Greg Walkerden
Hi Keren, You might find it interesting to have a look at Eugene Gendlin’s work. He develops a model of emergence of awareness, consciousness, behaving, etc that offers a schema that is more primitive still than centering on any of the senses or chemosensory capacities more generally: to do with the mutuality and forward orienting of being alive. I’ve attached a couple of texts of mine that may help you get into his gestalt. … I wouldn’t want to derail your framing (particularly if you are well into the PhD), but he does offer a model of how ‘being aware’ gets going in the first place that might illuminate some puzzles.
I should add: I have an open access chapter recently published that describes a key strand of how I have taught environmental students to work professionally from their evolving *felt* sense of the situations they are in. It includes stories of them teaching themselves negotiation skills, reflective practice, etc, and describes the pedagogical organisation around this. All this really required was me knowing what I wanted to teach and having the courage to do it. It’s certainly an instance of teaching “new ways of knowing and going beyond the [conventionally recognised] facts”.
I have attached my chapter FYI. The full (2025) book it is in is here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939/practicing-embodied-thinking-research-learning-donata-schoeller-sigridur-thorgeirsdottir-greg-walkerden
The roots of this approach to teaching – the knowing what I wanted to teach – were my own reflections on my own practice, which the 2005 chapter attached shows. When, about 5 years later, I became a full time academic, one of the goals I set myself was to develop a way of teaching this more sensitive, astute approach to professional practice that is so important to adaptive capacity for us collectively (as well as individually, of course). I take it for granted that we can’t ‘control’ what will happen, socio-ecologically (very obvious at larger spatial scales and over longer timeframes); we have to work responsively and fluidly, surfing and influencing socio-ecological dynamics. The ‘adaptive management’ tradition that (to a substantial extent) I orient from foregrounds this. Teaching this way was a deliberate contribution to shifting the character of the environmental professions (I was teaching environmental science, environmental management, environmental planning and sustainability students).
It’s worth staying, btw, that teaching professional practice this way is deeply aligned with ‘teaching the soft skills’ that employers are constantly calling for, but which are generally considered *hard* to teach. I show a potent way this can be done. This alignment with what employers want is a strong selling point if you find you need to persuade a more conservative educational institution to let you teach this way.
Charles Birch (who is a biologist who worked with John Cobb, amongst others) has a useful paper on ‘Whitehead and science education’ that speaks to some of this, and is encouraging. I have attached it FYI.
Broadly speaking he points to the importance of helping students grasp the implicit or explicit ontological assumptions of their research methods and theories, and leaning on Whitehead’s orientation to education in which “three stages of learning, romance, precision and generalization” are fundamental. … In effect these are contributions at the levels of curriculum and class design. … Whitehead’s approach is broadly aligned with Dewey’s, and Dewey’s has been very influential shaping progressive education and foregrounding experiential learning, so there are opportunities in many educational settings that Whiteheadian insights align with.
… Where things get tricky is, I think, the subterranean trust in mechanistic, atomistic intuitions that much of our (in English, at any rate) grammar and vocabulary reinforces. … At that deeper level the challenge is like (and perhaps could be seen as an instance of) being mindful. E.g. being mindful of, = aware of and sensitive to, the particularity of what is here-now, *does* heighten sensitivity to how reality can be understand processually … ‘Letting come, letting be, letting go’ actually foregrounds vividly the processual nature of our experiencing. Education in mindfulness is obviously possible, but not such an easy fit to our institutional contexts, though I have done quite a bit of it in postgraduate environmental education (with a Gendlinian emphasis on how we ‘feel’ our situations, which has obvious resonances with Whitehead). … One could specify ‘being mindful’ explicitly as including ‘being aware of the processual character of reality (as we experience it)’; that would be *a* way into this territory, quite an attractive one I think.
An addition: The Buddhist emphasis on impermanence is close to being an explicit framing of mindfulness as ‘a way of becoming aware of the processual character of reality’.
Hi Bill and Alexandre,
Alexandre, you write “So far, process philosophy has been the most useful paradigm I found to explain my experiences in non-ordinary states of consciousness.” My experience echoes that. In the 1990s I went looking for theory that could explicate my experience of working creatively, in intellectual tasks particularly, and I coupled that with exploring Dzogchen, a Tibetan Buddhist (and Bon) ‘direct realisation’ tradition. Eugene Gendlin’s process philosophy, which has roots in Whitehead (amongst others) provided me with the leverage I needed to think more clearly about what was going on.
I read (and practiced) Dzogchen texts while reading (and practicing) Gendlin’s ‘A Process Model’. Very resonant of your comment: “Understanding Whitehead is therefore just as useful to me in understanding my own transcendent experiences as my transcendent experiences are useful in understanding Whitehead.” That led me on to work that extended Gendlin’s process model and his practice tradition to explicitly cover experiencing-being ‘Vastness-Oneness’. (If you are curious, a chapter of mine re that is here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7lrivgn0oipicdjvkxubl/Walkerden-2021-Focusing-Vastness-and-Union-Author-s-copy.pdf?rlkey=hurla6fqp0fc1mm6oiq6d9tg8&st=n0xiba66&dl=0 ).
Bill, unsurprisingly, I resonate intensely with your core theme: “Deeply presencing with what is freshly emerging now is what is most trustworthy.” !
“Forgetting what we already know” is a provocative framing though :))
It works experientially when we need to drop received stories or familiar frameworks to understand something freshly. But implicitly – as I know you know – ‘what we already know’ is in play *in* what comes freshly now. As per Gendlin’s “eveving” and Whitehead’s ‘concrescing all in one’. … What you quote from Faber, though, “the unknowable in the form of the unexpected is constitutive of the matrix of becoming”, is striking. It leads me to think about the implicit time horizons with which we usually think about ‘knowing’. *What we know* is usually tacitly looking back: we are (tacitly) celebrating past accomplishments.We may also stand here now knowing somesuch. To sit with the quality of ‘knowing’, as we are experiencing it *now* is a much more intense and enlivening thing.
When I shift to orienting forward to “the unexpected [that] is constitutive of the matrix of becoming” it is unknowing, openness that I find foregrounded. Experientially the segue between the three (as I am doing it now) is moving from settling-controlling to wonder-and-gladness to openness-uncertainty-vulnerability. Three stances … three kinds of grounding …
… I find all three precious, but (like you, Bill) it is ‘the trustworthy freshly emerging now’ – the being-here – I find most enjoyable and heartening.
—
The ambition of building (attempting to build) an “alliance between speculative philosophy and mystical poetry” is quite amazing. I have been dipping into Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’ which I gather Whitehead read almost like scripture, as an inspiration for this work. Whitehead’s cosmology centres on the here-now / open-emerging edge, with what-was playing an enabling role.
‘The Prelude’ is kind of a meditation on, an explication of, Wordsworth’s lived experience. For example, from his meditations on being in Paris around the time of the French Revolution:
“the fear gone by
Press’d on me almost like a fear to come;
I thought of those September Massacres,
Divided from me by a little month,
And felt and touch’d them, a substantial dread;” (p.178)
The sorrow and fear lived now … and the strange ‘distance’ …This is the past lived freshly now.
One cannot centre on creativity, on becoming, on events, on actual occasions without having an experiential sense of ongoing aliveness as orienting … at least to me it would be counter-intuitive not to be grounding here and yet be giving these concepts such a central place in one’s understanding of reality.
I have just been looking through Whitehead’s ‘Adventures of Ideas’, though, imagining that that would be a place where he might at least allude to the importance of “experiencing freshly now” for his own practice. Unfortunately, as usual, his own process sits in the background – it’s implicit in every passage in every text, but how he lives his thinking personally is rarely alluded to, and, it appears, never explicated. He *alludes* to it in the first paragraph of the Preface to ‘Adventures of Ideas’:
“The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter. One meaning is the effect of certain ideas in promoting the slow drift of mankind towards civilization. This is the Adventure of Ideas in the history of mankind. The other meaning is the author’s adventure in framing a speculative scheme of ideas which shall be explanatory of the historical adventure.”
But even here it is a third person allusion. He, though, *has* been enjoying an adventure.He emphasises the importance of practical experience, for example here:
“To avoid misunderstanding I must disclaim the foolish notion that it is possible for anyone, devoid of personal experience of commerce, to provide useful suggestions for its detailed conduct. There is no substitute for first-hand practice.” Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p.111-2.
I have high confidence that letting words come from “experiencing freshly now” is central for Whitehead. But it would be good if he were clearer about his own process!Hi Nelson,
I read your post with a lot of interest, as I spent quite a lot of my professional life working on watershed-water_body systems, as a systems analyst and facilitator, as an environmental manager, and as an environmental planning consultant.
I was struck by the beaver example: those kinds of left field surprises keep cropping up in environmental management (Holling’s classic book ‘Adaptive environmental assessment and management’ is one text that underlines that). I was also struck by your desktop / field contrast and your ecologist’s more intuitive ‘gestalt’ response. I was struck, particularly, by resonances with my experience of managing a multidisciplinary team that included a number of ecologists – that ‘felt’ (e.g. intuitive) sense of what was going on was always in play, but often not treated seriously enough by the scientists themselves. (They would see and feel things that fell outside their analytic lenses, but which were still helpful for management, but they would crop up informally in conversation, not in their reports.)
My work was consciously holistic in two senses. The systems thinking looked at socio-ecological dynamics holistically. It was, though, quite atomistic in its underlying intuitions because flows of material, energy and funds were central to the analysis (much of which was quantitative modelling). But that also sat embedded, in my practice, in an holistic felt appreciation of complexity – dropping below the atoms to an intuitive sense of aliveness. Our feeling (prehending) involves complex crossings that we can’t parse in a conventional way. A chapter of mine on felt understanding in ecosystem management (attached for anyone curious about this) unpacks the feeling layer of skilful practice. It includes an extended wetland example that is quite resonant of yours, albeit with the complexity of our feel for situations foregrounded.
Looking at all that from the perspectives of Goethe’s “qualitative understanding”, ‘felt Gestalts’, “process science” and “participatory method”, its clear, I think, that letting one’s *feel* for a situation play a prominent role is participatory: one is consciously, deliberately exploring how one is personally moved by a situation in order to understand it more deeply.
Systems analysis, as I practiced it, is formally a process science, but there is quite a remove from the mathematical modelling we did to appreciating and orienting from the intrinsic aliveness of (at least) all the (in the usual sense) living beings in the system (place …). I have at various points practiced that further gestalt shift. We took a fresh approach to conservation of an endemic rare plant, Angophera inopina, for instance, because I shifted my gestalt from the individual discrete bodies of plants to appreciating the aliveness of the plant as a living process playing out through many ‘bodies’, both the multiple trunks arising from a single underground organism and the emergence of new organisms through seed dispersal. Shifting my gestalt led us to focus on ‘ecological permeability’: how might the living process that is the plant considered holistically flow through space and time, coping with climate change (which is driving distributions south in the southern hemisphere)? That led us to look at slow infrequent gene flows (seed dispersal) valuing places like parks, drainage lines, gardens etc in urban areas differently – because over the long time they create space for the plant-as-one-living-process-with-many-material-embodiments (or more precisely: as one pulsating flowing embodiment) to move through the landscape, adapting that way to climate change. Extremely rare events (i.e. unlikely serendipities) become more important when you think like this, and increasing the ecological permeability of the landscape – the opportunity for the plant to move – becomes more important.
To my mind all knowing is participatory. But when we slow down and notice that, and heed how *we* are being moved as we think, as we wonder etc, a lot more is accessible to us than when we think more conventionally with our focus on ‘the entities and events we are aware of’. Gendlin’s work on felt understanding provides a way of instantiating, embodying, that participatory sensitivity. Whitehead, it seems to me, points to this with his understanding of all into one making a fresh one, and prehending-as-feeling. But Gendlin’s work, which has significant roots in Whitehead, goes much further and does a much better job of helping us learn modes of *practice* that support such consciously participatory knowing.
Thanks for the evocations 😉
Greg.Hi Enrique,
This is an intuition I am deeply sympathetic to. … Close examination of any experience shows vastly more than we know how to say. For example, as I write these sentences I can feel my own long history of puzzlement and curiosity about these matters in play as a felt background to my words coming, and my own long history of exploring these kinds of issues systematically, through both practicing and philosophically (the two intertwine).
… How to move in response to this recognition is what I am most interested in … This is a place Eugene Gendlin has done a lot of work. (The first 15 or so minutes of this video provide a good introduction to his thinking, for instance: https://youtu.be/DZ_QPBcTBf4?si=NsRsZhyrm5HpyWAL .)
He emphasises, re the character of where we are coming from (as we speak, act, …):
(i) That there is a striking orderliness to our grounding; we can feel precisely when something lands, occurs, that ‘fits’ what we feel is needed, for instance.
(ii) That the orderliness is **different in kind** from the orderlinesses that any pattern of words can offer us … For example, our feeling of what we mean to say is not like an extended discourse we have not got round to saying, laying out, yet. Words do point towards a process of feeling meaning, but to conflate the said words and the felt meaning would be like mistaking the finger for the moon it is pointing towards (thinking of the Zen saying re that.)
(iii) Investigating this orderliness – exploring how it can be fairly characterised – is tricky, principally because it is so taken for granted. Where Gendlin focuses is on exploring the roles that ‘where we are coming from’ play in our thinking and acting, e.g. noticing the impact that unease about what someone has said has in our conversation with them.As a writer (though not as a person) Gendlin stops at noticing this play of what happens into our ‘implying’ – i.e. into our first person living here, aware, oriented towards being ourselves here, = oriented towards what happens as our living goes on.
Personally I don’t find this central, though it’s very important. *My* experience is of a kind of ‘grounding’ in play here that is deeper than can be named through any account that assumes, in some fashion, that ‘we (all beings) are individuals present in the world making sense of things, doing our best to live our lives’. … For Whitehead, I take it, this grounding is ‘God’: the stability that is a counterpoint to the flux. I have been used to thinking of Whitehead as a process first thinker – as seeing flux as primary – but looking some more at ‘Process and Reality’ I see that he emphasises a kind of counterpoint:
“we find in the first two lines of a famous hymn a full expression of the union of the two notions in one integral experience:
‘Abide with me;
Fast falls the eventide.’
Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide,’ ‘me’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of ‘substance’; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics of ‘flux.’ But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers.” (P&R p.209)I find it captures my intuitions (which stem from sitting with my experience of being here now, from experiencing presence) better to say I want a schema (i.e. story that speaks from and resonates with my intuitions) that captures both the multiplicity and instability of flux and the felt constancy, stability, of ‘grounding’ that for me involves the kinds of ‘lures for feeling’ Whitehead talks about here:
“[God] does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” (P&R p.346)
This goes well beyond the mapping that Gendlin provides.
I gather that you find yourself in a similar place …
There are two ways experience is “bigger” than our discourse here: (i) in the complexity of making-here (the “all” being integrated and the “self-creativity”) and (ii) in the extraordinariness of the grounding.
I can’t go as far as Whitehead in having *an* explicit discourse (cosmology) about what is going on – even held provisionally as he does. I want more fluidity: that seems more faithful to my sense of unknowing and the flux of aliveness. But I value the way his schema points to places in our experience where we need to say ‘we need *something* that makes sense of ‘this’ [… the grounding-and-the-flux … the …] about-in our experiencing …’.Thanks,
Greg.Hi Montgomery, Rick and Joshua,
This is a topic-theme-question I have wanted to develop further. (Apologies that I am posting with quite a lag.)
I don’t think metaphysics and physics and the other natural sciences are – or ought to be – as separable in the way Matt Segal and your professor, Phil Devinish, Montgomery, have asserted.
Imre Lakatos’s philosophy of science offers an alternative perspective that rings true to me. He focuses on the networks of assertions we make when we are doing science, which range from very local descriptions to very general statements about what-is. For example, if I am talking about an estuarine ecosystem, there will in one direction be particular statements about things like observed concentrations of pollutants, dynamics of plant growth (e.g. fluxes of biomass), etc, and in the other direction statements about what a system and what an ecosystem is, what plant growth is, a wider context re the physics and chemistry of water, etc.
Lakatos’ approach is to see research programs as evolving, with local particular assertions getting changed more quickly as our understanding moves forward (e.g. we do experiments, rethink critically, etc.), and the more general claims being revised much less frequently – but still being revised or at least revisable.
Wider statements are very general and as such aligned with much more experience (practice, effective activity, etc), so we quite reasonably require much more argumentation to change them.
What is at issue in a metaphysics / science divide is whether there is a *fundamental* difference between metaphysical and scientific assertions.
Its certainly true, as Matt indicated in his response to my question, that we can hang onto very general statements – e.g. ‘the earth is the centre of the universe” – much more easily than quite particular ones – e.g. ‘the path that wandering planet Mars follows through the sky is …’. The Ptolemaic model of the universe was accommodated for a very long time by adding epicycles to descriptions of the motions of celestial objects. Eventually the Ptolemaic model was dropped because the Copernican one explained the observations more simply.
It seems to me that Whitehead’s assertion that reality is organisms all the way down can be approached in a similar fashion. We can – in principle (I am not sure how to in practice) – come up with particular versions of this that we *can* test. We test them, and if our observations play out as expected, our confidence in Whitehead’s general model, and in our particular detailing of it, grow. If they do not, we would look for other ways in which it might be detailed, and explore how resilient the alternative model is. To keep going in this way is to approach metaphysics-and-natural-science as one system, in the way that Lakatos describes (and which he thinks is how all scientific thinking evolves).
I think Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ cries out for such treatment, *because* central to Whitehead’s method is to look at all the details and variety of experience, and see what kinds of general understanding of reality is required if *all* of what we find is to be accommodated by it. His description of his aims implies he has been doing this kind of testing iteratively as he has developed his model. (Its worth noting that sciences like cosmology work only in this way – through observation and reflection – because experiments are impossible. We consider more cases, and adjust our models as we learn more.)
Eventually a process like this *might* lead us to abandon the claim that Whitehead has developed a persuasive general cosmology. This would not happen because any particular facts *force* us to abandon the general metaphysical intuition – that (I think) could not happen because one could keep adjusting the process-first schema so it survives each apparent counter-example. Why one would abandon it is because the process of adjusting would come to feel arbitrary, and thus unreasonable.
I *do* think that explicitly metaphysical curiosity is useful, because our metaphysical assumptions are usually so taken for granted that we can see no alternatives to them. Coming up with new models and seeing what they suggest we should look for can be very fruitful. … I have done a bit of this myself, looking at how Gendlin’s process-first thinking (which derives in part from Whitehead’s) can help with understanding the lived experience of non-human beings (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p8rvkko632qwukc659qc2/Walkerden-2023-Kangaroo-know-how.pdf?rlkey=x5e04xndy0n7rfatdclg47vij&dl=0). What interests me most re this course is running into examples of where scientists are finding interesting crossings between metaphysical intuitions and how they interpret and practice.
Warmly,
Greg.Hi Dennis,
I’ve just checked out Houston’s program: https://www.houstonforesight.org/program/#
It looks like we are both well and truly started on helping us move collectively to more preferable futures 😉I work in the adaptive management tradition, which comes out of ecology, which is less optimistic and emphasises resilience in the face of multiple possible futures, and preferring intentional proactive transformation to forced transformation.
If you’re curious, an explication of what for me is the most precious strand of teaching this is here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939-18/learning-catalyse-socio-ecological-change-greg-walkerden
Thanks, Greg.
Hi Dennis,
Re: “For the first time in my seventy-four years, I fear my own government. The goal of this administration seems to be to hurt as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”
This is very, very distressing …
I hesitate to try and parse the Trump administrations’ policies from my level of engagement, on the other side of the Pacific …
What I *suspect* is that they will hurt many people they do not intend to hurt – tariffs are very likely to do this, and if they cut access to healthcare many Trump leaning communities will suffer …
They are hurting many they want to hurt. The culture wars aspect of Trump’s actions are here, e.g. the international aid bureaucracy (not to mention their international partners) and federal government employees generally are two obvious groups, and with the removal of DEI provisions many non-white people.
I’m conscious, though, that many groups have had good reason to fear the US Government, and indeed the Australian government (in both centre-left and centre-right varieties), over long periods e.g. refugees, Indigenous peoples, … not to mention peoples in places like South and Central America and the Middle East, …
With Trump what I am most unsure about is whether the people he says he will help will actually *be* helped. … The net effect of his programs on, for example, white, working class, unskilled workers is not easy to judge in advance, as the intended help may be swamped by unintended harms. …
I have just read the material on ‘Ecological Civilisation’, and the ethos’s of process thinking and the current US administration are far, far from each other.
For example re Culture we have:
“Developing a culture that values wisdom, compassion and creativity more than acquisition, consumption and status.”And:
“Hope, Love, and Laughter: Additionally, an ecological civilization is infused with hope for a better future, love for the planet and all its inhabitants, and a spirit of laughter and joy in communal activities.”Though I can’t think of any governments that would count as having brought laughter and joy into most people’s lives!
Solidarity is a direction in which to move … Especially at the local level in the way Jay’s “Getting Started” opportunities point to.
The ‘process thinking’ value “[being] community-centric approach [in a way that] promotes a sense of belonging and interconnectedness among its members” … is in this place. From friends who know the US better than I do, I know that local solidarity is something people care about across the political spectrum. That perhaps is a place to build from; it’s very much in line with the spirit of our work in this course.
I wish America and Americans paths through the current turmoil that make sense, and unexpected hope.
And I offer my apologies if anything I’ve said jars or feels unfair to anyone reading this. Quite possible writing from Australia, and from my own positionedness.
Greg.
By way of preface, I am in Australia, so I watch the US scene from some distance; and with great concern. I have spent about 40 years advocating on environmental issues, initially through NGOs and my church, then as a professional environmental manager, working as an intrapreneur in consulting and government, and most recently as an academic (researching and teaching). I segued from advocating as a citizen to working professionally in the hopes of having a bigger impact – since I can’t live both paths at once, I’m not sure! But anyhow … … I’ve also held a couple of senior management roles, one in IT and another in environmental management. … That’s the practical experience I think from …
For me Dennis’s post is linked to a distressed comment made in Week 4’s online class coming from the experience of watching civil rights advances fought for in the 1960s being eroded away; I have been sitting with, and grieving about this. The civil rights advances seemed settled, and yet here we are. One detail: I was talking to my sister who works for a large Australian corporation which does contracts with the US government. They have had to drop DEI programs in their US subsidiaries to keep doing business with the federal government.
From an environmental perspective I am *deeply* concerned by the impact of Trump’s election. Climate change and biodiversity loss are very hard and *very, very* slow to reverse. Millenia for the first (the IPCC thinks 2 to 3 metres sea level rise is baked in over the next millennium, for example), and many millions of years for the second. People and non-human beings will be living with the harms we are doing – will have lives shaped by the losses occurring now – for a very long time.
1.
Regarding the definition of ‘unilateral power’, Bob writes (textbook p.66):
““Unilateral power” is the label applied to this traditional vision by the process philosopher and theologian Bernard Loomer. To be unilateral here means to move one way. The president orders the generals and admirals. The generals and admirals command the captains. The captains direct those below them who ultimately control the sea- men and privates. Orders flow one way—down the ranks. They don’t move upward against the flow of power.”I think the picture of “unilateral power” – as command and control – is too simplistic; it unhelpfully obscures dissent. Even in the military there is all kinds of dissent, but its necessarily hidden – personal prejudice can shade a DEI process, vindictiveness can infuse military treatment of prisoners, evidence of abuse can be leaked, …
James C. Scott (whose political intuitions lean to anarchism) is one scholar who has done us a service by underlining this. The Wikipedia page on him – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott – has helpful summaries of his major books. Scott has explored many forms of hidden dissent and resistance.
A lot of grassroots work is helpful in this kind of way.
2.
I *think* that it is better to look at all political and economic power as relational. Even military power is relational, in the end – although this doesn’t mean you can’t wipe some peoples out. (Having wiped out a group, you have to live with the consequences of that in the other relationships you have where you are interdependent.)From my own experience in senior management roles, and from being close to other senior managers, one of the things that stands out is how constrained choices feel: one is always ‘balancing’ (integrating, finding a resultant amongst, …) many considerations. Three basic ones are a version of (i) the cause and effect networks in which an organisation is embedded, (ii) the wider socio-political networks in which it is embedded, and (iii) the capacities, culture and internal organisation of the organisation. (This is a version of a short heuristic I used to help postgrad environmental policy, planning and management students come to understand the landscape in which they were working.) The job is more about holding many considerations together astutely in shaping a choice than it is about having ‘greater degrees of freedom’. Of course decisions one makes higher up the hierarchy may be more consequential, … the impact of a creative choice can be larger … This instances what Whitehead is talking about when he talks about the great deal that is being had and held together in any actual occasion’s becoming.
From this perspective “relational power” has a lot more going for it than one might think. “Relational power” is a more illuminating metaphor than “unilateral power” when it comes to Trump (or any other US President), which is a point Zhenbao was making, that Nelson quoted. … Trump is (naturally) beholden to a (significantly) different array of stakeholders from either traditional Republicans or Democrats. But like anybody in that role he has many dependencies (they are interdependencies of course).
What disorients me most personally – because it shows there are a lot of people in the US whose political instincts are so different from mine that I can’t quite make sense of them – is that an absolute majority of Americans voted for him. But on the other hand, there are so *many* people in countries like the US who have lost out while a kind of rebalancing has been going on at a global level. Hans Rosling’s work – https://www.gapminder.org – underlines how the last 50 years or so have brought about huge improvements in material wellbeing in China, India and diverse other places. Yet its happened via (some) working class Americans being pushed into service economy jobs with lower wages and greater insecurity. What this highlights is how unskilled we are collectively at shaping change with justice and compassion. Capitalism – especially the US version of it which provides poor health care and very expensive education for so many – fails us dramatically here. Markets look after people in proportion to their market power (pre-eminently their income and wealth). It’s painfully obvious that collectively – via our governments – we need to redress that.
3.
I have personally hoped for mixed economies, with governments responding to the common good, to be helpful. And I have found my way to strategies that make sense to me, notably:
– Working at multiple levels at once, e.g. in the one project, developing the skills of the people who are participating, doing the substantive job at an organisational or network level, and doing innovative work that can be an example to others. In this way if the politics shifts at the substantive level at which I am working, undermining what I have been doing, the people I am working with have become more skilled, and innovations are still diffusing through networks.
– Working for long term social change at the same time as working on the particular decisions and cases in front of me, e.g. I have worked for ‘improving ecological permeability’ (relevant over long time frames) – doing a better job of sharing our landscapes with non-human beings – at the same time as working on management of particular locales, places.
– Accepting that with things like climate change and biodiversity loss, we still have the potential to move on better rather than worse trajectories, even though being on ‘good’ trajectories is not possible.These are good things to do … In Whitehead’s terms one could see them as one person’s efforts to follow the ‘leadings’ that ‘God’ provides … (It seems to me that whether or not we each use the word ‘God’ here, all of us (or at least most of us) have this kind of experience of ‘leading’.)
If I lived in the US now, I think I might be percolating possibilities of / engagements in direction action (demonstrations, etc) …
Although in this last phase of my life I have shifted my focus to long term cultural change (e.g. working on making non-human beings more intelligible to us, and helping people develop skills in (more) embodied thinking), so, perhaps just turning up to march …
… I think Trump’s ‘horizon of concern’ is very narrow – I think its likely that he *actually* only lives as if he is the only one with intrinsic value (given the way he ripped of subcontractors and donors to his charity, its hard to see even his family as actually inside his horizon of concern) …
Mostly when we talk ‘social justice’ we omit consideration of non-human-beings’ well-being … we all have horizon of concern issues …
Nelson writes: “I still believe that love and hope will prevail over hate and fear, but it will take time to be lasting.”.
It seems like Whitehead would agree, because this is the character of God as he understands / experiences it …
It’s also the character of ‘God’ as I experience God, in everyday mysticism. (Other languages for ‘God’: the ground of my being / that which I find interiorly as a ‘source’ from which I derive / Buddha nature … Brother Lawrence’s ‘the Practice of the Presence of God’ and Buddhist experience of ‘Buddha nature’ – the Ground/Root of reality as compassion-wisdom-openness – both speak (and shape) my experience …)
I think the “hope” I have rests here. But it’s not pollyanna-ish: evolutionary history shows us *huge* catastrophes can happen. … I am left, I think, where Whitehead leaves us: returning to my sense of ‘the good’ and the leadings that come from there, and resting in the not-knowing re how it will all work out when …
Hi Bill, here are a few loosely connected thoughts in response.
1.
The contrast between “a more rigid metaphysical framework” and the wildfire approach where “the ideas function as creative catalysts, sparking new insights and possibilities without aspiring to final or exhaustive conclusions” is very similar to Gendlin’s contrast between a logical pattern and a felt sense. The same text could be used in the statement of each (*just* laying out the logical pattern, vs explicating the felt sense *as* a logical schema) – the difference (or at least the essential difference, since generally I would expect texts to have traces of their processes within them) is in the process of writing and reading. Is felt understanding in play in a lively way, or is logical orderliness where the connections come from? I think its likely that for Whitehead there is *always* a felt sensing ground in play, but we should look for evidence re that.2.
Re: “how our experiencing is a series of actual occasions that constitute us like a series of waves”
I have been dipping into John Cobb’s ‘Whitehead Word Book’ (available on kindle) to get into Whitehead’s terminology with more precision than Bob’s introduction (Cobb in his intro says that after getting oriented by Bob, his wordbook can help with getting into the precision of Whitehead’s terminology). One of Cobb’s comments that’s pertinent here is:
“Similarly, an occasion of human experience is not to be understood as a person experiencing. There is no person beneath or behind the experiencing. The act of taking the past into account and constituting itself with a view to the future is the actual occasion. The person is constituted as a long series of such occasions growing out of one another and out of the body.”
For me this raises interesting questions about what we mean by terms like “our” and “us” – and my “we”. When I think of “my experiencing” and “me” I have … a sense of a substantial thread through time, a centre of experiencing, certainly ‘a body made [by me as life process] for going on in’ that *is* going on (putting this Gendlinianly).
… I think ’embodied living presence’ is what I take myself to be, which is ‘more substantial than’ (?) a Whiteheadian wave of experiencing-and-presence, I think …
If I ask, what does Whitehead’s schema – ‘being a series of actual occasions’ – *help* me with, it does focus me more on present experiencing, freeing me a bit from than the weight of the past, … there’s a certain lightness … Perhaps I feel a bit more uprooted, though?… I doubt that *Whitehead* would intend that I feel a bit more uprooted … which brings forward the interesting question / speculation: how does (did) *he* experience *himself*, holding, as a handle for his being present, ‘being a series of actual occasions’? … => A thing to look out for is traces of his speaking directly from his first person experiencing in the text of P&R.
3.
Re: “Can we experience dipolar prehension?”
… I’m puzzled by the thought that we might *not* be able to “experience” “dipolar prehension” if it’s a pervasive process in our lives. … Grasping our own process *as* we are becoming is the territory, I guess, so this becomes a question about reflexivity, I take it …I do wonder if the term “dipolar prehension” fits my experiencing … Talk of “physical and mental poles” and a “mental prehension side” and a “physical prehension side” seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. A bit of focusing-based microphenomenological enquiry might be helpful here … something we can experiment with, perhaps …
–
… There are a lot of threads to take up …
Thanks George and Bill.
Reflecting on my post I think I am iterating around a central question: Where is Whitehead coming from? *How* do his philosophical intuitions arise? Thence: what is he trusting as he develops philosophical positions, and what is his philosophical method, his *process* of philosophising?
I’m sure those aren’t questions I’ll answer with confidence soon. I’ll be pleased if I have a good working sense re them at the end of the first couple of courses in the Certificate.
George, re “organising”, my question is more precise: Its a commonplace of modern natural science to say that reality is organised as a hierarchy of parts. A *simple* process first take on this would be to replace talk of ‘parts’ with talk of ‘events’ (that have a flow of becoming) or ‘(sub)processes’. But how events-processes hang together in a way that enables plant life (say, ‘like a democracy’) and animal life (say, ‘like a monarchy’) is not at all obvious to me, from a *process first* perspective. … Gendlin in his ‘A Process Model’ has concepts that could be used to explicate the ‘monarchy’ intuition: he shows ways new orders of wholeness can be understood as emerging. … Its a bit of a long story, but the introduction to Gendlin’s process thinking I mentioned in my Introduction post re myself and the kangaroo know-how chapter linked to above both provide quite a bit of explication re this, for anyone who happens to be interested. (I also have a long history as a systems analyst re socio-ecological dynamics -> its not systems thinking in general that I am missing.)
Bill, I am delighted these musings resonated and evoked :).
Reviewing my post its obvious to me that I am deep in the process of puzzling and musing here … This Whiteheadian intuition – “How easily these supposedly dead inert mechanical bits join our body as nourishment!” – is very heartening :).
A rock would be some kind of assemblage or aggregation, I guess, that is different from the democracy-like or monarchy-like organising of plants and animals. To look at this in a Whiteheadian way it looks to me like we need a typology of ‘kinds of organising’ …… If one simply takes a things-first concept and replaces it with a process-first concept, one could ‘tick the box’ re ‘kinds of organising’, but, one would not then have used process thinking to do anything illuminating or interesting … => it’s that kind of more creative use of Whitehead’s approach that I am reaching for here …
Hi Daryl, A great deal of Gendlin’s work is available online, in the Gendlin Online Library – https://focusing.org/gendlin/
There are two sides to his work, the development of practices for thinking more skilfully (leveraging felt understanding), and building theories around that. A process first ontology is central to his theoretical intuitions. The closest he comes to Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’ is his ‘A Process Model’.
For his practices an early paper is ‘Experiencing: A variable in the process of therapeutic change’: https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2082.html
There are various videos of Gendlin on YouTube introducing the thinking process that came to be called Focusing.For his philosophy, a useful entry point is ‘Experiential phenomenology’: https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2101.html
His ‘A Process Model’ book is very dense. Something of a way in is a paper of my own that Gendlin embraced as an introduction to it: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/m7gfw5ve2llbif0t6vzvj/Walkerden-2004-How-I-read-the-structure-of-the-A-Process-Model-text.pdf?rlkey=mhi2ms1q949blgkv80viszihg&dl=0
From where I am sitting at the moment (recognising I have lots more to learn re Whitehead), the reasons *why* one might take an interest in Gendlin, from the perspective of this course, are (i) that he is one of the thinkers who has carried forward Whitehead’s work (in dialogue with other philosophical traditions of course), and that in particular he has explored lived experience, from a first person perspective, very deeply, and (ii) that because he has examined thinking *processes* very closely he has very helpful things to say about *how* one can do speculative philosophy, and thence specifically process first thinking, skilfully.
Hi Daryl,
Here are some more connections with points you raised (… we had better move our discussions to Session 2 soon, I guess).
Modelling socio-ecological systems (quantitatively with software) to support environmental decision making is part of what I have done professionally … so I am familiar with eg the challenges of thinking about predator-prey dynamics. There are mathematical heuristics that guide this. (One way in is to look at – or in the absence of data guess at – the shapes of various dynamics as curves, and look for kinds of equation that can give rise to those curves, and then build from there.)
Re: “But the scheme and the levels and natures of the relationships in the scheme are only analyzable through genetic or coordinate analyses which are themselves always to be seen as abstract (and limiting) analytical tools.”: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘genetic analysis’ and ‘coordinate analysis’. Is the first any analysis that engages with evolving through time, and the second one that takes a given state and describes it analytically?
Re: “I do have to ask in what way, if any, is Whitehead’s categoreal scheme diminished for you if some of the eight elements are less “primal” ??”
For me it would not be diminished, but if some terms are more ‘primal’, and others less, I would like to see their relations laid out explicitly, just so I understand the schema better. I do think that the underlying appeal to unity – that comes with the sense that everything we are saying is part of *a* story – is really worth spelling out, as it illuminates the grounding of and integration in his (anyone’s) thinking. ==> That wanting-a-sense-of-the-whole looks to me like it’s a major motivation of his whole metaphysical effort. -> IE his metaphysical project *is* an effort to speak of all that is in very general terms that are, at one and the same time, illuminating as we bring them to situations.
I hadn’t realised he has other lists of categories; I’ll keep an eye out for them. They’ll help clarify what he means by ‘category’, amongst other things.
I see what you mean re going in and returning many times, and finding some space to set things aside somewhat, making sense. … It’s a good approach to any complex text, or anything really. … Hermeneutical circles are articulated in this spirit … I’m looking forward to this course leading me to go back and forth many times!
Thanks, Greg.
Hi George, Christie and Daryl, thanks for your comments.
I’ve worked deeply with Eugene Gendlin’s process thinking, for which Whitehead is a major inspiration, for nearly 30 years. I’ve dipped in and out of Whitehead over that time, but never got my head around his overall system. Wanting a catalyst / support that would lead me to put the needed time in to get a better grasp of it (one that I can use in my work on Gendlin, inter alia) was a major reason for doing this Certificate.
I can sense how ‘creativity’ could work as a core concept, Christie, every ‘actual occasion’ is creative …
And indeed, as you say, Daryl, “where to begin” is necessarily puzzling when relating (= processes that are complex crossings) are/is what one is describing …George, if you haven’t read them, you could have a look at my comments on ‘models’ and ‘wrong’ on your post re that. I think of all models, all theories, etc as heuristics: as tools for helping with coming to grips with somesuches.
But in building – or arriving at – a schema with “eight categories of existence”, we can at least say, I think:
(i) He has a way of recognising what ‘existing’ is, … perhaps ‘ways of recognising’, but in that case he has a way of recognising how what is found via those different ‘ways’ of inquiry / investigation / encounter is in some way ‘the same’; i.e. they are all (a) ‘existing’ and (b) ‘kinds of’. In other words there is *some* kind of underlying unity that he is recognising that is at least implicit in listing these eight. (I think it’s likely that he makes his general picture of what existing and kinding are explicit at various points in his writings that I haven’t encountered yet.) => I am nagging my sense of ‘sameness’ in asking these questions (in my original post), because it’s not intuitively obvious to me how these eight phenomena are each ‘kinds of existing’. I.E. again: how are ‘existing’ and ‘kinding’ being understood such that these eight quite diverse phenomena are recognised as ‘kinds of existing’? There is *some* kind of underlying unity being pointed to here that is not clear to me (yet).
(ii) With axiomatic systems, and generally in laying out fundamental terms for any schema, it is usual to seek a vivid simplicity. … This helps with making the schema seem ‘intuitively obvious’ (in the arenas in which it is going to be used), and reduces the risk of anomalies (paradoxes, contradictions, …) arising as you build on / work with the schema. => Their selection is far from arbitrary. Usually the statements of fundamentals that we encounter have been highly refined: simplified carefully, differentiated, etc., as a result of multiple iterations of using them and restating them. So I come to talking about ‘eight categories of existence’ *expecting* to see traces or obvious features of that refining and carefulness in the concepts themselves – to be able to see how they are carefully crafted to fit together as clear and simple foundations. It’s puzzling in that direction that prompted my post.
In our Session 2 readings there are some quotes from Whitehead that I find helpful here. In particular:
“If you were to look at the works of early modern philosophers like Descartes, Benedictus de Spinoza, or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, you would easily see how much they hungered for the certainty achieved by mathematics. They modeled their systems on mathematics, beginning with definitions and axioms and building on them as if they were perfectly clear, self-evident principles beyond all possible doubt. They hoped that if, like mathematics, they started with absolutely certain truths and carefully checked each step of the argument, they could build a whole system of knowledge that would itself be certain. Despite the very understandable attraction of the mathematical model, Whitehead, himself a great mathematician, thought these philosophers had made a serious mistake in adopting it. “Philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought” (PR 8) . The deepest aspect of this mistake is that “metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” (PR 8).” (Mesle 2008 p.16)
It follows from this that I should be looking for ways Whitehead arrives at his eight categories as ‘tentative formulations’ … It might be that some of the threads I am pulling in my initial post are places where we can reasonably look for some more refining or better crafting of concepts to come …
Mesle (2008 p.15) quotes Whitehead articulating pragmatist friendly intuitions re enquiry:
“Rationalism never shakes off its status of an experimental adventure. . . . Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought, progressive and never final. But it is an adventure in which even partial success has importance. ( PR 9).”
If we look at the eight categories as a staging point on a journey (of clarification, of deepening insight, …), I want to understand how we got here and where to next.