all causation is vertical:  there is a hierarchy of levels of order.  Each level (except the highest and the lowest) is implicate in relation to the level above it and explicate in relation to the level deeper than it.  (In line with speaking of “underlying wholeness,” I am referring to the more implicate orders as deeper, even though Bohm often speaks in Neoplatonic fashion of descent from the highest implicate order to the more explicate orders.)  The “implicate-explicate” language here suggests determinism:  each level is a mere explication or unfolding of what was already there, implicit or enfolded, in a deeper level.  Indeed, Bohm sometimes says that there is an infinite hierarchy of implicate orders, suggesting that this somehow avoids the conclusion of total determinism.  But this is problematic.  First, it is hard to see what it might mean.  Second, it is hardly consistent with speaking of the ultimate implicate order as characterized by love and intelligence.  Third, if the level of conscious human experience is totally a product of some deeper level, it does not mitigate the implied determinism to say that the series of increasingly deeper levels of causal orders never reaches bedrock.  But the fact that Bohm thinks there is a problem requiring a solution shows that he often does not think of each level of reality as having its own activity, creativity, or freedom, by which events can partially determine themselves vis-à-vis other levels and the whole.