Code Compliant Reality !
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I am wrangling away at a longer essay, “Why Whitehead?”, which is helping me put together my seeming obsession with the lure of his ideas. That one is still incubating while I have sharpened my focus to this course and P&R – his most ‘difficult’ work. “Why Process and Reality?”, I now ask myself. It is so hard. So strange. So gritty and yet so wild a ride. Bear with me as I wax analogical… and biographical.
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My younger son recently bought a duplex in the small college town nearby and leapt into a demo-reno process in which he and his wife did much of the work. It was hard work on an old, under-loved house; gritty! One document we all became intimately familiar with was “The Code” – the local and state building codes. In a house that was to be partly rented out the “code compliance” requirements were very rigorous and tied to periodic inspections by local authorities. Here in New York we “take care of our own” as Springsteen says – but the price is a vast bureaucracy which is infrequently demonstrative of speed or creativity.
The Code (it seems impossible not to capitalize it) (TC) is an immensely dense and multi-stranded document. It carries the weight of the past in complicated ‘grandfathering” rules which accept startlingly dangerous pre-existing conditions, but looks to the future in demanding bright, shiny 21st-century features for anyone bold enough to undertake what Whitehead might have called a “speculative” new project. TC even specifies what precise level of minor work you can do without triggering a need to be “code compliant.” It is an immense and dynamic tangle of sideways and backwards and forward references incorporating both the physical and the mental – and even the ethical. The electrical part of the code must reference the plumbing part since water and electricity do not mix well; fire-proofing between duplexes has to be especially emphasized since we are free, only just, to endanger our own lives but not those of others; new materials for insulation demand new wall-design codes and old materials can become effectively illegal. In so many ways it’s dense richness reminds me of P&R.
It was a very frustrating book to work with and impossible to comprehend in its full unity. But the thing with The Code is that it also establishes a sort of comfort zone. If you hire someone else to do work you have a reference ground that establishes a mutual suite of very concrete guidelines. If you do your own work you can look up details in the code – and even if you have not done the engineering calculations for 2-by-4 studs you can trust that “16 inches on center” will hold. You may not be able to understand why those peculiar electrical outlets are required but can have a certain surety that there was a good reason. You can sleep more soundly on the next stormy night.
Process and Reality does that for me!
To use Whitehead’s language, and perhaps a bit of his overarching model for all of reality, P&R arises as a disjunctive set of complicated and atomic elements but as one moves into it they begin to concresce into a conjunctive whole. Looping back. Referring forward. Shifting context and usage. The many elements of the metaphysics start to become one coherent whole. Each time I read it or go back to reread a section I find new meanings. This can destabilize me if I wonder how much I have “missed”. But it is also reassuring as the lookback so often reveals to me that what felt to me like a loose stitch in my understanding was whole cloth from the beginning.
My son and I will never comprehend the full details of The Code, much less their vast matrix of inter-relationships, but we can be reasonably confident that they have been woven together over decades in a coherent way to allow a conviction that his was a safely completed renovation project. Similarly I will never fully grok P&R, but as I work my way through it I do so with a growing awareness that it was built and elaborated through a genius lifetime and is – even though I could not really prove it to you – itself a codification of a coherent metaphysics for the 21st century.
D.
** Consider both books and their relationship with time. The building code struggles mightily with its past, present and future. All those old buildings cannot simply be snapped into code compliance without bankrupting the homeowners. These old elements must be carefully enwrapped in the new forms.
Do you see the parallels with Whitehead when he takes on the creaky peculiar elements of 17th and 18th century philosophy while identifying the worthwhile bits and folding them into his new schema? Unlike the code officers, though, Whitehead is ready and willing to their discard the old edifices and rebuild anew.
I think “pragmatism” is one of the philosophical categories used to refer to Whitehead’s work along with that of James and others. Certainly that is equally descriptive of such a practical tome as the building code book. The willingness to accept, in fact the expectation of, revision and improvement and evolution is evident in both.
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