Gordon Lyn Watley
Where can I find a link to the extracurricular Zoom meeting? Can someone send the link to me directly at gordonwatley@gmail.com?
And finally, a quote I love on the aesthetics of tragic beauty:
“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things. The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
– Tom Waits
And another take-away:
This last year I finally got around to reading Olaf Stapledon’s classic science fiction novels Last & First Men (1931) & Star Maker (1937). The former is a historical survey of the future evolution of the human species over hundreds of millions of years; the latter is an account of the literally cosmic journey of an individual human being & his encounters with a variety of extraterrestrial beings & their ascent to encounters with ever higher & more complex levels of structures of consciousness (from global minds to sentient stars, nebulae, galaxies, &c.) on their way to encountering the ultimate consciousness of the universe, the Star Maker. What the first novel does temporally, the second one does spatially, both vertically & horizontally.
And now, in my engagement with this course & also in working thru Dr Davis’ new monograph & edited collection (with Roland Faber) on exotheology & extraterrestrial life, it occurs to me that these two novels by Stapledon are redolent with Whitehead’s philosophy of organism! It turns out that Stapledon (1886-1950) knew of & highly valued Whitehead’s metaphysics, & I even found a 1975 article in the journal Process Studies about this very thing; so I’m quite late to the party. (In academia, if you have what you think is a new idea, you probably don’t, & this is why you need to read old books: caveat lector! And Stapledon’s stature among science fiction authors is such that there is probably no end to his influence on the genre. I think I’ve found my rabbit hole.
Hi, Joel,
In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead describes God more often than not in terms of Eros (desire, yearning), so much so that I wonder if we might not be able to add “Lover” after “Companion/Fellow Sufferer” on the list. There’s a rich Christian mystical tradition of God as Eros centered on the Song of Songs & New Testament language about “the bride of Christ” as a metaphor for our relationship with God, after all. One might also think of the divine love songs of the Sufi poet Rumi & the blending of Christian devotion & Hindu Vaishnava bakhtivedanta in George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” in this regard.
So I agree with you about the move from dogmatism to mysticism. I do worry a bit, tho, about Whitehead’s emphasis on individualism when he writes in Religion in the Making that “[r]eligion is what the individual does with his own solitariness”, especially given his insistence on the interrelationality of all things. Even as individuals, we are always already also persons-in-community, & religion too must necessarily have its communal aspect. And I think many people who are committed to process & open/relational panentheism are still trying to figure out what that communalism looks like.
To speak personally: like many others, I left fundamentalist evangelicalism for process panentheism, & an important part of that journey for me involved the lure of the aesthetics & communal mystical unity of the traditional liturgy (ritual) of the Episcopal Church (&, of course, of the Catholic & Orthodox Churches as well), & thankfully the Episcopal Church has evolved into a capacious hold-all, theologically speaking.
On the other hand, I’d love to join a more explicitly progressive open/relational congregation (they do exist, I hear), but there are none anywhere near where we live, & even if there were, they tend (as far as I can tell) to be pretty generically Protestant in their liturgical orientation, where the sermon, not the Eucharist, is the main focus of communal gathering on Sundays. In other words, I find myself conflicted & (to some extent) unsatisfied with what seem to be the available options. Is a process Eucharist too much to ask for?
Jamie, thanks for your thoughtful post. I think deconstructive modernism has got something of a bad reputation. It’s not all nihilistic, & the ones that are, in my opinion, I’m not so sure they entirely know what they’re talking about. John Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell or What Would Jesus Deconstruct? might be helpful in this regard.
“A need to tell & hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment & before love & shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence.; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, & the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.” – Reynolds Price (A Palpable God (North Point Press, 1985) p. 3
In my opinion, narrative (like experience) goes all the way down. Every process of an actual occasion’s becoming into being is a story with a beginning (physical pole), a middle (conceptual pole), & an end (satisfaction). In personally ordered series of (societies & nexūs of) actual occasions, narrative transcends its role in single actual occasions to take on higher & more complex levels of storytelling experience, creative transformation, intensity, & harmony.
More abstractly than “all stories are fictions”, I would say that all stories are creations, & every story, all the way down, is the outcome of processes of present imagination (entertaining available possibilities) leading to creative transformation out of the past into the future.
As far as meaning making is concerned, the deconstructive postmodern insistence that there is nothing outside the text (Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”) is perhaps better translated as “there is no outside text”: & “text” here includes everything that is, not just words written down; it’s semiotics all the way down, too. For Derrida, language is an open (not closed) system of difference & deferral (differánce) of meaning that has no stable reference point, but only conditional, shifting, perspectival ones. I see many points of interconnection with Whitehead’s thought here.
Meaning doesn’t reside in the text, as if it could mean only one thing; nor does it reside in the reader, as it it could mean anything the reader wanted; rather, meaning is an event, a result of an encounter between a reader & a text, & meaning depends on their interaction. Meaning is always in motion, always a process, never the same thing twice (because, after all, what is?)
Daniel,
As I see it, for Plato the Receptacle (hypodochē) is the space (khōra) that receives the Forms/Ideas (eidoi [plural], eidos [singular] ≈ Whitehead’s eternal objects) that are transitioning from the world of permanent unchanging being to the world of transient changing becoming at the direction of Plato’s creator-god the Demiurge (demiourgos). He uses the dynamic metaphor of the wet-nurse (tithēnē) – usually translated as “foster mother”, which is not nearly as active – nurturing an infant who is not her own with a view to its growth & continuously changing journey thru life. It is the go-between, at the behest of the Demiurge, between the world of perfect Forms & the world of imperfect Copies. Without the Receptacle & its Khōra there could be no transient copies of eternal forms which change from moment to moment & yet are still identifiably (in some sense) the same.
For Whitehead, the extensive continuum (space/time) isn’t simply the environment for the continual oscillation of the becoming & perishing of actual occasions; it’s incomplete (conceptually) without the Receptacle or Space for the serial unity of actual occasions, both at the level of the whole & at the level of the various hierarchical levels of societies of societies of societies of actual occasions. Without it, there would be no serial personal unity, from electron to (the same) electron, from cell to (the same cell), from person to (the same) person across space & time.
We are born with a certain minimal amount of actuality built-in; we are thrown into a particular family, society, culture, religion, timeframe, &c., but otherwise we are born with potentialities wide open (within those beginning limits). Every decision we make enables some new possiblities & cuts off others. As we age, we increase our actualities & decrease our possibilities, until finally at the end of our life no possibilities are left, & we die. Without the Receptacle & the Khōra, we would have no sense of serial personal identity, & neither would any of the sub-societies of sub-societies of actual occasions that make up the bodies that sustain us (are ours) throughout our lives.
I hope this makes sense; & I hope Dr Davis will correct me where I may have fallen short in my attempt at an explanation.
Those were the days! My first Bible was my mom´s old Scofield Reference Bible.
Kathleen,
I have the same trouble keeping the primordial & consequent natures of God together, & often have to remind myself that for Whitehead God being conceived as dipolar means they aren’t separate, but two sides of the same coin (or, better, to aspects of the same process).
The primordial nature, which is timelessly eternal, connects eternal objects with concrescing occasions, providing initial aims as lures toward creative transformation & its subjective satisfaction; the consequent nature, which is everlastingly temporal, acts as a receptacle, enfolding the now objectively immortal actual entity into the divine life & providing feedback (as it were) to the primordial nature for the ongoing generation of new conscrescing actual occasions (including the serial successors of the actual entity we began with) to keep the (one & increased by one) cycle going. It’s the oscillation that makes it a cycle/process, & an exemplification of Creativity.
Love that quote from PR 348: a word picture of the Daoist yin/yang symbol.
Jamie,
Because the Zohar is a medieval text, it’s just outside my area of specialization (Judaism & Christianity in Antiquity), tho I have studied Merkavah & Hekhalot literature some. I was aware of the new Pritzger translation when it was first announced, but never got around to purchasing it because it felt too wide afield. Turns out there was a hole in my library with its name on it. Thank you for bringing it up! I found the first volume on Amazon, & have even opened it up.
I was thrown off by your referring to what the Zohar does with the first 4 words of Genesis 1.1 as a “literal” reading –– that was my bad for not catching it.
“In the beginning, God created” or “When God began creating” would be literal translations of the Hebrew. What the Zohar does is something more interesting: it reads those 4 words in the order in which they occur, rather than according to the rules of Hebrew grammar. (Other less esoteric rabbinic authorships have been known to play this game too.) “With beginning [a.k.a. Wisdom] he [or: it] created Elohim” is a positively Derridean way of making sense(s) of the text (or perhaps it’s the other way around). In any case, the Zohar simply doesn’t care what the rules of Hebrew Grammar say; & why should it?
The correspondence between the Zohar’s Ein Sof & Whitehead’s Creativity you suggest makes perfect sense to me. And And now you’ve got me reading it, after all this time.
No doubt Dr Matt knows Hebrew better than I do, but i don’t see how this counts as a literal grammatical translation. Unlike English, with its typical sentence pattern of Subject-Verb-Object, Hebrew’s typical sentence pattern is Verb-Subject-Object, which Genesis 1.1 follows. The “et” is an object marker that identifies “hashamayim ve et [same object marker again] ha’aretz”/“the heavens and the earth” as the objects of the sentence. “Elohim”/“God” is clearly the sentence’s subject.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the book you cite, but I suspect that there is more than a little typically Rabbinic creative & inventive eisegesis going on here.
Charles, you’re a bibliographic cornucopia. Thanks so much for this reference! Just the subject of world governance/universal world order is politically “triggering” for so many people in the US; I can’t wait to read this.
Thanks for your comments on the film, Kyle; I’ll have to watch Groundhog Day again with this new proposition/lure for feeling in mind; & I agree, it sounds like the Buddhist connection is probably more Zen than Shin there.
The perpetual perishing of concrescence into objective immortality marking the transitoriness or “emptiness” of becoming into being seems more gently tragic (so many nuances in that phrase!) than other instances of the tragic that we might think of: the predator/prey relation of “nature red in tooth & claw” or the child sacrifice practiced by Philistine & Canaanite [including Israelite] peoples in antiquity (which actually has a biblical basis in the law about returning the firstborn of [eventually only] livestock to God, ensuring future births & acknowledging the proven fruitfulness of the womb: in both cases, demonstrating that life requires death as a prerequisite in order to continue. It’s got me wondering whether Mesoamerican human sacrifice might have a similar function.
A beautiful practice illustrating acceptance of the tragic sense of life in the “gentler” sense of universal perpetual perishing is the painstaking creation of elaborately painted paper kites, only to destroy them in the process of simply flying them for the first time; same thing with Tibetan Buddhist monks & intricate mandalas made of colored sand, only to be erased at the end of the ceremony.
One might even argue that tragedy — the dependence of life on death – is central to the Christian Eucharist, too. And now I wonder whether this feeling for the tragic sense of life isn’t ingredient in everything we’d be willing to call “religion”.
I think “The Big Lebowski” is worth looking at in terms of process thought & (in this case) Daoism – the Dude does Tai Chi with his favorite adult beverage in hand, e.g. – & it makes me wish we’d had the time for a section on Daoism & Confucianism.
I have this book! Haven’t got around to reading it yet, but I bought it in part because of the process thought implied in the subtitle, & in part because the bloodshed that seems so essential to Aztec religion is, imo, so problematic for what we usually mean by “religion”, especially in terms of process thought. I’m going to have to move it toward the top of the To Be Read pile. Thanks for reminding me of this, Charles!
I don’t think Dr Farhan’s process theological take on Muhammad Iqbal’s reconstruction of Islamic religious thought will find much acceptance among Muslims living in Muslim-majority countries (for the foreseeable future anyway); its chances among Muslims living in Western countries, on the other hand, seem to be much better. And I think Dr Farhan knows this. And the same goes with the very idea of Islamic Humanism. The more progressive forms of Islam flourish in the West, the hope is that they will eventually have increasingly positive impacts on non-Western Muslim communities. For some background on Islamic Humanism, see this book.
Oh, I don’t feel bad about not quite “getting it” before; that’s why I took this class, for moments like this! And thanks so much for the book recommendation; it looks like Just The Thing!