Replies

Jeremy, as I said in an earlier response, I’m quite interested in Buddhism and process, and so glad you are as well. There are many process thinkers with similar interests, and the dialogue between Process and Buddhism has been unfolding for decades now. Three kinds of Buddhism have been especially important to process thinkers: Zen, Pure Land, and Madhyamika. In relation to Zen, a good bit of work with the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy. Are you familiar with it? Perhaps this page in Open Horizons might interest you? https://www.openhorizons.org/can-a-christian-believe-in-no-self.html. And this one? https://www.openhorizons.org/whitehead-and-zen-buddhism.html. Let’s talk more.

What a great story, Tom. I’ve never heard that. Really good.

Chris…is there a way that I can help you here? If you can facilitate the discussions, I can see if one of the organizations sponsoring our program (Cobb Institute and Center for Process Studies) might set up zoom and develop publicity. Not sure it’s possible, but I can try. As for who might participate, I can think of two options: (1) those who have taken the Intro to Process Thought just completed, and who have a kind of background in process, or (2) the general public, around the world, who has such an interest. Are you thinking #1 not #2? If so, I’m not quite sure how to get the word out to them, independently of this Forum, which is used by some but not all. We could send emails to all participants with an image that describes when, where, and how to access, if they are interested. Are you thinking once a week, once every two weeks, once a month? What would actually be possible for you? Please share your thoughts and I’ll see if I can help you make it happen.

I think Chris reads between the lines is an excellent way and raises a very interesting and important question. I wonder, Chris, if a starting point might be something like “holistic thinking,” although not using that phrase. That is, introducing process thought as a way – perhaps there are others, too – by which insights from sciences and the arts can be jointly appreciated by people of all ages. Without bringing in “God” or “spirituality” or anything that sounds “religious” to the secular materialist ear. Perhaps this could be done in the context of teaching science and mathematics, since STEM holds such sway in public education these days, but with a recognition, among STEM advocates themselves, that the arts, with their capacities for evoking intersubjective understanding, have a place: hence the acronym of STEAM that some now use. This would build upon Whitehead’s work in Science and the Modern World, and his own attempts to critique purely mechanistic understandings of reality (he called it scientific materialism) and offer a cosmology that can be jointly embraced by scientists and artists alike. Not sure where to take this…but yours is an interesting suggestion. I hope someone follows up on it.

Yes, Kathleen…the Mind of the universe, in whose life the universe and we ourselves unfold, and who dwells within each of us, moment by moment, as an initial aim (a fresh possibility) for responding to the situation at hand, can be surprised. Our novelty, including our self-creativity, adds to God’s life.

Can you say a word, here, about how you might set them up?

Evan, I bet you understand Whitehead’s notions of width, narrowness, and vagueness as well, if not much better, than I. I’m glad you discovered Cobb’s presentation of them. To my knowledge, there are two places where Whitehead deals with beauty and contrasts in something of a sustained way. Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. In your spare time, you might want to check out the latter, too. I can well imagine you taking ideas such as these and seeing how they might be relevant to a spirituality of the earth, as embodied in indigenous traditions familiar to you. I don’t think anyone has done that. And, yes, “chaos also makes its contributions.” Such an important insight. Too much order can stifle a soul and due violence to the world.

David, you have understood the slideshow and its ideas very well! Thank you for such a serious and engaging response. Perhaps I will encourage the Cobb Institute to have a special pop-up on slideshow, amid which you and others can share and explore. Good idea? I am interested in your own background and the church you now attend, with its eucharist for everyone spirit. And in your sister’s group, too. What a rich background you bring to these discussions. The many that are becoming one in you now, and being increased by one, is illustrative of the kind of generous creativity (in sense #1) that is important to all in the process tradition.

Friends…this is such a rich discussion. Let me ramble a bit. I am so glad that music, painting, and theater have played a role. And landscapes! As an occasional musician myself, it is indeed, for me, a means through which I experience and enjoy auditory contrasts, and find myself like irresolution as well as resolution, dissonance as well as consonance. All are, or can be, “beautiful.” As we think about beauty, I think it important not reduce it to prettiness, insofar as some things that are conventionally thought “ugly” have their beauty, too. And also important to include, but not limit beauty to the sublime. Think of the beauty of a single moment, as depicted in haiku. Likewise it is important to remember that beauty can be in relations of feeling as well as relations among objects felt. Think of be beauty of tenderness, or poignancy, or courage. And also the question of truth in beauty. Whitehead thought beauty becomes even more beautiful when it reveals things not otherwise revealed, when it carries truth within it. This does not mean it needs to be representational. There can be beauty in pure sound, and the truth it reveals is a truth of possibility. Finally, and so important, Dennis reminds us that contrasts are not enough. It needs goodness, too. Perhaps the tensions in our society, where different sides in the culture wars find their respective ideals beautiful, are illustrative. It would be good if they listened to one another, in a spirit of kindness and civility. That listening would be good, and beautiful.

Tom, thank you so much for bringing in your Quaker side. There are, I believe, many connections between Quaker traditions and process thought. One of my own books, Living from the Center: Spirituality in an Age of Consumerism,” is quite influenced by Thomas Kelly. I think you are right to see relational power as something felt and experienced: a spirit which can pervade and inspire a Quaker meeting. Also, the idea of “initial aims” as God’s presence within us, moment by moment, can help us appreciate the still small voice, or the inner light, that is at the center of our lives. The fact that the aims are pre-reflective means that silence, a quieting of the heart and mind, becomes a means by which we find them and they us. Moreover, the kind of speech that emerges out of the silence is very different from chatter. It is, or can be, contemplative speech. I’m sure you know the difference from your own meetings. When people speak from the center, there’s a wisdom and tone, and maybe a love, that is authentic: bespeaking the love of the divine as described by Whitehead in Part V of PR. The love is in the quietness, it does not force itself on us, yet reveals and embodies a “kingdom” not of this world, in the here and now.

Kevin and Dennis…For some people (and for me) there is a strong tendency to want to think of enduring objects (include solid objects that move through space) as actual entities. For Whitehead, they are instead aggregates of actual entities, densely packed, and sharing common characteristics. The actual entities of Process and Reality are only the momentary “occasions of experience”- otherwise called actual occasions or, as I prefer, concrescing subjects. The enduring objects are societies, not single occasions. To make matters worse, the actual entities don’t even move. They occupy regions of the extensive continuum, and stay in those regions, even as their influences pervade the future and their “real internal constitution” includes elements of the past. See: https://www.openhorizons.org/does-anything-really-move-a-question-for-whitehead.html. For those unsatisfied with this point of view, and I’m among them, it may help to offer a revised understanding that depicts any given society or nexus a an “actual entity” in its own right. There may be problems with this, insofar as it presents the image of a single “substance” enduring through time, but it fits so much of what we actually experience. Altering Whitehead in such ways is very “Whiteheadian.” His own ideas are springboards for thought, and need not be turned into settled doctrines to which all “Whiteheadians” conform. Put differently, all Whiteheadians are neo-Whiteheadians. I think he would appreciate such revisions, alterations, critiques, and emendations. Let process thought, too, be in process.

Thanks very much for sharing this piece, Douglas. And what an interesting addition you offer from evolutionary biology.

Ryan, thanks for this great idea. We in the process world recognize that noone, including us, has a monopoly on truth, and that all of our perspectives are finite and perspectival. The very idea that we would have a final truth, beyond which there are no questions, and no new insights, is very non-process. Who can sound the depths? Not us.

“the creativity of the whole earth concresces into the hurricane.” Thank you, Jamie, for this metaphor and for your grappling with the idea that Creativity is itself fundamental, not only for the whole but for the self-creativity of each finite creature and, who knows, perhaps for the infinite Psyche in whose life all finite creatures unfold. Hurricanes, too, are in God’s life. Part of the maynness of the living whole.

“… most of Whitehead’s metaphysical theories were derived from his reflections on modern science and on ordinary experience and [that] he included his novel concept of God only because he found it necessary, on strictly rational grounds, to do so.” Not quite sure this is true. It’s hard to read the sections in Whitehead on divine love and tenderness, and to think he found God only necessarily. There was, in him, an intuition that something in the universe is about tenderness. See the quotations here: https://www.openhorizons.org/whitehead-on-god-six-passages-from-process-and-reality.html