Worldly Religion in Deleuze and Whitehead: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy By Matthew David Segall ~ September 9th, 2013 ~ Kracow, Poland –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– "Behold, I am making all things new." -Revelation 21:5 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Whitehead attempts to articulate a novel cosmological scheme that, among other things, is responsive to modern Western civilization’s need for the “secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world.” 1 He was referring not only to the need to secularize, or concretize, the anthropic God of mystical feeling and religious worship (what Whitehead calls God’s “consequent nature”), but also to the need to understand God’s more-than-human cosmic function as an original impulse granting coherent value to the experience of actual occasions of every grade (i.e., God’s “primordial nature”). With no less sense of urgency, Deleuze (and Guattari) argued in What Is Philosophy? that, in an age when “we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world,” philosophy’s most pressing task is to “give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks,” modes of existence which renew “[belief] in this world, in this life.” 2 Like Whitehead—whose speculative philosophical flights are bounded by that “essence to the universe which forbids relationship beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality” 3 —Deleuze emphasizes immanence as opposed to transcendence, this world as opposed to the next. In what follows, I draw on Whitehead, Deleuze, and their contemporary interpreters, in the hopes of taking a few steps closer to a viable philosophical religion. In particular, my paper dwells on their appropriation of several under-appreciated dimensions of both Platonic philosophy and Christian spirituality, not in order to defend some parochial point of view, but merely to explore the related questions of what an immanent God might be, and what, with such 1 1 Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1929/1978), 207. 2 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74. 3 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 4.