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An interesting idea, Chris. As I read your comment, I’ve been listening to a podcast on the problem of “sectarianism” in philosophy, as prompted by philosophers who build “schools of thought” and seek converts to what they consider higher wisdom, as distinct from philosophers who do not do so, but seek to promote conversation in a pluralistic context, without proffering a vision of their own. The distinction is between Plato and Socrates. There are Platonic schools of thought, but not Socratic schools. I think we in the Whiteheadian world need a bit more of the Socratic spirit. Less doctrinaire, more dialogical. Additionally, I think the relevance of the “process school” to world affairs is more in terms of general sensibilities and an attitude toward life, than in mastery of specifics. Hence my own suggestion that “twenty key ideas” from the process tradition are important to the world – more important than the more rarefied speculations of interest only to an academic elite: https://www.openhorizons.org/twenty-key-ideas-in-process-thought.html However, even here, still more important may be a mood or sensibility, not necessarily reducible to “ideas” but rather in attitudes and disposition: that is, to collective ‘moods’ with practical consequences. Precedence for this is the European Enlightenment, which was a collective mood emphasizing reason, science, and progress. And the European Romantic movement, in both England and Germany, which was a collective mood emphasizing feeling, beauty, and a sense of oneness with nature. If the Whiteheadian tradition is to have an effect, it will need to become a mood and not just a speculative philosophy. Here the arts, including music and film, have an important role to play. Also process-oriented religion and postmodern science. The three can work together to help elicit a collective mood what helps solve, and move beyond, the “urgent” problems.

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far to my essay on “Harry Potter, Hamlet, and God: Characters in our Imagination.” I am involved in a group in NYC, but with worldwide reach, called the East Side Institute that is particularly interested in theatre arts and improvisation. I’ve suggested to them that they partner with the Center for Process Studies. I am thinking about starting a group within the process community of folks who are interested in what they call performative activism, and I’ve suggested to them that process philosophy offers a cosmology conducive to such activism. If you’d like to be part of such a group, let me know. (And if you might happen to like to take the lead in organizing a Process and Performative Activism, all the better.) For more about them, and about connections with the creative and performing arts, see: https://www.openhorizons.org/play-process-and-possibility-the-east-side-institute-8203.html

Daryl, I think you are right on all that you say above. Whitehead’s tendencies toward miniaturism (as if actual entities are only small quantum events) is a problem. This is why I add that, for him, human experiences are also actual entities. Still, there is the problem of solid objects in space. They are but aggregates (nexuses, societies) so he says. So many understandably want to say that they, too, are actual entities, with something like experiences of their own – regnant occasions, if you wish. I don’t think there is anything that prevents that. – But on the supernatural or, as I prefer, the ultranatural, it is also important to recognize that, for him, we live in a multidimensional universe amid which, in non-three-dimensional spaces, actualities and societies of them may well exist, tied to the organic realm in some way: e.g. tree spirits and mountain spirits. And also that some may appear on their own terms: e.g. ghosts and other apparitions. I think his cosmology is open to all of this; the question of whether they exist is empirical, not metaphysical.

Dear George,

I am using the terms phenomenological and metaphysical in ways that are common among philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I use phenomenological to refer to a philosophical method that emerged with Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and was later adopted by Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and others in the 20th century. This method is characterized by its effort to bracket speculative interpretations of reality and return to what is revealed in immediate, lived experience. Its mantra was “to the things themselves,” emphasizing the direct exploration of experience in its various forms—sensory, imaginative, bodily, mathematical, ethical, and religious. You might also describe it as an empirical approach, though one that, as Whitehead also affirmed, rightly attends to the full range of human experience. This phenomenological method is implicit in all attempts to connect Whitehead’s thought with lived experience and is especially evident in the empirical tradition of process philosophy (for example, in Loomer). It focusses on description, not speculation.

I use metaphysical to refer to a philosophical method that seeks to provide a speculative account of reality—akin to what Whitehead means by speculative philosophy in Process and Reality. This method aligns with the kind of philosophy Whitehead saw himself reviving, reminiscent of pre-Kantian thought as found in Leibniz and Spinoza. While concerned with lived human experience, it does not attempt to bracket speculative concerns in its treatment of it. Moreover, it engages with a broad range of subjects beyond human experience, including those significant to the sciences. This approach is exemplified in John Cobb’s more explicitly speculative orientation.

These two approaches—speculative and empirical, metaphysical and phenomenological—exist on a spectrum rather than as rigid categories. Process philosophers may lean more toward one direction or the other, emphasizing either a more phenomenological engagement with lived experience or a more speculative, metaphysical account of reality. However, both approaches remain integral to process thought, contributing to its richness and depth.

As explained earlier, some scholars, such as Delwin Brown and Sheila Davaney, speak of three traditions in process thought: speculative, rationalist, and empirical. Hartshorne, they propose, is in the rationalist tradition, as exemplified in his embrace of the ontological argument for God’s existence, which relies on definitions to make its case. The speculative and rationalist traditions lean toward the metaphysical, while the empirical tradition leans toward the phenomenological. These distinctions help clarify the different emphases within process thought, showing how some process philosophers prioritize broad metaphysical speculation, others rational coherence, and still others a close connection to lived experience.

You can find both approaches within Whitehead’s own philosophy. At times, he focuses on describing experience as it is lived, while at other times, he speculates on the fundamental nature of reality itself. This interplay between phenomenology and metaphysics is part of what makes his thought both grounded and far-reaching, offering insights into both immediate human experience and the broader structure of the cosmos.

For a further explanation of three three types, see the essay by Brown and Davaney on this page: https://www.openhorizons.org/three-types-of-process-theology-empirical-speculative-and-rationalist.html

A second to Nelson on Christe’s metaphor of creating “eddies of alternative movements within this suddenly flooded river of overwhelm and distress.” Thank you, Christie. I’d like to offer a brief word on process & practice. It is typical for many shaped by Platonic ways of thinking, which prioritize theory over practice, to think of process-relational thought as, first and foremost, a way of thinking, the ideas of which are then put into practice – as if the ideas always come first. But many in the process community propose a more organic image, amid which the two – theory and practice – are conjoined. How we think partly determines who we are and how we live, but who we are and how we live also influence how we think. Our ways of acting in the world, our experiments with creating eddies of hope in concrete ways (community gardens, multi-generational learning circles, community based art projects, volunteering in nursing homes, daily meditation, music-making, video creation, etc,) instantiate process ideas, to be sure, but they also give rise to new ideas and deepen what are otherwise abstract principles. One of our subsequent teachers in the program – Mary Elizabeth Moore – is an extremely helpful guide in understanding and appreciating this more organic approach. Bottom line? In creating those eddies, the eddies themselves, as being created, can be our teachers.

Alexander, what an excellent example of what process philosophers and theologians have in mind when they talk about living with respect and care for the community of life and the earth itself. This way of living is what they – we – have in mind with the idea of an Ecological Civilization moving beyond the worst aspects of modernity, its hyper individualism, its valorization of thinking over feeling, and its promethean impulse to mold the entirety of the more than human world toward human ends. Another way to think of this movement is in terms of a transition from the unilateral power of modernity to the relational power of a constructively post-modern way of living, which seeks to cooperate with and learn from the more than human world – from water and its flows, for example, What your example makes evident is that such a movement is not simply constructively post-modern, it is also, as as richly, pre-modern, pre-industrial. It makes ties to ways of living that have come in earlier times, communitarian and ecological in spirit. Indigenous peoples, too, offer guidance for this new way. The new way does not hide from some of the benefits of modernity (e.g. some of the advances in science, aspects of an emphasis on individual rights, the emergence of democracies that transcend a divine right of kings) but the new way does so humbly, without falling into a simple repetition of all aspects of modernity, especially its promethean spirit. Let the people of Matera be among our mentors.

George, I think it is pretty clear that, for Whitehead, the “self,” “psyche,” or “soul” is a linear ordered society—that is, a society that forms something like a “line” of concrescing subjects, each inheriting from its predecessors in the line and contributing to its successors. The given occasion of the moment—the concrescing subject in the here and now—inherits through memory, both conscious and unconscious, such that memory forms a sense of identity.

However, it is important to remember that each concrescing subject also inherits from the entire past actual world; the “many” that “become one” in the emerging occasion include the whole world, not just the past personal self. This leads to the possibility, which John Cobb emphasized in his dialogues with Buddhism, that a form of living might emerge in which we identify as much with the world as with our past personal selves. He called this post-personal existence and saw it as intimated in Buddhism. He spells this out in his book Christ in a Pluralistic Age.

Indeed, in The Structures of Christian Existence, John argued that there are many ways of being a person—Prehistoric, Socratic, Prophetic, Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Greek, and Christian. These different ways are what he meant by structures. His aim in the book was to describe each on its own terms while also introducing what he called the Christian structure or way, highlighting its own unique beauty. He referred to this as “self-transcending selfhood.”

Back, then, to the metaphysics. A linear ordered society is but one form of a society, of which there are others—corpuscular societies, for example. A rock would be an instance of the latter. In John’s Whitehead Wordbook, he does an excellent job (as always) of explaining the different types of societies and their distinctions.

For my part, I think it is important to consider the self phenomenologically and not simply metaphysically. That is, to take ideas such as prehension, experience in the mode of causal efficacy, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, the withness of the body, decision, subjective form, subjective aim, the desire for satisfaction, and an intuitive sense of the initial phase of the subjective aim, and ask: How might they illuminate dimensions of my own lived experience, however else understood? Without this more phenomenological approach, the whole discussion of the self is out of touch with life as lived. Bob Mesle’s book, to my mind, is an excellent example of bringing home this more phenomenological approach without leaving behind the metaphysics. Both approaches are important.

Daryl, thank you for your comments on animism. For my part, I have never been at home with waving the flag of “non-supernatural” as a promising call toward a healthy future for all. There’s so much in life that is para-normal given ordinary meanings of normal. David Griffin, while himself waving that flag, nevertheless opened the door for a healthy appreciation of telepathy, psychokinesis, out of body experiences, remembering past lives, apparitions, the the possibility of a continuing journey after death. He argued that they can all be understood in ways that are non-supernatural, if the latter term means “interrupting the laws of physics and chemistry.” But of course he understood those “laws” in a Whiteheadian way, as including the paranormal, for example. However, for many people, the very project of rejecting the supernatural implies a rejection of mystery, of enchantment, of beauty, of the un-enframeable dimensions of life. Indeed, the project seems to be still another example of the will-to-power. So I am hoping that process philosophers can find a different flag to wave in their attempts to reconcile science and religion. At one point, David Griffin coined the phrase “ultranatural.” I think that’s much better.

Such thoughtful comments, Roni and Paula. Thank you. I’m all on board with recognizing and appreciating multiple forms of sentient and intelligent life, among which are are fellow breathing kind, but also the very small: insects and microbes. I’ve written a theology for small things that might interest you:https://www.openhorizons.org/the-last-flight-of-a-disappointed-mosquito-8203divine-love-in-small-things.html. I like the idea, Roni, that perhaps the capacity to revere all of life is uniquely human. Perhaps it might be thought of as the image of God within us. if God does indeed embody such reverence – a fellow sufferer who understands, appreciating each creature with a tender care that nothing be lost. It is noteworthy that of all the world’s religions, Jainism comes closes to this sensibility in thought and practice. It is this tradition that influenced Gandhi to lift up the idea of ahimsa (non-violence toward all creatures) as a fundamental principle of life and, incidentally, the foundation of his vegetarianism. And it is also noteworthy that Jainism does this with a philosophy that is, by some accounts, atheistic: rejecting the idea of a creator God but saying that sentient life itself is the framework for all thinking. Nevertheless, we can hope that Christians and Jews and Muslims might become more Jain-like in their sensibilities. An interesting feature of process philosophy and theology is that it sees intrinsic value in all concrescing subjects: it is the value they have for themselves, in experiencing the world, however momentary their experience. Their value is not imposed upon them by God; it is intrinsic to who and what they are. The aim of God is not to impose or create this value, but to inspire it – that is, to provide initial aims that help creatures create themselves in their experiential response to the world. Value is the richness of their own experience, for its own sake. On this you might be interested in John Cobb’s essay on Whitehead’s theory of value: https://www.openhorizons.org/whiteheads-theory-of-value.html

A note on process philosophy, karma, and reincarnation. A leading process theologian in the Hindu tradition, has written an essay called “Why Believe in Rebirth.” You might find it interesting: https://www.openhorizons.org/why-believe-in-rebirth-jeffery-d-long.html. There are at least two ideas in Whitehead’s philosophy that lend themselves to a serious consideration of reincarnation. One is his idea that the journey of a soul, understood as a regnant or dominant occasion that is more than the brain, might continue after brain death, and the other is his idea that reality includes many, perhaps countless, dimensions in which actualities can exist, of which three dimensional space is but one. This multi-dimensionality is what he calls the extensive continuum. Thus, if the soul undertakes a journey after death, it may undertake that journey in another dimension of the space-time continuum, rather than in the three-dimensions of terrestrial existence. The former is sometimes called vertical reincarnation; and the latter horizontal reincarnation. Both are imaginable from a process point of view. For general reflections on life after death in a process spirit, see: https://www.openhorizons.org/life-after-death-process-reflections.html

Bernard Loomer represents one of three kinds of process theology: speculative, rationalistic, and empirical. He and Bernard Meland are exemplary of “empirical” process theology. Empirical process theology is different from speculative process theology (John Cobb) and rationalistic process philosophy” (Charles Hartshorne). In contrast to speculative process theology, empirical process theology does not speculate about God as an external power but instead sees God in (and as) the world itself. And in contrast to rationalist process theology, it does not focus on logically consistent ‘principles’ that allegedly illuminate reality but seeks instead to be faithful to lived experience itself. It avoids a yearning for the perfect system of clean-cut, orderly abstractions, seeing the yearning itself as pathological. On this page I offer eight simple ideas that are important in the empirical tradition: https://www.openhorizons.org/bernard-loomer-eight-key-ideas-in-empirical-process-theology.html

Yinying, a word about “subjective” in process philosophy. In English the word sometimes suggests something “merely” subjective and perhaps deceived, as distinct from something “objective” and public. The word is not used in this way by process philosophers. It is a name for the sheer immediacy (the “subjective immediacy” in Whitehead’s phrase) of a momentary experience that has reality for itself as well as for others. A momentary experience is an actual occasion of experience or, as I prefer, a concrescing subject. This subjective immediacy includes, for Whitehead, self-enjoyment, self-creativity, and an aiming for satisfaction. The “subject” emerges out of this process, and does not stand outside it. In the course you’ll be taking with Andrew Davis, Davis will speak of satisfaction as an “aesthetic achievement.” He uses the word aesthetic, because for Whitehead the satisfaction sought by a concrescing subject is for harmony and intensity. Understood as subjective immediacy or for-itselfness, something can be “subjective” and, at the same time, quite objective. Perhaps the experience of an emotion makes this clear. A person may be feeling an emotion such as “disgust” in the immediacy of her experience, an her feeling of disgust is quite objective: it is part of the very make-up of the universe. Nothing illusory about it. In Whitehead’s philosophy, emotions are called “subjective forms.” Whitehead believes that all experiences, human or animal, microscopic or macroscopic, terrestrial or galactic, angelic or divine, involve subjective forms or emotions. These subjective forms (emotions) are among what he calls the “eight categories of existence.” They are as real as objects in space, which he calls nexuses. Thus he offers an ontology that includes subjective feelings as part of the very fabric of existence. For more on the eight categories, click here: https://www.openhorizons.org/eight-categories-of-existence.html

Yinying, thank you for your post of Feb. 14. A word about time. In Whitehead’s philosophy, as in Aristotle’s, “time” is an outcome of relationships between actualities. At a very technical level, an ‘actuality’ in Whitehead is a moment of experience, an actual occasion, a concrescing subject. It comes into existence through influences from the past and also its self-creative response to those influences. The self-creativity includes an “aiming” at satisfaction: a subjective aim. Once this aim is realized, the concrescing subject is complete, and its immediacy perishes, to be succeeded by other subject. This perishing of immediacy is the advent of “time” or “temporality.” In terms of lived human experience, it is most deeply measured, not by clocks, but rather by memory. In remembering the past, we have a sense that the past has “passed away” and yet is also “present” as an influence in our immediate becoming. In terms of lived experience it is also measured in anticipation. We have a sense that there is a “not yet” which will be, but is not yet. Memory and anticipating, then, are the measures of time – not clocks. This does not mean that time is cyclical or linear; it is neither, but can be expressed in both ways. The truth of the image of linear time is that the future is indeed not-yet and the past is already. The past, once it happens, cannot be reversed or changed. Its meaning can change, but not its facticity: the fact that it happened. Linear time is a visual representation of this irreversibility. Cyclical time is a visual representation of something else, that is also true. The “not yet” can, once it happens, embody patterns of thought, feeling, and physicality that have also been embodied in the past, such that there is a sense of repetition. What once was, repeats itself. These patterns include what Whitehead calls “pure potentialities” that can be actualized in different settings. Hence the wisdom of cyclical as well as linear imagery – despite the fact that, deep down, “time” is a name for what is recognized in memory and anticipation…At least so it seems to me.

George, thanks for your response. I think we all need to modify Whitehead’s thinking in ways that make sense to us, and add some of our own thinking as well. So speaking of creativity as God the creator and/or the creativity is fine if that is what is most meaningful. However, I want to explain why, for Whitehead and also for John Cobb, this path is not chosen. They prefer to distinguish creativity and God, for the sake of being honest to both. Here goes:

Many Christians and Christian-influenced thinkers who engage with Whitehead struggle with his distinction between creativity as the ultimate reality and God as its primordial but not exclusive expression. Influenced by Abrahamic traditions, they tend to conceive of God as the ultimate, making it difficult to speak of another ultimate that, in some way, transcends God.

However, Whitehead had reasons for drawing this distinction. As interpreted by John Cobb, creativity, for Whitehead, is non-moral and without preference. It is not teleological. This passage from John’s Whitehead Wordbook captures the idea well:

“Sometimes the reader of Whitehead is likely to project into ‘creativity’ more than he intends. Whitehead does cause us to marvel that whatever happens, the process of bringing new occasions out of old ones continues. Creation is fundamental and ongoing. There is always something new. But what is new may not be better than what is old. Occasions that occur in the process of the decay and dying of larger organisms, such as human beings, are also instances of creativity, no more and no less than those that bring new life into being. Creativity is completely neutral from a moral perspective. Mutual slaughter consists in instances of creativity just as does the composition of a symphony. Also, one cannot speak of more and less creativity. Like ultimates in other traditions, creativity is beyond good and evil or any quantification.”

Given this, one can speak of creativity as the Godhead—a reality that transcends God. A creative abyss of sorts. I myself use this language. In this sense, there is something greater than God. If we think of creativity as, among other things, the internal freedom—the self-creativity—of actual entities (concrescing subjects), then this makes some sense. Even as God’s deep listening and divine luring are profoundly powerful, both (especially the luring) depend on the self-creativity of actual entities for their actualization. In this respect, the self-creativity of finite creatures—an instantiation of creativity itself—is at least as powerful as God.

Some might argue that an actual occasion is “initiated” by God through the provision of “initial aims,” or fresh possibilities to be actualized. However, this aim, too, depends on the self-creativity (the capacity for decision) of the concrescing subject. So it is not quite accurate to say that God “initiates” the actual occasion if that implies generating it into existence.

These philosophical observations aside, it is worth noting that everyone who appropriates Whitehead’s philosophy modifies it in some way, emphasizing certain aspects while downplaying others. Whitehead himself would likely have welcomed this. He hoped his ideas would be used and adapted, and I understand why some Christians and others might want to tweak them in a more palatable direction.

At the same time, as John notes, the distinction between creativity and God may be more palatable to those within Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Creativity can be likened to the creative abyss of Nirguna Brahman, while God corresponds to the personal and purposive divinity of Saguna Brahman. Similarly, creativity might resemble the “emptiness” of Madhyamaka Buddhism, while God aligns with Amida Buddha, the cosmic Bodhisattva of Pure Land Buddhism.

In the house of neo-Whiteheadian thinking, there are many rooms—or better yet, rooms in the making. Process philosophy and theology remain, as they should, ever in process.

Jeremy, take a look at this page on Process and No Self you have time: https://www.openhorizons.org/whitehead-and-zen-buddhism.html. And this one on Whitehead and Zen Meditation: https://www.openhorizons.org/zen-meditation1.html

Like you, I have a strong interest in Buddhism. Process thinkers have been engaged in dialogue and friendship with Buddhists for many decades now: especially Buddhists in the Zen traditions, Pure Land traditions, and Madyamyhika schools. Your interest adds to that. And I love your meditation!