David Orth
I don’t know if this will help. Process psychologist Eugene Gendlin gives special attention to this layer of experience that is pre-conscious (Focusing 1978?). Gendlin calls it the “felt sense” – words right out of Whitehead, though ANW calls this layer “causal efficacy.” Or I love Gendlin’s phrase “implicit intricacy.” There are, for instance, somatic sensations that accompany trauma and beauty. We do not generally pay any attention to them unless they get bad enough or lovely enough to notice. They are unconscious, but can become conscious. We may first notice a physical aspect to them – vague sensations in the torso or face usually. However, we can learn to make them more conscious, and by so doing we discover that there is surprising information and valuation in our world there to unpack – stuff we would never guess through either psychological or philosophical analysis. This unpacking reveals novel meanings and information about what is really going on for us. Gendlin was focused on the specifically therapeutic value of this unpacking. Very different from “analysis,” this process of unpacking is much more specifically relational, and can help shift and dissolve inherited thinking and reaction through an iterative process over time. (Gendlin unfortunately calls this process “Focusing” – which just causes confusion, I think). I’ve found it most helpful in dissolving emotional reactions and stuck places and moving along. Seems very weird, I know, but on some level we do it all the time. Driving for instance – the unconscious sense of where the car boundaries are. (Check out this demo by one of his students: https://youtu.be/yTl2atf8F3o?si=X8epw5FcDKqfsmku ). Gendlin, unfortunately, is mostly unknown in process studies. While his goal was therapeutic, not metaphysical, he could definitely illuminate this aspect of ANW.
George, that’s great. Would love to see what you come up with. One of the difficulties is that most regular folks (without a philo or science background) have a mixed view of the world with some pseudo-intellectual mechanistic, isolationist views they’ve picked up, mixed in with some holistic human experience and pragmatic life. I wonder if starting with Dewey would be a tactic. Or maybe even a list of Whitehead’s basic inversions, but described in more existential language. I am struck that the so-called hermetic wisdom schools (most recently Gurdjieff or Steiner) are proto-process. Maybe some of that could be used. I am particularly struck by Gurdjieff’s proximity to Whitehead. He even had his Law of Three, a kind of concrescence. And his dual-aspect monism and radical empiricism. Keep me posted.
I like Robert B. Mellert’s observation (What is Process Theology?) that religion is not immediately or necessarily about God. At this point, I may be confusing Mellert with my own thoughts, but basically for Mellert religion is a fundamental category of experience grounded in reference to possibility and the process of actualization that includes reference to something real, but also “not yet” – a very mysterious aspect of experience ANW wants to attend to. This, to me undeniable, aspect of the world gets linguistically abstracted variously as the Dao, the mysterium tremendum, the sacred, truth, goodness, beauty, the immensity, or traditionally in the west and middle-east, God.
While I am more than sympathetic with new atheism’s various concerns about classical theism (the four horsemen, etc, as I think ANW was as well), I wonder if the epistemological mysteries of abstraction, relevance, potentiality (these significantly more esoteric aspects of Whitehead) are fully accounted for by efforts to dissolve Whitehead’s God function. I have not read Sherburne’s full argument, but I’m glad that folks who balk at God, are exploring the logical & prehensive possibility of Whitehead without God. This needs to be part of the conversation and I don’t want to be a part of any dismissal of those who are understandably concerned with God language – its damage & associations.
While I personally deconstructed every theological construct I grew up with, Whitehead’s God is a “construction” that fits my own tentative experience as well as a social benefit for some kind of public word to reference the Sacred, creativity/transformation, and beauty (as ANW broadly understands it). When I worked as an ER chaplain, I was constantly reminded that for so many people (sophisticated and not) this God idea is both vital and dangerous – like a table saw. Yes, you can cut off your hand with it, or you can really begin to unwind certain horrors and breakage chaos deals out heartlessly. Yes, there are many today who “cut off their hand” imagining that God orchestrates or allows their tragedies and somehow this makes them meaningful. But with a little guidance, some careful God thoughts were also ready access to a constructive process first of grieving (such a bland word for the psychological horror and real deprivation), then of an organic process of opening and creativity in the face of brutal chaos. (I often used the old Celtic prayers for their holistic, embodied poetry. I edited a bit.) But what is most important, is to find ways to access the constructive novelties and sacral connections available to us within time and within the world. What we call this surely seems socially important per context, but I am going to use whatever words gain me and others access.
Yikes, I always have a moment of “what the hell did I just post!?” I’m still thinking/feeling on this one.