Bill Gayner
Thank you so much, Dr. Davis, I would love to meet Sheri Kling. I am enjoying her book. I don’t know that you need to know this in making the introduction, but the first two weeks of March are crazy busy for me. How will you make it — do you have my email as part of registration in this course or with the Cobb Institute?
By the way, I was able to clear the decks and will be able to attend class on Wed March 6. I am looking forward to it!
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Ryan,
I resonate deeply with your words, and have had a similar process as yours, being drawn in by how much sense process thinkers make about God and the world while also being challenged by the technical language. I agree about how appealing it is that Whitehead centers human experience rather than peering suspiciously at it. I love and resonate with your second paragraph as well:
“As a result of the centering of experience and then moving to the imaginative generalization, I am struck by the sense of wonder and curiosity that process thinking encourages, and is almost necessarily intrinsic to this thinking. This encourages me towards openness rather than suspicion as an initial response.”
I am also finding struggling with Whitehead’s technical language is like working on Zen koans, how it opens and enriches my ability to contemplate vital mysteries such as accessing a deeper sense of participating in sacred presencing, a sense of coming home that is transformative and process oriented, like being welcomed home into a cosmic, ever changing river. How, in this river, deepening experiencing opens us into a deeper appreciation for how the world that nurtures healing and growth, how these societies of enthusiastic actual occasions giving themselves to the next wave moment cares for us with such tenderness.
Thanks, Eric, for the tips. It may be that you are seeing that lower price on Amazon.com — the US site, whereas Amazon.ca — the Canadian site — is offering at this eye popping price.
Good to know that the van Geert book skipped over Whitehead.
I like the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy and look forward to checking out that article, thank you.
I appreciate you answering my question about your take on actual occasions. I like that phrase “droplets of experience”. I am finding that my felt sense loves the feeling of that continuum of experiencing from humans to the fundamental actual occasions, its changing my lifeworld in lovely ways, and interested to find out more about how it may be useful in the various sciences, including for example at the McGilchrist conference Easter weekend.
Wow, thank you so much, Dr. Davis, I look forward to watching the lecture you have shared and reading the article!
I registered for the conference almost as soon as it was posted, I could not believe such a mix of people I have been following for so long were getting together and am delighted you are presenting at it, looking forward to hear what you will share in that rich context as well as for how that deepens the already rich connections between this course as such great preparation for that conference!
Hi Dr. Davis,
Roy’s book is availabe on amazon for almost $1000. Paul van Geert and Naomi de Ruiter have written Toward a Process Approach in Psychology: Stepping into Heraclitus’ River (2022) available for $43.58 on Kindle here in Canada. Are you familiar with their book?
What a fascinating post, Evan, thank you so much!
I thoroughly appreciate and agree with most of your reflections. I deeply appreciate that Democracy Matrix has the integrity to name the US as a deficient democracy and Ukraine a hybrid one, presumably a hybrid between a deficient democracy and a moderate autocracy. Makes sense to me. As a Canadian, I wonder if we are really a working democracy, but there is so much that is still working here that deserves defending. And so much in the US that I deeply love as well.
I hesitate to bring Israel into consideration, since I am thoroughly loving this course and it would make me sad if I were to cause disruption and the topic is such a source of trauma and pain on every side. I invite anyone who continues reading my post to please imagine me with open hands and warm heart towards you, whatever your views, open to learning more about your pain, cultivating compassion towards us all. I love the Buddha’s dying words, “Things fall apart, tread the path with care.”
Would you agree, Evan, that Israel presents a challenge to your theory? I also question how Israel is ranked as a working democracy given that Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu viewed it and so many scholars now view it as a more extreme form of apartheid state than South Africa was. It may function as a working democracy for Jewish Israelis, but Palestinian Israeli citizens do not enjoy full political rights, and Palestinians in the occupied territories are living in a form of extreme, walled apartheid, policed by the Israeli army. Israel is arguably a settler colonial state and yet in 2023 Israelis were apparently very happy. It is striking how happy they were, but able to carry out what the ICJ has ruled is plausibly genocide.
Along these lines, it is striking that Germany seems to be overcompensating for its past, or perhaps consistent with its colonial past, punishing anyone who dares to criticize Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. Of course, my own country, Canada is another settler colonial state, supporting Israel now, defunding UNRWA despite the ICJ’s recommendations, and reacting harshly to our own domestic pro-Palestinian protestors, even if they are Jewish.
Reflecting on this, it strikes me that in describing how experience is dipolar, including both physical and mental prehension, Whitehead provides clues for what experiencing can be like when the right brain is orienting the left and the left collaborating with and serving the right.
Thom, as a fellow therapist, I enjoyed your exploration here. You wrote:
“I am not thinking of psychotherapy as an exemplar of process thought per se, (Psychotherapy is not the practice of ANW’s metaphysics, and “emotion, experience, feeling” in psychotherapy and ANW have different meanings), but I sense it is comparable in multiple respects and might be useful in making clearer the nature of ANW’s ideas. Or maybe I am reading so much process thought, so much that anything in my field of vision is just an inkblot on which I transpose Whitehead.”
My sense is that your experience and understanding of therapy is important data which Whitehead would want to use to test his speculative philosophy. If you came up with data from your experience of psychodynamic therapy that did not fit or contradicted Whitehead’s philosophy, my sense is that he would have wanted to adapt his theory to fit your data. My sense is that you are testing his theory in the light of your own experience and understanding of therapy. In this sense, you are also exploring how the experiences of clients in psychodynamic therapy exemplify what he is saying about human experience as an exemplification of modes of relating and becoming in actual occasions, in the sense that our experience include myriad actual occasions and their societies and their societies of societies flowing and interrelating with one another.
Eric, could you say more about what you mean by “This is a reminder I need to keep straight two kinds of actual occasions, those related to Whitehead’s understanding of physics, and those related to his understanding of human experience.” What inspires me in Whitehead is that these are all on a continuum of experiencing, with human experiencing an exemplification, a rich, complex form of what happens at the fundamental level of actual occasions — but that it is all through and through both experience and physics. By different kinds of actual occasions are you referring to these different levels of complexity?
I am very interested in your quotation from Hustwit, how “the human person [as] a society of billions of these occasions (that is, the body), which is organized and coordinated by a single dominant occasion (that is, the mind)”. Wow! I would love to hear more about that too! (Is it just a matter of catching up on my reading?) There is so much here about the interrelationship between the one and the many. For example, how psychological flexibility involves being able to relate to more than one self-aspect at a time in a way that is permeated by a whole felt sense that is always more than we can articulate, and how Christopher Mole, a UBC philosopher, argues that mindfulness does not involve one part of the brain, but rather synchrony in multiple processes.
An interesting conversation, Kathleen, Charlie and Eric, that feels like a concrescing gathering together and progressing. It seems to me Charlie and Eric are drawing on the dipolar dimensions that are part of any process of experiencing.
Following on Charlie’s comment, Hosinki comments on the passage you quoted, Kathleen: “Whitehead is arguing, in short, that sense perception is not the most basic fact in the initial phase of an occasion of experience, and that sense perception depends entirely upon perception in the more primitive mode of causal efficacy.” (p. 51) Causal efficacy is how an actual occasion influences another, and, at our complex level how a patch of red affects us. Actual occasions and their societies are dipolar, the physical mode participates in causal efficacy, it is how actual occasions are affected by the past, how they emerge from the past. On the other hand, the mode of “”conceptual” [mental] prehension is an anticipatory feeling of the unsettled future as a cloud of possibilities or “eternal objects” to be decided and actualized” (Davis, II, p. 16).
So Hosinki says that for Whitehead the more than bare sensing perception that is happening involves causal efficacy or physical prehension. Eric through retrospective induction is picking up on the mental pole of his experiences of red, and of any experiencing, and so makes a vital point about how experiencing red can include a sacred lure, but Whitehead is highlighting here the physical rather than the mental pole of our experiencing. However, the mental always accompanies the physical mode in our experiencing.
My sense, Kathleen, is that your response that there can be so much more in the sensing of red involves your own rich retrospective induction of sensing red, which includes your felt sense of so many experiences of both poles of experiences, being richly moved by it (causal efficacy, physical prehension) and then being lured by it (mental prehension). Each of the wonderful, varied reds you describe involve a highly differentiated felt sense that is always more than we can fully say, but which delights when we reflect on it and explicate it, for example remembering different experiences of red that have delighted us. My felt sense of red includes Ann Carson’s wonderful book Biography of Red. Taking in the always more of our felt sense, we come to more fully appreciate how we are moved by present experiencing informed by the tremendous variety of our past and the whole universe’s evolution. Taking in our felt sense of this moves, inclines and lures us in so many ways, drawing us in, inspiring us, or in the case of a stop sign, leading us to step on the brake.
Hi Richard,
I just heard your remarks in the video of the class and the issue is likely too many links in my remarks. I will take them out and see what happens.
Warm regards,
Bill
Hi Richard,
That’s the strange part. I can post here in this section, but not in Week 2. I thought we had been asked to a post a comment in each of the weekly sections in the forum. In my mind that has become “an assignment”, lol. I can go into the Week 2 section in the forum, start a new topic, compose it, but I am not able to post it. Sometimes it gives me that statement I shared with you above “there has been a critical error on the website” and sometimes it doesn’t, but in both cases,it doesn’t post my comment. I was able to post in Week 1 and I have been able to reply to others posts.
I wonder if there is maximum length that the system supports, because this is probably longer than my other posts. It is 2000 words, where my post in Week 1 was 732 words.
Trying to uploade it, the system took me to a page that said:
“There has been a critical error on this website.
Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.”
I clicked on a button to find out more about troubleshooting WordPress and it took me here: https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/faq-troubleshooting/
Thank you so much, Dr. Davis! Your recommendation led me to buy Sheri Kling’s A Process Spirituality which I am enjoying very much. I deeply appreciate her integrating Whitehead and Jung. I was realizing, given her aim at reconnecting society with a cosmology vital and rich enough to help us address the metacrisis we are facing, that I was missing a serious political dimension, that you would find in religious figures as diverse as Martin Luther King, Matthew Fox, even the pope, the whole prophetic tradition and engaged Buddhism. In the section I am in, she has really only cited Al Gore and Greta Thunberg, both well within the bounds of manufactured consent, although Greta is now straying beyond them with her criticisms of Israel. It seems to me to not include deep, activist, critical political thinking would be to fail to show up for our world and to realize the full opportunity process theology affords, so I went looking and have now ordered John Cobb’s Process Theology as Political Theology. I hope Sheri Kling addresses this as the book proceeds, either through direct inclusion or by carefully stating the limits of the interdisplinary integration she is attempting. I certainly don’t expect any of us to be able to address everything! I wonder if she perhaps addressed this in her methodology and I might have missed it.
Hi Dennis,
I wonder if “emerging” might have two meanings. It strikes me how since all actual occasions are creative processes, rivers of feelings that at their most basic level are continually freshly emerging in contingent relation with everything. On the other hand, the way it is being used here seems to involve how actual occasions enter into more complex relationships, forming societies, and these societies collaborate to form cells, and organisms such as humans. Also, Whiteheand points to a general tendency towards exploring creating more complex, coherent wholes, something like what Carl Roger calls the actualization tendency in living creatures, but pertaining in to what the rest of the world calls “the inanimate” as well.
I am intrigued by how actual occasions and the societies they form are drawn, lured by the divine. It seems/feels to me how God lures us is deeply related to the opportunities afforded them through their mutual generosity and enthusiasm (the etymology of “enthusiasm” means “filled with God”) to participate in exciting forms of greater complexity, fulfillment and creative exploration in togetherness, while also remaining true to forms they have already established (such as species and the endless creativity the form of a species interacting with environments affords). I have a felt sense emerging that perhaps God depends on and grows through the very growth God affords us and which occurs through us.I am including the whole universe in what I mean by “us”.
You are asking such a rich question, Chris. Iain McGilchrist has a lot to say about this in his recent book The Matter with Things, how we have ended up in wildly over-emphasizing left-brained styles of making sense of the world, so abstract, fractured, from the outside and focused on acquiring things, while neglecting the holistic, richly felt and value-oriented right-brained style. He argues convincingly that we are better off when the right-brained style orients the left.
John Vervaeke, in his Youtube series The Meaning Crisis, has a lot to say about this strange predicament our civilization has found itself in. One of the contributing themes he outlined had to do with how the Roman Catholic Church lacked the fuller access to the ancient neo-Platonic tradition and so missed the theme of participating in the sacred that was preserved and carried forward by the Orthodox Church. This was further compoundedd by the nominalism of the medieval church scholars. So that we became these abstract, head-oriented thinkers, all image of god and only left with abstractions in attempting to connect with reality, as opposed to discovering how we are already participating in sacred reality.
He has much more to say about this, including how Descartes, Kant and others contributed to it.
I would want to add something as well about how their powerful political, social and economic forces reinforcing these tendencies, how uprooting us from our living experiencing serves the powerful in exerting and manufacturing consent, although we all suffer from it, the privileged and the oppressed. Not to compare, of course, it would be wonderful if we were all privileged.