Replies

What a beautiful reflection, Nelson, and I am so you glad you stumbled into this program because of all the wisdom, kindness, and thoughtfulness you have contributed to my own learning, and I’m sure the learning of others.

What you are wrestling with as far as ‘bias’ speaks to me as a qualitative methodologist and researcher. Thinking from a process-relational perspective, I wonder if what we often call bias might actually be the residue of an older idea about what research should be, that it should strive for a kind of what Donna Haraway calls a “God’s eye view” or what others have called a “view from nowhere.” Within a Whiteheadian framework, a detached vantage point is not possible, right? Every act of knowing is already an event of relation, an occasion of feeling-with and becoming-with the world.

In that sense, maybe what we call bias isn’t something to eliminate, but something to understand and reflect on as part of our participation. Our perspectives, values, and experiences are not distortions of truth but expressions of how the world comes to matter for us. They shape which aspects of experience we notice and how we respond to them. Maybe inquiry becomes less about correcting for bias and more about cultivating awareness – noticing how our particular histories and inheritances guide our attention and how they might open (or perhaps close) possibilities for creative advance.

So rather than striving for neutrality, perhaps the aim is for greater noticing and attunement. We might become more sensitive to the field of relations which is precisely the place where our own knowing is happening. And what might once have been seen as bias becomes a site of ethical and creative responsibility (or what Haraway and others call response-ability) – an invitation to participate more fully, and more openly, understanding that we are always already in relation with/in our ongoing process of becoming.

Yes, that was an excellent reading! Over the past ten years, I have been following around the experience of wonder (like a devoted, smitten suitor) trying to understand her for the betterment of our world, particularly by nurturing rather than dismissing wonder with young children in schools. Coming to view wonder as the felt sense of a shimmery, relational process of becoming – perhaps even as the felt awareness of Creativity itself – within the framing of what Tarnas describes as a “deep-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence” has certainly allowed me more intimate and expansive ways of knowing this phenomenon.

I agree that we are living in a terribly impoverished and pathological societal condition. Not only is the reductionist physicalist worldview an expression that is cut off from feeling, as you say, but this way of thinking forces us to accept a condition where we falsely understand ourselves as cut off from one another, the land, and all of the rest of nature. Erin Manning describes this situation as “the genocide of relation,” and it is no wonder we are surrounded by, embedded in, suffering.

Yes, I agree it is hopeful to imagine that this extraordinary time we are living through is the beginning of the end of the impoverishment and a reorientation toward a mode of living better together…that’s one reason why this course and this certificate program have been so enlivening. And also why we might feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to help make this shift happen in whatever way we can.

Wow, this is really interesting. Thinking with Whitehead, this non-physical morphospace sounds a lot like the field of possibilities, potentialities, or eternal objects and/or what Erin Manning and Brian Massumi call the field of relation. Based on other Mike Levin talks and a past conversation I watched between Matt Segall and Mike Levin, Levin hypothesizes these patterns in non-physical morphospace as agentic, which does not align with Whitehead’s articulation of eternal objects. I am just so excited about this – the possibility of stretching/changing Whitehead’s understanding of eternal objects, and/or Levin and colleagues coming to understand these patterns differently…Regardless of the outcome, to me it is so amazing to see science in conversation with philosophy where they both may inform and shape one another. Cool stuff!!

[Christie Byers]

Oooh, I love this thread and find what everyone wrote interesting and thought-provoking!

It is my understanding from reading Matt’s work, in alignment with what Alexandre said here, that the theories of dark matter and dark energy were invented ad hoc in order to try to account for the “observed rotational velocity of galaxies and the rate of inflation of the universe” (Segall, 2023, p. 31) that consistently do not match Einstein’s equations. Matt calls these ‘epicycles’ akin to Ptolemy’s ad hoc epicycles he sketched out in order to try to explain why the planets were behaving unexpectedly.

So, in other words, thinking with Whitehead, a paradigmatic shift is on the horizon for cosmology, and dark matter and dark energy theories are desperation attempts to save the paradigm that is in the process of being supplanted.

So, in this sense, you are exactly right, Dennis, that the dark stuff in question cannot be observed…maybe because it has been invented, or in other words, is not real. Just like those hidden circles upon circles of Ptolemaic astronomers were invented and not real before the Copernican paradigm shift.

• This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by Christie Byers.

I love this description so much, Bill. I admire your ability to find the words to describe what many of us feel, but may find challenging to articulate.

Your description makes me wonder about how some kinds of humans may spend much more time than others in this mode of felt sense vs. a left brain’s mode of experiencing representations of the world, and why that might be. (I have hypotheses). Also, if this is the case, and these “felt sense” folks are in the minority, and this mode of being/becoming-with-the-world is not well understood or valued by the majority of our Western culture, what is the impact on these can’t-help-but-exist-as-felt-sensers? How do they feel valued in a world that doesn’t value this modality?

It also makes me think about my experiences encouraging and supporting future teachers to feel a “felt sense” of wonder in their everyday lives. I don’t use those exact words, but they are asked to pay attention to the everyday world as they go about their usual lives and keep a journal about what they wonder about. The impacts are now quite predictably very powerful in terms of felt relation, vitality, increase in felt capacity, peacefulness, etc. In terms of what you are describing here about felt sense, I think what may be happening is just the fact of being tasked with finding something to write about for the wonder journal (or ‘finding’ wonder, so to speak) sort of requires tapping into this alternative mode of attending to the world.

The beautiful way you described your process,

This has inspired for me a lovely form of eyes-open meditation in daily life. Savour current thinking and external sensing. Then drop into the body, coming alive to the felt sense. Notice how this infuses external sensing with a vividness. I find the effect is instantaneous. It works for thinking and imagery as well, if perhaps more slowly, if we let go of central control in our head and allow thinking and imagery to serve coming alive to the felt sense. Finding words and imagery that are alive to the felt sense, thoughts and imagery sing in life forwarding ways, and serve to deepen our experiencing.

…resonates with the vibrant descriptions of wonder experiences shared by the teachers I work with. There is definitely something approximate going on here that I am very interested in.

Thanks for yet another beautifully-written post.

[Christie Byers]

Hi Bill,

Thank you for your lovely answer. Every time I read something you write or hear you speak, I find myself feeling very calm, sort of dissolving into your thought with you, and wishing you were my therapist helping me with some frozen suffering, or perhaps better yet, a next-door neighbor friend I could take regular walks with having long, beautiful conversations <3. I hope you have people in your life who have the capacity to offer and reflect back to you some fraction of what you are able to offer others.

While reading Davis’s words today I found myself thinking how incredibly busy Whitehead’s God is, and how he really could use some helpers. I think you are most certainly one of those helpers, Bill.

I think what I am really trying to get at with this subjective aim question is some kind of clue about how life-purpose develops, perhaps some kind of initial yet continuous divine endowment, a thread of meaning we continue to notice and may choose to follow because of who we are, how we are lured, how we respond, the environment we grow up in, how we develop our gifts and medicines we might offer. In my writing, I call it a shimmer thread. I wonder how this idea of a shimmer thread might relate to Whitehead’s subjective aim.

The way you describe it, and likely the way Whitehead intends, is seems subjective aim is very momentary, very temporary based on context.

The GPS metaphor is helpful, but in my opinion tells no tales about particular life purpose. Or maybe the traveling is the purpose.

Hopefully the destination is something better than Costco.

Thanks again for your beautiful words.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Christie Byers.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Christie Byers.

[Christie Byers]

Hi Randall,

I really like what you’ve done here aligning speech and language to becoming and being, human speaking with concrescence. I am very interested in exploring and learning more about this particular aspect and how Whitehead understood language. I have really interesting linguistic/verbal/emotional data uttered by people discussing their experiences with wonder that I would like to be able to analyze in a Whiteheadian way, if only I could wrap my head around what that is, exactly. Your post is getting at the alive and living (immanent?) aspect of speech, and the dead (past) aspect of language that I have been thinking about as well. I’ve read Whitehead’s text Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect that helped a bit, but I think I need to read it again.

Also, there is this fascinating article on Whitehead and Language, or more precisely, the living earth and how language emerges from the prelinguistic, from Jay McDaniel’s site Open Horizons that you might find interesting:
https://www.openhorizons.org/language-and-the-living-earth-a-whiteheadian-exploration.html

If you are interested in teaming up with a Whiteheadian language exploration buddy to think with on this topic, let me know. It is an important piece of my research that I am eager to understand better.

Thanks for the thought-provoking post!

Best,
Christie

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Christie Byers.

Hi Robert, this is a fascinating topic, and one I have been interested in all of my life. As a wonder scholar who invites teachers to attune to wonder in the hopes that they will promote the same for their young students, I tend to share my own wonder experiences, the most enduring of which is: why is the world so beautiful? And why is beauty even a thing? I experience beauty every day, as I’m sure we all do, and in my opinion it is an aspect of why life is worth living. In Whitehead’s universe, it turns out, it is the very reason for living.

Your post about evolution and the competing paradigmatic assumptions prompted me to return to a wonderful book I read several years ago (before I began studying Whitehead) that may be of interest to you and the questions you are asking: The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum. Prum is an ornithologist positively in love with studying birds and fascinated by their beauty and the birds’ own fascination with beauty. He explores Darwin’s mostly ignored theory of aesthetic evolution and argues that this theory should be restored to the field of evolutionary biology. On page 325 he states “Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience” and that the “wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves.”

And then on p. 324, “Aesthetic evolution means that animals are aesthetic agents who play a role in their own evolution.”

Basically, his claim is that reviving this undervalued Darwinian theory would allow us to explore how natural selection is not the ONLY force involved in evolution, that it is more complex than that.

I notice Whitehead is not cited in the text, but I am interested in revisiting the book now that I am deep in the exploration of Whitehead’s metaphysics and central focus on beauty. Maybe you would be interested too?

Thank you for the provocative post!

Daryl,

Wow, this book sounds amazing. Thank you for sharing it, Daryl! Like George, I also ordered a copy right away and look forward to reading it.

I feel the same way as Henning does about ongoing debates in education – that they lack a coherent metaphysical root stock, and I become frustrated with those who say we need less theorizing and philosophizing and more direct action. I definitely think we need both, as of course they interact and shape one another.

From my perspective, every action (or inaction) is always already based on the some theoretical/philosophical/metaphysical basis, though simply unanalyzed. Once analyzed and brought into the foreground of conscious awareness, any inconsistencies can be analyzed and reflected upon – and perhaps recognized as contrasts that might be brought into meaningful harmony when viewed through a Whiteheadian metaphysical lens.

Also, I love what you bring up here about hierarchy and power. I know of several individuals who are high up in a particular hierarchy who exercise relational power, and it is quite inspiring. My hope is that this can shift toward becoming the norm rather than the exception in leadership. I look forward to reading Henning’s take on this.

I really appreciate you sharing this valuable resource as a direct application of how Whitehead’s thought can be applied to thinking about the everyday issues we face. I agree that metaphysics/cosmology is at the root of these problems and our best hope for working for something better.

Hi Greg,

I very much resonate with what you’ve written here; the integration of the contrast of having to eat others (and being edible ourselves) with feeling compassion for all our relations is an open and disconcerting question for me too. I am particularly physically sickened by the idea of an animal suffering while being eaten. Ever since I was a little girl watching a TV program called “Wild Kingdom”, watching an antelope being eaten alive by a lion…Later I learned something about endorphins being released in a body being eaten, or a body going into shock – but I’ve been meaning to look into that again and confirm whether it is indeed true. To this day, the worst way I can imagine dying is being eaten alive by a shark (thanks, Jaws!)

Regarding plants, I also agree with you. One of my students about a year ago was wondering about whether plants have feelings and found research about plants ‘screaming’ and making other sounds when in distress or being cut. There is a paper in Cell about it: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3

So, what to do and how to think about it? I like what you write about all being part of one big whole, and one process, so in a sense we are already inside of each other, and a part of one another anyway. There are indigenous authors who write about respect and reciprocity with all of our relations, including those we eat – thinking in terms of gifting our bodies and other gifts to one another. For example, the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer. David Abrams writes about allowing a mosquito to take and use his blood as a way of demonstrating kinship and reciprocity, and recognizing his own edibility.

German Biologist and Philosopher Andreas Weber writes about the fact that we are edible and how part of being alive is that we each take our bodies into one another in order to become ourselves. He has written a book with the title “Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology” – though it is not yet available in English. Here is a link to an interview with him on the topic:
https://www.ttbook.org/interview/becoming-edible-philosopher-andreas-webers-mystical-biology

So what do I do? It’s not perfect, but i definitely think about the issue quite a bit. I know the option is not available to everyone, but I make a point to only purchase meat from local farmers who raise (and kill) their livestock humanely. The animals live a ‘happier’ life being free to roam and socialize with one another on pasture. I am a plant lover and take good care of my plants, and those that I eat, I try to communicate with demonstrating gratitude and respect, and only taking what we need. One interesting thing about fruit (tomatoes, apples, berries, etc), is that the plant intends that part to be eaten as a way of reproducing itself…so I don’t feel any conflict there!

I am interested in ideas that others have?

I appreciate you writing this tender and thought-provoking post <3

Another group doing beautiful work:

https://decolonialfutures.net/

Also Canadian; hmmmmmm….

Hi Bill,

So beautifully articulated, as usual. I am always deeply moved while reading your posts and think about them for days and days afterward.

I have found Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis quite helpful in thinking through all of this as well. What an incredibly useful (and very well researched!) angle – though I do find his use of ‘non-normal’ ways of being, moving, thinking-feeling, becoming in the world (schizophrenic, autistic) as support for his hypothesis somewhat careless and potentially harmful, and would be interested in talking through that aspect sometime.

A connection: as a wonder scholar working to develop theory around the importance of wonder for education, I think about how the heck it comes to pass that the more impoverished and narrow mode of perspective on the nature of nature of the left hemisphere comes to dominate. Well, I think we have been reading and discussing via Whitehead’s scheme and Bob’s book where it all originated, and how it has come to pass, but the question I am wondering about is how this narrowness is perpetuated. I think about how young children are so full of wonder, freshness, and vitality and likely feel intimately connected with everything else in the world – as you say “all our relations” – particularly if they are fortunate enough to spend their days outdoors exploring the landscapes and waterscapes like I did as a child.

In my current work with pre-service teachers learning to teach science, I task them with tracking their everyday experiences of wonder through wonder journaling. It is a little tricky for them at first, but I am thinking this is at least partially because wonder might be a kind of opening or portal onto the right hemisphere way of attending to the world (processual, relational, directly experienced, etc, etc), which they have been trained to dismiss and push into the background of everyday awareness. Once they become more aware of this processual opening through repeatedly engaging with it, some mention that they can see/feel it emerging in classrooms all the time, but teachers don’t know exactly what to do about it and due to being constrained by high-stakes testing of predetermined standards and curricula, dismiss it as unimportant. I am so interested in whether this mostly unintentional action contributes to perpetuating the narrowness of thought and understanding and valuing of a broader view of the nature of reality, the nature of nature, the nature of our relationship with the rest of nature…

Anyway, I have lots of thoughts and questions about the relationship of experiences of wonder with causal efficacy, feeling process, feeling relation, opening up to creativity and imagination, feeling propositions, understanding and feeling a broader dimension of the world/cosmos and feeling ourselves as becoming with it as participants (but not the center of it!). Perhaps feeling the flickering of a kind of conscious awareness of our own process of becoming-with the world.

Lately, perhaps primarily due to the provocations of this group, I have found myself wondering about experiencing a sense of wonder as possibly a way to talk about directly experiencing God. But THAT thought is something I am far from discussing in science education academic journals just yet!

Anyway, I am so grateful for you and the thought-provoking posts you gift to all of us – and it’s very cool that we read a lot of the same texts!

Wow, I love this thread so much; such beautiful, gentle Whiteheadian offerings and ponderings for an otherwise gloomy and heavy Sunday January morning on the East Coast.

I just finished final edits on a chapter (I research and write about experiences of wonder) that includes a vignette that feels appropriate to offer here. I wrote about a strange and revitalizing moment experienced last April just before and during the passing of the “Great North American Eclipse. I write about it as an experience of wonder, through a Whiteheadian conceptual lens, attempting to convey what I felt as a “rhythm of becoming”. I have been thinking about how wonder experiences may be what Whitehead refers to as rare experiences of consciousness where you feel yourself in the process of becoming-with the world.
My apologies for the length, but if you have time, I’d be curious about thoughts about whether this ‘counts’ as an example “feeling dipolor prehension” – but also, perhaps the increase in felt vitality that may accompany direct consciousness of the processual-relational dimension of the world.

By the way, Bill, I LOVE Daniel Stern’s work and articulations of ‘vitality affects’ 🙂

Excerpt from chapter:

Sitting at my computer screen, philosophical texts splayed across the desk, feeling the gravity, again, of the daunting task at hand. It is taking me such a long time (years!) to think through the ontological ground for making sense of wonder, not to mention the challenge of figuring out how to say something about it that is comprehensible with/in (ill)logical and violent wor(l)ds. Only one thing feels certain: an expanded cosmology is indeed what is needed (Whitehead, 1929) in order to situate the uncanny and lively utterances and affects waving and poking at me throughout my pages and pages of data – the traces and fragments offered up by preservice teachers talking about their experiences searching for and writing about wonder. I find myself, once again, wondering about the connection between autistic perception and attending to that dimension of the world still in the process of becoming (Manning, 2016). Something important is moving and dwelling there, pleading to be seen, to be heard, longing to express itself, literally ALIVE (and maybe even trapped?) there – but I start to despair again – who am I to do this work? Who am I to speak on behalf of wonder? And what approach to languaging might allow wonder to be heard?

But today is a special day, the entire US is anticipating the arrival of the 2024 event: a solar eclipse. I look out the window and sense a new texture to the daylight. It is somehow thickly alive, fully present, an agent in the scene where a figure in my neighbor’s yard stands out in the foreground – fully outfitted in mustard yellow (how odd!) contrasted against the deep blue and white of the building just behind, the glowing green of the grass below- a collection of saturated color blocks and strong shadows, producing something that feels almost vintage, like a sepia memory, or a cinematic composition purposefully tinted for a particular a/effect. Like old and new coming together at the same time (a memory of the future?). An intensification is moving here, entertained from my vantage point, with my perceiving body. I feel it doing something strange with/in and with/out me, in the depths of the between, in the thickness of the strange light. What is going on here?

I see the mustard-clad figure is moving – painting a white flower box lavender. Lavender! Another solid block of color seeps in to play the contrast game with the others. A sudden flurry of pink cherry petals enters the frame, tossed around by a cheerful breeze. They call out to me, catch my attention, announcing that something else, another perspective demands consideration while ‘I’ am immersed in philosophical reading about synthesis, processes, and production. I look back down my book, feeling tipsy, under the influence, in a kind of trance-dance with the petals and the vivid color block contrasts, and continue reading Shaviro’s (2012) words:

…syntheses are processes that aggregate other processes, or perspectives on things that are themselves also perspectives (since there are no points of view on things, but…things, beings, are themselves points of view” Deleuze, 1990, 173). They are productions whose “raw materials” are other productions, and whose “products” are themselves taken up as materials in further processes of production (p. 112-113).

What processes of production and perspectives are at work here? I look back out the window and the cherry petals are gone, but the painting, the strange light, continues. And then – Oh! Another flurry of petals! How moving! Something is moving again! Translucent pink dancers – they seem to be, no, they certainly are enjoying this strange light, this breeze, this moment of being carried beyond the bloom branches together. I feel them enjoying it! And I catch myself enjoying it too, being carried without intention, without deciding, just flowing. I am right there in the midst of it, and I feel my too-tense muscles soften into the rhythm. All of these bits together: pink petals, flutter, wind, my untensing body, glass window, philosophical text, vivid color blocks, thickening air, strange light – are these the “raw materials” taken up in some kind of ‘new process of production’? It feels like I am tapping into, and becoming part of, a process, an intensification of some kind of swelling aesthetic on the move.

Ecophilosopher David Abrams (2010) urges us to notice how

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attentions; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds…things catch our eye and sometimes refuse to let go; they “grab our focus” and “capture our attention,” and finally release us from their grasp only to dissolve back into the overabundant world…everything swerves and trembles; anguish, equanimity, and pleasure are not first internal moods but passions granted to us by the capricious terrain (p. 49-50).

Afterward I pause and reflect on the passions, the moving, the in-forming beauty that swept me up and away. Something was opened up and traversed just then, and whatever ‘it’ was, I was definitely a part of it, and it felt deeply meaningful, valuable. I begin writing up my analysis again, refreshed, vitalized, excited to push past the doubt and the impasse with this new colorblock flutter dance version of ‘me’. I feel gratitude for this gift of encouragement and co-becoming with the languaging of the worldscape outside my window:

Be patient
Stay with it
Dance!

Behold the beauty,
Become beauty
Becoming nature
in relation,
in passing,
in passing.

Whitehead (1920) claims that it is the very nature of nature to be passing, and bodying bodies are right there in the midst of this passage, participating with/in it, being called to dance in/with its repeating, yet ever-changing rhythms. Perhaps it is here, in nature passing, in nature dancing, that wonder moves, moves us, moves with us – alerting us to the ‘we’ we are in the process of becoming.

Hi Greg,

I am also interested in the roots, as they have been my original angle of arrival, so I appreciate your attention to them. Such great questions! I’m wondering how long you have been on this Whiteheadian path, because as someone mentioned last night, it can be really helpful to look at WH’s work as a whole system, or a Gestalt, and to approach this journey with patience and openness, with a faith that it will come together in time. In my case it is taking a very very long time to grasp that whole. Each piece taken alone cannot be abstracted from the others and understood without understanding their relationships.

I think if I were to choose a core concept it would be Creativity, or the Creative Advance of the Cosmos.

Yes! This resonates with me too. We are not taught metaphysics, but we are all struggling along, kind of groping in the dark, trying to live our lives without this deeper understanding of the nature of the cosmos, the nature of nature, and where we fit into it all. I have found the process-relational metaphysical journey to be incredibly soul-fulfilling and nourishing, and a way to balance what otherwise felt lopsided and distorted. I appreciate you bringing this up and expressing it such a lovely way, Christopher.