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I’d also like to thank you for a great post on the Whiteheadian understanding of empathy. To get technical, empathy in Whitehead’s conceptuality, if I’m not mistaken, is hybrid prehension, the feeling of the feelings, the mental feelings of others. Or, even more technically, empathy/hybrid prehensions are “prehensions of the subjective aims of other subjects (personally ordered nexüs/societies), as opposed to just any kind of propositional prehension …” (Fortescue). Since all types of prehensions are what are involved in the process of concrescence empathy/hybrid prehension certainly can be conceived in terms of its contribution of input to one’s concrescence.

Looking at empathy, and also at the formation of a perspective (Stephen David Ross wrote an interesting book reinterpreting Whiteheadianism by emphasizing a concept of perspective, and I’m also going to attempt some reinterpretation here) through a process lens what I see is that the experience of empathy, and also the formation of a perspective on something includes empathy in this strict, technical sense of the internal taking account of, and integration into one’s concrescence of the mental state, for instance the pathos or joyfulness, of other entities (and the more of such an internal taking account the better), however I also see a bit more.

Personally I don’t agree that empathy in a Whiteheadian sense is really just confined to internalizing the mental feeling, such as the pathos or enjoyment, of an actual entity that immediately meets the eye; rather, in my expansive interpretation it’s ideally a leaning into, a tuning into the internalization of all of the data, to use a Whiteheadian word, that’s tied in with that pathos or joy. That is, empathy is also a more inclusive form of intuition, it pulls into one’s awareness more than merely the mental feelings of others. And the same holds for the formation of a perspective, it should not just involve taking account of the most immediately heart strings-pulling data about something, it should involve integrating into the concrescence of our perspective as much relevant feeling and data as possible, ideally the whole gestalt of what one is taking a perspective on, which makes for a better perspective in terms of soundness, depth, and ethicality.

For example, when watching a nature program on television about predators our empathy and perspective should not be limited to just favoring the animals that we see them kill and consume, but rather should take in the whole of the ecosystem that they’re an integral part of, and which would collapse without them performing their function of controlling the populations of other species, causing a catastrophe for all life in that ecosystem.

With this sense of the importance of a holistic empathy and perspective in mind, and going with your example of the painful tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, we should, with a Whiteheadian emphasis on interrelatedness, and as Pope Francis advises, take into account all of the interrelated elements. We might want to take into account and to heart the following quotes and perspective of Pope Francis:

“I am simply against turning a complex situation into a distinction between good guys and bad guys, without considering the roots”.

“Little Red Riding Hood was good, and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in the abstract,”

“a wise man who speaks little, a very wise man indeed … told me that he was very worried about how Nato was moving. I asked him why, and he replied: ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia'”

“Something global is emerging, with elements that are closely intertwined with each other.”

And after condemning the cruelty of the war he went on to say: “But the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and miss the whole drama that is unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not-prevented”.

What he’s alluding to is the perspective that our media’s narrative of Russia’s morally criminal invasion of Ukraine leaves out its backstory, a backstory which includes the culpability of the Western powers that be who have provocatively expanded NATO right up to the borders of Russia (imagine how the United States would likely react if another superpower established a military presence right next-door in Mexico or Canada!); a perspective in which the relevance of NATO’s expansion isn’t just an excuse used by Russian leaders, but a real factor.

None of this is meant, by either Pope Francis, or me, as a justification of the Russian aggression, or a downplaying of its heinousness. It’s a cruel aggression that doesn’t meet the key criterion of a just war since it wasn’t Russia’s only option. The point of recognizing the culpability of the NATO powers is not to lessen the culpability of Russian leaders, the point is to not allow our leaders to be simplistically and hypocritically righteous and thereby prolong or escalate the situation rather than working for a diplomatic solution. The point is to sincerely seek a diplomatic solution by being honest about the West’s portion of guilt for the war. Guilt here is not a zero-sum proposition, acknowledging the West’s guilt doesn’t absolve Russia, it just enables us to negotiate for peace in a forthright fashion that’s more likely to be successful.

Sorry for going off on a bit of a digression, but the example of the Russia-Ukraine war does, I think, illustrate the importance of a full-scope empathy that takes into account, and into the concrescence of our perspective the complete big picture whose face is the human, or in other cases nonhuman, tragedy of innocent victims. A more technical Whiteheadian would correct me and say that I’m conflating empathy with other types of prehension and subjectivity, but I think of empathy not in a narrow standard sense but in a broader way as an experience that proceeds to incorporate, or is incorporated with, not something that can or does stand apart from, the rest of our prehensivity and sensibility. Well, it’s okay to understand empathy as just hybrid prehension, but I prefer a more expansive concept of empathy. And in either case you’re right about it being an aspect of the process of concrescence.

(Nutshell version: This has all been my verbose effort to say that empathy often works out to be more than just a feeling of another’s feeling, it’s often also an experience that keys us into the whole behind whatever elicits it, into the formation of a discerning big-picture perspective.)

(Btw, there’s a great ethically prophetic organization called CODEPINK, it’s “a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs”. It has a genuinely ethical take on the war. I would recommend that everyone check out its website.)

I’d also like to thank you for a great post on the Whiteheadian understanding of empathy. To get technical empathy in Whitehead’s conceptuality is hybrid prehension, the feeling of the feelings of others; and of course prehensions, all types of prehensions are what are involved in the process of concrescence, so certainly empathy can be conceived in terms of its contribution of data to one’s concrescence.

Looking through a process lens at empathy, and also at the formation of a perspective, the experience of empathy and the formation of a perspective on something includes empathy in this strict sense of the internal taking account of, and integration into one’s concrescence of the pathos of what’s at issue, and the more of such an internal taking account the better.

However, personally I don’t agree that empathy in a Whiteheadian sense is really just confined to internalizing the pathos of something, in my expansive interpretation it’s ideally a leaning into internalizing all of the data, to use a Whiteheadian word, that’s tied in with that pathos. And it follows that the formation of a perspective should not just involve taking account of the most immediately heart strings-pulling data about something, it should involve integrating into the concrescence of our perspective as much relevant data as possible, ideally the whole gestalt of what one is taking a perspective on, which makes for a better perspective in terms of soundness, depth, and ethicality.

For example, when watching a nature program on television about predators our empathy and perspective should not be limited to just favoring the animals we see them kill and consume, but rather should take in the whole of the ecosystem that they’re an integral part of, and which would collapse without them performing their function of controlling the populations of other species, causing a catastrophe for all life in that ecosystem.

With this sense of the importance of a holistic empathy and perspective in mind, and going with your example of the painful tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, we should, with a Whiteheadian emphasis on interrelatedness, and as Pope Francis advises, take into account all of the interrelated elements. We might want to take into account and to heart the following quotes and perspective of Pope Francis:

“I am simply against turning a complex situation into a distinction between good guys and bad guys, without considering the roots”.

“Little Red Riding Hood was good, and the wolf was the bad guy. Here there are no metaphysical good guys and bad guys, in the abstract,”

“a wise man who speaks little, a very wise man indeed … told me that he was very worried about how Nato was moving. I asked him why, and he replied: ‘They are barking at the gates of Russia'”

“Something global is emerging, with elements that are closely intertwined with each other.”

And after condemning the cruelty of the war he went on to say: “But the danger is that we only see this, which is monstrous, and miss the whole drama that is unfolding behind this war, which was perhaps somehow either provoked or not-prevented”.

What he’s alluding to is the perspective that our media’s narrative of Russia’s morally criminal invasion of Ukraine leaves out its backstory, a backstory which includes the culpability of the Western powers that be who have provocatively expanded NATO right up to the borders of Russia (imagine how the United States would likely react if another superpower established a military presence right next-door in Mexico or Canada!); a perspective in which the relevance of NATO’s expansion isn’t just an excuse used by Russian leaders, but a real factor.

None of this is meant, by either Pope Francis, or me, as a justification of the Russian aggression, or a downplaying of its heinousness. It’s a cruel aggression that doesn’t meet the key criterion of a just war since it wasn’t Russia’s only option. The point of recognizing the culpability of the NATO powers is not to lessen the culpability of Russian leaders, the point is to not allow our leaders to be simplistically and hypocritically righteous and thereby prolong or escalate the situation rather than working for a diplomatic solution. The point is to sincerely seek a diplomatic solution by being honest about the West’s portion of guilt for the war. Guilt here is not a zero-sum proposition, acknowledging the West’s guilt doesn’t absolve Russia, it just enables us to negotiate for peace in a forthright fashion that’s more likely to be successful.

Sorry for going off on a bit of a digression, but the example of the Russia-Ukraine war does, I think, illustrate the importance of a full-scope empathy that takes into account, and into the concrescence of our perspective the complete big picture whose face is the human, or in other cases nonhuman, tragedy of innocent victims. A more technical Whiteheadian would correct me and say that what I’ve really been talking about are other types of prehension and subjectivity, not empathy, but I think in terms of empathy in a strict sense proceeding to incorporate, or being incorporated with, not something that can or does stand apart from the rest of our prehensivity and sensibility.

(Btw, here’s a link to the website of a great prophetic organization called CODEPINK, it’s “a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs” It has a genuinely ethical take on the war: https://www.codepink.org/nato_escalating_towards_russia_war.)

Also, here’s a link to a great, a very informative video:

Joe, I absolutely share your empathy and support for the women of Iran, and various other societies who are subjected to repressive patriarchy and the male dominator mentality and culture in a religious form. However, there are two things that we need to be mindful of in our opposition to patriarchy overseas:

1) Historically (including quite recently) the alleged “backwardness” of certain other cultures, including their genuinely barbaric treatment of women, has been used as a moralistic and ideological pretext for colonialism and imperialism. We need to be careful to not allow our opposition to the inequities of other cultures to draw us into cultural imperialism, and the military imperialism that it factors into. Let me be clear, I’m not alluding to the postmodernist relativist argument against cultural imperialism, according to which right and wrong are mere constructs that are entirely relevant to cultures and we therefore can’t ever say that anything that goes down in other cultures, no matter how atrocious, is wrong because then we’re just projecting our sense of right and wrong onto them and ignoring the fact that by their lights what we consider to be wrong is right. I’m not a cultural relativist and am not making that argument at all. Although I respect cultural differences, and appreciate cultural diversity, I think that there are certain ethical eternal objects, to use Whiteheadian language, which all human beings and cultures should actualize and be morally judged on the basis of, which certainly include respect for the equal humanity of women. I absolutely agree with condemning the patriarchal repression that’s perpetrated in other cultures (sometimes blasphemously in the name of God), I would just caution all of us against not allowing our correct disapproval of the evil of patriarchal repression to suck us into complicity in the evil of imperialism (or discrimination—in France, for instance, they have laws against Muslim women wearing a hijab in public, which actually might be the personal preference and choice of some individuals, so the rights of these women are inversively and ironically being negated in the name of enlightened Western principles of equality and separation of religion and the public sphere).

2) And the other thing that we should be quite mindful of when condemning repressive male supremacism in other societies is that we still have a very long way to go on gender equality issues in our society before we can get too holier than thou (please note that I’m not saying that you’re personally holier than thou, but as a nation we tend to be quite self-righteous). For instance, we still don’t have an equal rights amendment for women in the Constitution. And of course there’s been the recent blow dealt to women by the U.S. Supreme Court. And incredibly there’s a growing movement among this country’s political male supremacists (you can guess who they are) to actually repeal the 19th Amendment, yes, the one that gives women the right to vote. So yes, as a society we’re in no shape to get too self-righteous about criticizing other patriarchal societies. Patriarchy needs to be condemned wherever it exists, but as members of a Western society with a history of imperialism, and that isn’t free of the sin itself, we need to tread carefully regarding our opposition to it in Muslim societies.

Please don’t take this as personal criticism, I think that you’re an individual with a wonderful empathy and a decent-minded point of view, my criticism is of our society; and the mindfulness of the potential for complicity in imperialism, and hypocrisy that I’m advocating is something that we all need to practice as a nation.

Thank you for your input Kent. Personally I don’t go in for the supernaturalism and substantialism of traditional Christology, the Nicene doctrine that Jesus and God are “consubstantial”, of the same substance, and that therefore Jesus is coeternal with God the “Father”. Nor do I subscribe to an Arrian Christology in which Jesus was created before the world. So no, I don’t think that Jesus existed before he was born. I also don’t overly idealize Jesus, I’m a psilanthropist—the fancy technical term for someone who thinks that Jesus was exclusively human—I recognize that he had feet of clay like the rest of us, and that not everything that he preached should be subscribed to (for instance his apocalypticism, which didn’t pan out; and the sadly mistaken gearing of his otherwise beautiful morality to his now discredited belief that the eschaton was imminent).

I prefer a kind of exemplarist Christology in which Jesus’ salvific value for our spirituality doesn’t involve the supernaturalism or the legalistic, judicial thinking involved in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. In my Whiteheadian exemplarist Christology Jesus is a divine lure rather than divine. He’s a lure that God is using for putting us in mind of the best eternal objects for human beings to order their lives to actualizing, and a factor that prepares and primes us to be receptive to spiritual and ethical initial aims. (He’s more a lure than an example in the strict sense of a role model who perfectly embodied all of the ideal eternal objects that God employs him to lure us toward.)

Also, from this Whiteheadian perspective we might understand that Jesus being an instrument of redemption involves Jesus being on the receiving as well as the giving end of redemption; that is, his being a beneficiary of God’s MO of constantly redeeming the present by luring us to prefer the best possibilities that we might bring out of the mistakes and evil of the past. With this understanding we can, for instance, see God taking the beauty of Jesus’ morality, which was unfortunately tied to his apocalypticism, and severing its ties to apocalypticism so that only the beauty remains, inspiring the beautiful lives of an Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King. And of course we can see God raising Jesus from the dead not in a literal sense, but rather from meaningless death to an objective immortality full of meaning for the spirituality of billions of human beings.

And of course being collaborators with God, co-creators, human beings are thoroughly involved in the ongoing creative process of crafting Jesus to be the instrument of redemption that he is. The theologizing of the Church Fathers, and subsequent generations of theologians, and countless simple devout Christians has contributed to the growth of Jesus into the lure for sanctification that Jesus has become postmortem. Jesus’ objective immortality is not something static, determined solely by what the historical Jesus was and did in his lifetime, it’s a work ever in progress, and all Christians have a part in it. Well, this is my personal Christology in a nutshell. It clearly isn’t orthodox, but it works for me.

I think that those are very spot-on descriptions. I’ve had the same thought.

Personally I think more in terms of the objective immortality of Jesus having been enriched by the Christian tradition, by the intellectuality of its theologians applied to the questions of Christology, and by the lived spirituality of its ordinary members. Thanks to the Whiteheadian doctrine of objective immortality, I consider that the meaning that Christians find in Jesus expands his reality, so to speak. I can see his reality continuing to grow after his death because I view his reality as being not only his life and career when he was an ongoing subject preaching and teaching, but also the footprint that he’s left in the self-creative process of generations of Christians, which can be, has been, and continues to be enlarged, enlivened, and evolved by them.

As for Jesus having an “ongoing consequent nature”, for that to be the case he’d have to still be in some manner an ongoing experiencing subject, and personally I haven’t yet been won over by the attempt of Marjorie Suchocki, and others, to revise the idea that perished actual entities are preserved in God’s memory into a theory of full-blown subjective immortality. My mind remains open, but to date I’m not convinced, and prefer the doctrine of objective immortality.

Thank you for the kind words, and for the link. The Open Horizons website is full of so much great content. It’s a wonderful resource.

Thank you for your reply. I don’t think that the process of, that is an actual occasion can be made to dovetail or harmonize with dialecticism, with, for instance, Hegel’s dialectic. However, I think that since we do observe a creative interaction of opposites in the world of everyday experience and can’t very well deny the existence of dialectical processes, it’s necessary to figure out how dialectical process might be accommodated, so to speak, by Whiteheadian process thought.

I found this in an article online: “[Gregory] Vlastos concludes that although it follows that in Whitehead’s system dialectic can no longer be used as a heuristic principle, ‘it does not follow that it cannot be used at all. In so far as Whitehead makes use of the concept of internal relatedness, he must conserve a certain part of it: the dynamic fusion of polar opposites, the process from the abstract to the concrete. This is best shown in his basic metaphysical unit, the actual entity. Without the dialectic the actual entity can only appear (…) self-contradictory.”

In this quote Gregory Vlastos recognizes that internal relatedness can sometimes involve the “dynamic fusion of polar opposites”, and that this can’t be ruled out as something that can take place in the process of actualization of Whiteheadian actual entities. I think that any solution to the problem of getting Whiteheadianism to accommodate dialecticism will involve thinking along these lines, however it’s a problem that I’m still wrestling with.

(Here’s a link to the article, it’s quite interesting:
https://philpapers.org/archive/TABHAW.pdf)

An apropos quote just occurred to me, something that the Roman poet Terence wrote: Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. It means I am human and consider nothing human to be alien to me. I think that Whitehead’s conceptuality provides a great ontological rationale for holding such a perspective. According to Whitehead’s ontology although human beings of course each make their own and often divergent self-creative decisions among the options available to them in life, we’re all configurations of the same fundamental creative process and possibilities in the same human life form. All human beings have in common certain basic, core human-making actualized eternal objects, and available for actualization eternal objects. That is, despite significant differences, thanks to ontology we all share the same humanity, and so although another human being’s politics might be alien and abhorrent to me no other human being per se is alien or should be abhorred as a person. I think that here we indeed have a profound basis for practicing the phrase “Hate the sin, but love the sinner”; or, in this case, abhor extremism and bigotry but love the extremist and bigot; and for not considering rural communities to be a world apart full of unrelatable aliens. If really comprehended, internalized, and taken to heart, I think that Whiteheadianism can certainly help us all to better relate to each other across both political and regional divides.

Thank you. Yes, in the West there’s a tendency, especially among adherents of supernaturalistic religions, to project the meaning of life outside of life, up to a supernatural source, to heaven or a transcendent God supernaturalistically conceived. Meaning itself is projected as a goal that is ulterior to life, such as making it into heaven when one dies. Even in the case of people who aren’t thinking about meaning in this supernaturalistic vein meaning often tends to get projected as something specific and discrete that life is for, rather than being understood to be the experience of life itself, and maximizing the harmony, intensity, and beauty of that experience. Something that I very much like about Whiteheadian process thought is that it supplies an ontological basis for locating the meaning of life in this world, and for conceiving it to be actualizing the best self- and inter-personal creative possibilities and fullest experience of life, rather than achieving some ulterior objective.

A Question. Would you say that the view I’ve articulated above is somewhat similar to traditional Chinese thinking about the meaning or telos of human life? The understanding that I’ve taken away from my reading of Chinese philosophy over the years is that it is. As I understand it, one Chinese view is that our basic participatory responsibility with respect to life is to participate in life, in existence in the world in a fashion that’s in accord with the nature and structure, the way or tao of life and the world; and to thereby realize and maximize the goodness of life, for ourselves, and for society. Life is understood to be about life itself, about realizing the right manner of living, and of being in relation to others, society, and the world; not achieving a posthumous reward in heaven; or focusing on one distinct goal in life, thereby making oneself too one-dimensional. If this is the Chinese view then it’s very much akin to my perspective, which finds the meaning of life to be integral to life, and internal to the world, not something discrete or extrinsic. Would you say that my understanding is correct, and that my thinking and the general consensus of traditional Chinese thinking on this question are on the same wavelength, so to speak?

Yes, certainly not everyone in rural communities owns the stereotype of the bigoted Yahoo. Unfortunately what’s happened in recent years is that the extremist Yahoo minority saw its star on the rise during a certain individual’s tenancy in the White House and became politically emboldened and energized, and is now aggressively asserting itself in the political mainstream, sometimes in physically menacing ways. For instance, in a small town in Idaho activists in the American Redoubt movement (an alt-right movement that aims at populating the Midwest with people who share its extremist political orientation and ultimately virtually seceding from the United States) who’ve decided to focus their efforts on forcing a community library to remove books about black history and that promote LGBTQ-inclusiveness have been attending library board meetings armed, carrying unconcealed guns to intimidate their opponents. Behavior like this of course garners ample news coverage and contributes to the “deplorables” image of small-town Midwesterners. However it should be noted that there are also plenty of residents of this particular town, many of whom self-identify as staunch conservatives, who to their credit are taking a stand against the Redoubters. The American Talibans, so to speak, are indeed far from being a representative demographic, but alas their extremism gets them a lot of attention, which gives the false impression that they’re in the majority in red states.

I think that process thought can indeed help here, can help to de-escalate the extremism and polarization by promoting a unific and ubuntic consciousness that we’re all one interrelated society rather than a red and a blue America; that we’re all together in the same process of creating a shared existence and well-being; that we share a common humanity even with the folks located far on the opposite side of the political spectrum; and that no community, even those that might have a large presence of assertive extremists can be written off and left behind. I think that this potential of process thought makes it very much the right prescription for what ails our body politic today.

(Btw, “ubuntic” is the adjectival form of “ubuntu”, a wonderful Bantu word that means shared humanity, a consciousness that we create our humanity and lives together. Process thought is arguably better equipped than any other philosophy that I’m aware of to supply an ontological basis for such a species consciousness—and beyond that, for an inter-species consciousness.)

The quote sums up Whitehead’s ontology of intercreativity, in which an actual entity is an integration of some of the diversity, diversity of experience and possibilities, of the universe into a novel individual (the many becoming one), which in turn becomes a new addition and contribution to the multiplicity of the universe (the many being increased by one). So yes, it’s the concrescent process of the generation of novelty; and also transition, the process of the new actual entity going from being a concrescing occasion to an object to be taken account of by subsequent entities. As for practices for internalizing this idea, one possibility might be adapting something like Buddhist mindfulness meditation, or some other form of meditation, making process thought’s perspective that the fundamental nature of reality is a creative, experiential, relational process one’s guiding and target insight. I hope that this helps.

Thank you. And yes, you’re quite correct, the process movement, as Dr. McDaniel and others are calling what started out as Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, has indeed to some extent moved on from, if it was ever guilty of strict adherence to Whitehead’s inceptive theories. To my knowledge it was never actually guilty of a rigid fidelity to Whitehead’s ideas. For instance, early on Whitehead’s conceptuality regarding God underwent significant interpretation, elaboration, and enlargement by theologians, who for sometime were the main custodians, so to speak, of Whiteheadianism. And Whitehead’s own nondoctrinaire disposition, his disinclination to present his theories as infallible and set-in-stone dogmas has of course lent mutability to them. I’m sure that Whitehead would actually be painfully disappointed if people were subscribing to his ideas in an inflexible fashion, and would be delighted that his views have been inherited by original thinkers who’ve reworked them a bit. And now, with Protestant theologians no longer the almost exclusive shapers of process thought (for decades the Divinity School of the University of Chicago was the unofficial hub of the evolution of process thought), and the “scholasticism” that some have accused the process tradition of giving way to great diversity, we can expect to see Whitehead’s theories being reworked even more innovatively. Personally I think that that’s quite wonderful, it means that Whiteheadianism is intellectually a going concern, a living movement not a dead artifact.

Perhaps Jorge Nobo’s book Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity might prove to be a helpful resource for exploring your questions. The Cobb quotes were from the entry for the extensive continuum in his Whitehead Word Book. Btw, noting that you take issue with a good bit of what you’ve found in the particular process tradition that this program is focused on, it occurs to me that you might be interested in the process thought of Nicholas Rescher. He’s a process philosopher but not in the Whiteheadian tradition. You might also be interested in Hartshorne, although he’s associated with the Whiteheadian tradition and was a pupil of Whitehead’s in college he’s an independent thinker who worked out different views on various questions.

To paraphrase John Cobb, a past occasion sharing in the constitution of a new occasion by means of prehension.