Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Art and the Christian Message. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art and the Christian Message. Show all posts

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Short Shorts... Christian Sloganeering, Inspiration, Revelation, & Universalism



Short Shorts... Christian Sloganeering,
Inspiration, Revelation, & Universalism



What is Kitsch?

Well, it's NOT the Canadian actor Taylor Kitsch... he's cool.




Art as Kitsch

It seems religious kitsch is everywhere on social media regardless the religion or faith. Here, I ask the question whether it is useful or not? Offensive? Helpful?

I suspect the answer lies in the eyes of the beholder as it would with any display of art...

...and also what the artist wishes to communicate to us about their faith or beliefs.

Some artistic kitsch I like... It may make me laugh, cry, be cynical, or be uplifted by it.

The ones displayed below I generally don't like though I realize they are telling us to be thoughtful of how Christian behavior to be loving, just and wise, and to emissaries of Jesus wherever we go.

On Parenting

In the case of raising and teaching little kids I'd like to see less abject brainwashing and more liberty for them to be directed to ask better questions when trained up in the household of their parents.

Children are innocent souls and if they are allowed, a bit of childhood respite from the wickedness of the world would be nice to be encouraged at all times.

And when approaching the subject of God as they grow older I think sets them up for good or for ill to be worked out the rest of their lives. Hence, a bit of caution to religious parents on the energy of their beliefs. Allow children to breathe a bit. Become themselves a bit. Simply watching you will be instruction enough when the time comes to verbalize wisdom and beliefs.

I love children and always wish to error towards love, patience, broad-mindedness, and good will. We each need wisdom when it comes to children... and with that wisdom we might learn ourselves and share it with those around us.

R.E. Slater
January 18, 20224


Defined

Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages
kitsch /kiCH/ 

as a noun
art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.
  • "the lava lamp is an example of sixties kitsch"
as an adjective
considered to be in poor taste but appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.
  • "the front room is stuffed with kitsch knickknacks, little glass and gilt ornaments"
  • a tacky or lowbrow quality or condition.

KITSCH



Kitsch (/kɪtʃ/ KITCH; loanword from German) is a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly eccentric, gratuitous or of banal taste.

The modern avant garde traditionally opposed kitsch for its melodramatic tendencies, its superficial relationship with the human condition and its naturalistic standards of beauty. In the first half of the 20th century, kitsch was used in reference to mass-produced, pop-cultural products that lacked the conceptual depth of fine art. However, since the emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s, kitsch has taken on newfound highbrow appeal, often wielded in knowingly ironic, humorous or earnest manners.

To brand visual art as "kitsch" is often still pejorative, though not exclusively. Art deemed kitsch may be enjoyed in an entirely positive and sincere manner. For example, it carries the ability to be quaint or "quirky" without being offensive on the surface, as in the Dogs Playing Poker paintings.

Along with visual art, the quality of kitsch can be used to describe works of music, literature or any other creative medium. Kitsch relates to camp, as they both incorporate irony and extravagance.




* * * * * *


Christian Beliefs

 

I had two reactions to the pictures above and below...
First the con... however I read this bit of nonsense it's still crap. If religion isn't true and gets exposed by science than let's put faith to death immediately. But if religion can survive the true truths of the universe than just maybe its metaphysic might be true too. Never be afraid to autopsy your faith. We want a living faith... not one that is dead and fighting for its zombie-self to manipulate and control our agency! - re slater

Now the pro... as people of science-and-faith we are to live in the present, not flee from difficulties... especially as presented by religious zealots defending an idolatrized faith. If prophecy is in any sense alive today as I think it is, we stand up and tell (forthtell, NOT foretell) our generations it's goods and bads, pros and cons, about itself. We don't stand mum and hope to leave disruption. Esp against sin and evil whether birthed by a church gone bad or leaders turned rotten. - re slater


* * * * * *



Bench Pressing with Rance
Subject: Universalism


Ok, warning. A good many of my friends may not want to read this. And I admit I sound pretty self-righteous, but here goes....

Today, I met and talked with a pastor who serves a non-denominational church in Alabama who only a few months ago became a persuaded Christian universalist.

He, like me in a previous life, came from the ‘free grace’ movement (names like Charles Ryrie, Zane Hodges, Bob Wilkin, etc) and in fact his church was part of that movement. We both agreed that, despite its name, it is one of the most narrow and doctrinally legalistic theological groups around. In reality, ‘grace’ is reduced to an abstraction and salvation is reduced to something like a commercial transaction. Unless you get all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted in the ‘faith vs works b.s.,’ you’re probably not saved, according to them.

There are approximately 8.1 billion people living on earth right now. So your chances of ‘going to heaven’ (as they put it) are extremely thin. Billions of people will roast forever according to these wacko beliefs.

From my research there are somewhere between 3.9 and 7.7 million Evangelical Christians in the world. That’s a mere 4-7% of the world’s billions of people who ever end up in heaven. By the time the ‘grace movement’ people get through with their nitpicking, only a fraction of those who identify as Evangelicals will be saved. How crazy is this? Plenty, if you ask me.

Evangelicals believe they are the only religious people on earth who will be saved. In general, Catholics aren’t ’really saved.’ Liberal and progressive mainline Christians arent saved. And certainly those Orthodox and Coptic Christians aren’t either. Muslims, ditto. Hindus, ditto. Buddhists, ditto.

And it gets even more depressing still since most Evangelicals believe in a literal hell. This was one of the main reasons I departed from Evangelicalism. I could no longer tolerate this narrow view of the world informed by a legalistic narrow view of the gospel.

There’s no good news at all in this kind of Christianity. It’s 99% bad news. Who could begin to love a god who is willing to create children made in his own image only to condemn billions of them forever? Not me, thank you very much.

I was schooled in this stuff, brought up in a Southern Baptist context and then trained in fundamentalist colleges as a young man. But relatively speaking, it didn’t take me long to feel increasingly uncomfortable with such nonsense.

My deconstruction began nearly 40 years ago. I haven’t de-converted from Christian faith by any means, but after all these decades my faith looks very different now than it did back then.
As my new pastor friend told me today, ‘everything looks different now. I view people differently. I see God differently. And once I understood universal salvation, I saw it everywhere in the Bible.’

I had to agree.

- Rance, 1.17.2024


Comment 1

I think you hit this spot on Rance. Might I publish it on my site? As always, I'll add a few thoughts too. You're my hero! BTW, I left one church after 27 years as I had become tired of my fellowship's incessant judgmentalism of others-not-like-themselves.

I couldn't evangelize for God, or bring converts into the church, if the church wasn't going to provide them with a nourishing, enriching fellowship as vs some imagined legalistic interpretation as to what they thought was holy or not holy.
To this day connecting divine sovereignty to power and determinism curdles my stomach. Divine sovereignty is always about divine love working with creation towards blessed, redemptive ends. Not power. Not wrath. Not hell. Not Christian inquisitions.
Thx again. - re slater

Reply: Rance - "Of course, brother."


Comment 2
by RRW

Hi Rance. I don't think you sound so much self-righteous as misinformed. I read a lot of people saying things about "Evangelicals" that aren't necessarily and definitely not universally true. I tend to distinguish Evangelical from Fundamentalist, though I recognize considerable overlap in many areas of thought.

My theological education started around Fuller Seminary (progressive? non-denominational Evangelical) and was consolidated at Regent College (also non-denominational, and very ecumenically diverse) as an Anabaptist. I suppose I'm something like a free-will baptist now, but I've always been rather iconoclastic, rejecting every post-biblical human tradition and line of thinking I could identify. I am not dogmatic about much except insofar as I am committed to biblical revelation as exemplified by apostolic teaching as represented by the canonical texts of the Old and New Covenants.

Abandon biblical revelation and you are on your own. If we are all on our own as to what truth is we are no longer thinking and acting as followers of Christ. He is our Lord; what he said as remembered and recorded by those who knew him best must be what we believe or we have departed from faith in him. If we recreate God in our own image however we see fit we are no longer fit for eternal life with him.

Universalism is one of those ways people impose their own thinking on the gospel as received. The words of Jesus are a plain refutation of that belief; eg., separating the sheep from the goats simply can’t be ignored as irrelevant here. And there is a lot more you have to excise from scripture to make the case for God’s eventual inclusion of everyone as members of His family. Someone in the comments mentioned that universalism results in monism, or in other words a deterministic world view. God would have to coercively override the will of those he created with free will by forcing them to accept him as God.

At some point our doctrines, if they are derived from scripture, have to all be correlated and coherent, otherwise they are not reasonable. I think it is not only possible but necessary for Christian teaching to be reasonable and coherent. That doesn’t mean the same as “logical” because a logical system requires more than humans are capable of (too much to explain that here, but ask if you want clarification). I think the Bible provides a coherent structure of beliefs if we mere humans don’t force it into our own distorted ways of thinking, which are then inherently incoherent and contradictory whether we realize it or not. I think that eternal conscious torment (torture!) is not a biblical doctrine. The only reasonable alternative is something like conditional immortality, with the expectation that some form of conscious and appropriate (just!) punishment is what scripture teaches, and then comes the “second death” of annihilation (the cessation of conscious existence) for the unfaithful and unbelieving.

Scripture does not teach that humans are immortal because we are created in the image of God. In fact Genesis teaches that because we have rejected the will and commandments of God we have lost the potential for immortality. The Old Covenant says we lost immortality and the New Covenant says we can regain it through faith in and obedience to Christ. People do not have God’s Spirit dwelling in them by nature; believers in Christ receive new life through the gift of Holy Spirit. Believe the Good News and you will be saved.

Reply by Rance
Richard, I have been very careful to build my faith in ultimate reconciliation for all on the Bible. A good case can be made for it, I assure you. I don’t even know where to start but simply to say it is how one reads scripture. The number of texts that explicitly state it are amazing.

Reply by RWW
Is there not an inherent conflict in proposing that the Covenant can be regained "through faith in and obedience to Christ" and "Believe the Good News and you will be saved?"

Reply by re slater
I no longer can read the bible as a "one-time" revelation. I believe the only kind of communication God provides is one that is daily and constant.

When I read the bible I read how past cultures thought about God... especially the Jewish culture. Jesus did too and had to correct Second Temple Judaism's covenantal legalisms of the day.

I feel much the same way....
God is a God of love... NOT a God of wrath and hate. That's what we do to one another when failing to love one another and creation-around-us again.
Further, Jesus revealed this loving God he called Father not with a sword but with targeted teaching on divine love and Spirit enablement.

Today, Christianity may simply expand the doctrine of inspiration to discover God never stopped talking to our hearts, minds, and souls by study, fellowship, experience, and history. 

If you wish, we might describe these events as General Inspiration as versus Special Inspiration... but when reading the bible it seems to me that all is generally inspiration and never one-on-one audible discussion except in the Christ-event when God became man.

As corollary, this would mean that the Christian commentaries, stories, and bios we read are from people moved perhaps a bit, perhaps a lot, or not at all, by the Spirit of God. To discern whether their words are from God I ask myself if God's love is at the center of the conversation and in their works. If not, they may have some things to say but I then read such beliefs in a different light as more human than divine. Some of which may be really helpful and some of which is complete rubbish.

How people think of God and act out their faith tells us a lot about the God they believe in.

For myself, divine love displays itself in acts which are healthy, healing, and redemptive.

When I read of God by those who push protestations, defensive apologies claiming biblical authority, or are generally off-putting to those around them, I read of people trying to push their idea of God on others. An idea which may be either good or bad. But love must always be the outcome as it must be the beginning and middle of any conversation.
As to the doctrine of hell it is what we do to one another rather than a place a wrathful God puts you in. Always remember, God is not hell nor is fellowship with God through Christ anything but redemption working itself out through us. And for the unbeliever, pagan, or non-Christian (my preferred term) God will always be a God to them as well despite religion or belief.

So why teach hell?

Well, that's the question isn't it... if there is no hell as the bible says there is... or as its Jewish culture in the first century may have believed; ...and certainly in what the early, middle, and late Middle Age church taught after (Catholic?) Dante's description of hell in his Divine Comedy of Hell's Inferno (published c.1321)... then what do we do with hell?

For myself, it is how we act towards one another and to nature around us. It is a description of our relationship with one another individually, familiarly, societally, and globally. Relationships are not places there are esoteric. And the pain and torture of a soul rueing life and troubles aptly describes a soul burning under the sin and evil caused.

The only place I find resolvement is in Jesus Christ's and the hell he took upon himself for us as God's sacrificial Lamb. Who served as our Atonement and Redeemer by the force of his life and death and resurrection. For without the resurrection, says the Apostle Paul, Jesus' death would not be legitimate. But with Jesus' ascension and transfiguration as the first fruits of salvation, we may find in Jesus One who will take our past, forgive it, and begin healing those of us seeking forgiveness and transformation.

Next topic...

As a former fundamentalist and later conservative evangelical I have to call my faith out. I've leaned into my original Baptist roots into Arminianism (free will) and thrown out Calvinism (divine determinacy).

Then expanded the former to incorporate and Open and Relational Theology.

And finally, I've removed the church's Westernized (Greek Hellenism) bias towards doctrine and replaced it with Whitehead's process philosophy and Cobb's process theology.

Why?
  • Because I can remove the limitations of Western philosophical theology upon church doctrines and traditions. It also allows me to freely use redactive tools upon the ancient biblical text to expand its godly content and to apply a loving divinity which is never absent of us.
  • Which is also why divine inspiration and revelation are important. If kept as a one-time reveal than God has bound us as God has bound God's Self. But I don't think God works this way... an imminent, intimately-near-to-us-never-to-leave-us God is always speaking, revealing, and inspiring. Some get it, many don't. Some get a bit of it while others make a "mash" of it.
  • When I read inspiring novels or fiction; see illuminating art pieces, paintings, and sculptures; hear the joy filling within a good rock opera or punk rock piece; or witness architects and landscapers weaving buildings and gardens around light and sound; I behold lively works of divine inspiration such as in the American Constitution with it's Bill of Rights. Public documents which give people liberty, personal rights, freedom, justice, and equality.
  • God is present and is presently doing what he can when his creation yearns to speak, be, and breathe atoning redemption and transfiguring healing to all.
Hence, at the center of love is:
  • humane and humanitarian forms of social justice;
  • intersectional faiths (certainly non-Christian faiths don't have Christ but in Process thought we can emphasize a redemptive center); and generally,
  • behave in progressively liberating norms of behavior with one another while abiding to love and covenantal integrity with one another.
Such thoughts never rests easily upon a Westernized conservative evangelicalism as its newer, postmodernal form of progressive evangelicalism can attest. But when uplifting Reformed and Evangelical doctrinnaire into Processual Theology's realms we may liberate bad ideas of God and judgment and recover the good news which is in Jesus anew. This, to me, is invaluable.
Lastly, if God is what evangelicalism says God is - whether Calvinistic or Arminian - than such a God is not worth following. And just like ancient man's ideas are always reforming the primal questions of purpose and destiny, so too those divinely driven burdens ask of God today to reveal a better Christ and more humane faith than in times past or present. Amen

Comment 3
By CM

I think people assume all forms of universal salvation are the same. The ultimate redemption that Brad Jersak, Chris Green and others put forward is one that has been in the historical church family all along. It includes judgement and "hell" but just sees these as penultimate not the final word. Can God's Love really fail? Will Jesus be all in all of will he not?

Reply by Rance - Exactly.




Friday, November 17, 2023

Elvi Bjorkquist - Process Thought, Aesthetic Qualities, and Beyond








...TO VIEW VIDEO PLEASE SUBMIT A DONATION OF SOME AMOUNT.
THIS WILL PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE 2023 YEAR OF ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
WHICH IS A LOT AND WELL WORTH THE EXPENDITURE...



Process Thought, Aesthetic Qualities, and Beyond
Elvi Bjorkquist, Artist, Graphic Designer,
and Graduate of the Cobb Institute Certificate Program

RR: Cobb & Friends Gathering: Elvi Bjorkquist


To View Video - Sign up at Cobb Institute: Here is the Video Link -




Brief Bio
  • Former Owner/Principal at Elvi Design Group
  • Former Owner at Cultural Expeditions, inc.
  • Studied M.div. & M.A. Religion/philosophy at Iliff School of Theology, Denver
  • Lives in Denver, Color
Papers

Books
I will show the connection between Art and Process thought of Whitehead. Whitehead also believes that aesthetic apprehension is complementary to scientific apprehension and helps to complete it. He believes that deeply felt intuitions highlight and illumines nature and that there are multiple ways of knowing and can be jointly affirmed and harmonized. Thinking is actually a form of feeling; aesthetic wisdom and rational inquiry are complementary. Both can be contexts in which people discover higher ideals in which to live and give a sense for the mystery and beauty of the universe, it becomes a means to the end of cultural transformation. Art can play a part in a direct interaction of Asian texts like the Upanishads, Bhagavadgita, the Buddhist scriptures, and the Taoist canon with the Christian biblical text. This education explores forms that enliven the minds and hearts of students leading them to healthy cultural transformation. This leads to everyone listening to each other in a spirit of respect and humility, and learn from each other with a willingness to be changed themselves.


Inspire Philosophy & Process Art - Kids Island Nursery


Open Horizons - Process Thought & Spiritual Decentering


What is process philosophy and who is Alfred North Whitehead?


Saatchi Art


Saatchi Art


Monday, January 24, 2022

Jay McDaniel - Observations on Process Philosophy: Art, Nature, and Light


Photo by Михаил Павленко on Unsplash


OBSERVATIONS ON PROCESS PHILOSOPHY:
Art, Nature, and Light

by Jay McDaniel


Art Out of Nature​

​Of course Wordsworth recognises, what no one doubts, that in some sense living things are different from lifeless things. But that is not his main point. It is the brooding presence of the hills which haunts him. His theme is nature in solido, that is to say, he dwells on that mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we set up as an individual for its own sake. Wordsworth always grasps the whole of nature as involved in the tonal­ity of the particular instance. That is why he laughs with the daffo­dils, and finds in the primrose thoughts ‘too deep for tears.’

- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

The perfection of art has only one end, which is Truthful Beauty. But some measure of success has been reached, when either Truth or Beauty is gained. In the absence of Truth, Beauty is on a lower level, with a defect of massiveness. In the absence of Beauty, Truth sinks to triviality. Truth matters because of Beauty.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas





​I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth


I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


* * * * * * *


Whitehead on Wordsworth​
by Alfred North Whitehead, Process Philosopher


Wordsworth expresses "the concrete facts of our apprehension." - AN Whitehead


Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others:

‘Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth,
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea? . . .’

In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius, expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?

​- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World


* * * * * * *


The Influence of Wordsworth ​on Whitehead
by Antoon Braeckman


In the "Autobiographical Notes," Whitehead asserts that he was acquainted with Wordsworth before he arrived at the university in 1880. In secondary school he read Wordsworth and Shelley during spare time. This acquaintance with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge becomes apparent through a consideration of the different passages in which they are mentioned. In Principles of Natural Knowledge he cites some lines from Wordsworth (PNK 200); in Process and Reality he quotes Wordsworth’s well-known phrase: "We murder to dissect" (PR 140/212). In Modes of Thought he suggests that he read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. But the most important rendering of the romantic poetry we find in Science and the Modern World. Let us therefore confine our investigation to the latter text, in order to see clearly Whitehead’s view on romantic poetry.

At the end of Chapter V, "The Romantic Reaction," Whitehead summarizes the significance of Romantic poetry: "I have endeavored to make clear . . . that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact." Here, Whitehead stresses the importance of the romantic concept of nature. That concept entails, according to the above quotation, two characteristics: (a) the organic view on nature and (b) the understanding of nature as exhibiting an intrinsic value-character.

(a) Whitehead elucidates the former aspect as a (romantic) reaction against the mechanical, 18th-century scientific view on nature, whereby nature is reduced to mere abstract matter, devoid of any form of subjectivity. As to the latter aspect, (b) Whitehead argues that the English romantic poetry "bears witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values." This means to Whitehead that nature, in the first place, has to do with experience, but above all with the experience of value. Both aspects of the concept of nature in romantic poetry exhibit two dimensions of one and the same intuition namely, that of the fundamentally subjective character of nature. This subjective character has to be understood as the ever-acting ground, involved in any particular instance of nature:

"Whitehead’s comment on English poetry in general, and his evaluation of the Wordsworthian poetry more specifically, shows that the most valuable contribution of that poetry consists exactly in this articulation of the concept of nature. This statement can be sustained through a closer study of the similarity in concept, principles, and elaboration of Wordsworth’s and Whitehead’s view on nature."

In Wordsworth we can find the stress on the organic pattern of nature. Moreover, while interpreting its value character, we are impelled to look at nature as an agent to be qualified as subjective. Finally, the concept of an ever-acting ground which is involved in and finds expression through all particular instances of nature allows us to envisage here in nuance Whitehead’s own principle of creativity. Hence, we can conclude that if there has been an influence of Wordsworth on Whitehead at all, it will have to do with his concept of nature. I would even claim -- but this has to be investigated later on -- that the particular synthesis of the concept of nature with aesthetics in Whitehead is almost completely Wordsworthian.

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*From Whitehead and German Idealism: A Poetic Heritage by Antoon Braeckman. Braeckman is a Research Assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, Kortrijk Campus, Sahbelaan, Kortrijk, Belgium. Below please find an excerpt from the article. The article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 265-286, Vol. 14, Number 4, Winter, 1985. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.


* * * * * * *


​The Poetry of Philosophy:
Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision
of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s Cosmological Scheme

by Matthew David Segall
September 28, 2012

reposted from Footnotes2Plato


The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the imaginative background of Whitehead’s outlook quite as profoundly as Wordsworth.1 This influence makes the task of this short essay far easier, since so much of what Whitehead labored to give clear conceptual expression to in his own work was originally awakened in him by the feeling for the universe that vibrates off the pages of Wordsworth’s poetry. In this sense, the task of this essay is the opposite of Whitehead’s: to translate the basic outlines of his philosophical scheme back into the cosmic visions and archetypal visitations expressed in Wordsworth’s verse.

One of the defining characteristics of Romantic literature is its exaltation of the figure of the philosopher-poet, the one who unveils the way in which, as Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 The famous friendship and intimate artistic collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth provides an example of two minds who, while considered alone are great in their own right, considered together as a single mutually formed and imaginatively alloyed soul surely surpass the genius of any claimant of the title philosopher-poet to come before or after. According to Owen Barfield, the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth both “exemplified the contrast” and “deepened the affinity” between the poles of imagination, namely, self )–( world, or again, spirit )–( nature.3 Reconciling these two imaginative forces in one person is all but impossible, since “the finite activity of poetry, like every other motion, still requires a predominance, however slight, of the one pole over the other.”4 Coleridge had a more philosophical bent, tending toward reverential reflection upon the high station of spirit, while Wordsworth was easily charmed by the every day and more sensitive to the living depths of the natural world. Though Coleridge proved himself on occasion capable of penning the sublimest poetry, it could be said that, as a result of his philosophical tutelage, Wordsworth became the greatest of his poetic achievements. Indeed, Whitehead writes of Coleridge that, despite being influential in his own day, when considering “those elements of the thought of the past which stand for all time…[he] is only important by his influence on Wordsworth.”5

Wordsworth is perhaps the most esteemed nature poet in the history of the English language. For Whitehead, he is the chief exemplar of the Romantic reaction against the abstract mechanistic picture of nature fostered by the scientific materialism of the 17th and 18th centuries. He cites the famous line, “We murder to dissect” with qualified approval, agreeing with Wordsworth that “the important facts of nature elude the scientific method” even while he, a mathematical physicist as well as a philosopher, believes the specialized abstractions of natural science need not necessarily leave nature lifeless.6 Science can and should be reformed. Mechanistic science of the sort championed by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace commits the fatal sin of bifurcating nature, isolating its objective mathematizable aspects by pealing away its sensual and moral layers, layers which found their home in a soul now entirely sealed off from the outside world. Concerning the ethereal hues of a sunset, the sweet fragrance of a primrose, or the melodies of a thrush the poets are all mistaken: from the point of view of scientific materialism, nature is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”7 Contrary to the general thrust of natural science since its birth in the 17th century, Whitehead’s cosmological scheme is an attempt to systematize Wordsworth’s emphatic witness to the fact that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values, and that these values arise from the culmination…of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.”8 In the jargon of his metaphysics, Whitehead saw in Wordsworth’s poetry “a feeling for nature as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.”9 Hidden within this one short cryptic sentence are the major categories animating Whitehead’s entire cosmological system, including “actual occasions,” “eternal objects,” “internal relations,” and “concrescence.”

Before moving on to unpack Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, it is important to note that his allegiance to Wordsworth and the Romantic reaction is not at all to say that he has sided with subjectivism or idealism over the objectivity of science. The danger in aligning oneself against the mathematical abstractions of mechanistic science is that one rushes too quickly to adopt the opposite extreme, elevating personal emotion and individual will to such unwarranted heights that the entirety of the visible universe is made to seem a private projection, a mere appearance dependent upon the constructive activity of my mind. Wordsworth’s absorption in living nature–“an inmate of this active universe,”10 as he put it–all but inoculated him against this subjectivist over-reaction; but there are a few occasions when Wordsworth seems almost to become infected by other strains of the Romantic bloodstream, especially those emerging in the orbit of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Whitehead strongly positioned himself in opposition to Kantian, Fichtean, and Hegelian forms of idealism which can be read as attempting to derive the concrete and contingent existence of the universe from the abstract universal categories of thought.11 Not incidentally (considering the influence of Schelling on Wordsworth through the intermediary of Coleridge), the relationship of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is far more congenial, since unlike for Kant and Hegel, for Schelling “Nature is a priori.”12 Whitehead pithily suggests that his approach “aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”13 In Kant’s first critique, experience is either translatable into conscious rational knowledge (Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas/representations” of geometrical space and time), or it is no experience at all. The vague but overriding feelings of nature’s creative rhythms and physical purposes always scintillating along the fractal horizons of consciousness are ignored in order to secure the certain knowledge of the rational, waking ego.14 The abyssal complexities of our aesthetic encounter with the sublime are left for the 3rd critique, the Critique of Judgment, but even here, where Kant’s powers reach their highest pitch, he pulls up short of the erotic receptivity that may have reconnected him with the animate intelligence of the cosmos. In book XI of The Prelude, as if speaking directly to Kant, Wordsworth pays homage to the “animation and…deeper sway” of nature’s soul while warning against the “narrow estimates of things” resulting from rational critique: “suffice it here/To hint that danger cannot but attend/Upon a Function rather proud to be/The enemy of falsehood, than the friend/Of truth, to sit in judgment than to feel.”15

While for Kant, “the world emerges from the subject,” for Whitehead, “the subject emerges from the world.”16 Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity is such that the order and meaning of our experience is originally given to us by the order and meaning of the surrounding actual universe. “[The subject] is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it.”17 Whitehead’s object-to-subject account of the formation of experience may seem too strict a rule for Wordsworth’s imaginative epistemology to obey, since for the latter the senses must be free to half-create and half perceive the world, as he suggests in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798). This reversal of the vector of experience may at times prove to be a true tension in the two men’s outlooks, a tension worth untangling if only to discover a deeper commonality.

It would be an unfair reading of Whitehead, based on his reaction to much of German idealism, to neglect the extent to which his epistemology is fully awake to the creative and participatory role of the imagination in evaluating and synthesizing the facts of the actually existing world. His criticisms of idealistic accounts of perception result primarily from the mistaken prioritization of a derivative mode of perception, “presentational immediacy” over the truly primitive mode, “causal efficacy.” Presentational immediacy is a highly advanced form of experience available to conscious human beings. Dominated by the eyes (“The most despotic of our senses”18), it gives us a certain degree of reflective distance from the causal flow of cosmic vectors of inter-bodily emotion. These vectors, felt through the more original mode of perception, causal efficacy, generate the “mysterious presence of surrounding things”19: for example, the “voluntary power instinct” of the brooding Cliff that made the young Wordsworth’s hands tremble while rowing back to shore in his stolen skiff.20 Without the enlivening passion of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy becomes a fallen mode of perception, detached and cut off from intimacy with nature, her inner life reduced to the external relations of dead objects floating in outer space. Without the reflective disinterest of presentational immediacy, causal efficacy would swallow up our consciousness into the “dim and undetermin’d sense/Of unknown modes of being” that haunted Wordsworth for days after he returned the skiff to its mooring-place.21 Whitehead describes a third, hybrid mode of perception called “symbolic reference,” which plays a role akin to the synthesizing imagination, able to skillfully interweave physical prehensions with mental conceptions in order to produce heightened forms of aesthetic enjoyment and moral appetition. In Whitehead’s jargon, mental conceptions are also prehensions, or feelings, but instead of feeling concrete matters of fact, they feel eternal objects, or abstract forms of possibility. Whereas causal efficacy is “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present,” presentational immediacy is the “[projection which] exhibits the contemporary world in its spatial relations.”22 Through the mixed perceptual mode of symbolic reference, habits of imagination are gradually acquired which bring forth the taken for granted world of every day experience.23 It is the synthesizing activity of this mode that Wordsworth refers to when he writes of how “The mind of Man is fram’d even like the breath/And harmony of music. There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society.”24 A skillful poet is able to consciously moderate the synthetic activity of symbolic reference, “to keep/In wholesome separation the two natures,/The one that feels [causal efficacy], the other that observes [presentational immediacy].”25

It would be a superficial reading of Wordsworth to ignore the degree to which he wavers in his assigning of precedence to either the mental or physical poles of experiential reality. Just a line below his statement in Tintern Abbey about the creative element in perception, he writes of being “well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being.” He finds that his mind is not only necessarily tied to his sensual encounters with nature (as it is for Kant), but that the language of sense has birthed and raised to maturity even the purest of his ideas from out of the womb of nature herself. Elsewhere, Wordsworth writes of the way a mountain range “By influence habitual to the mind/…shapes/The measure and the prospect of the soul.”26 Further conforming to Whitehead’s object-to-subject reading of the vector of experience, he writes: “From nature doth emotion come, and moods/…are nature’s gift.”27 But it could still be asked: is Wordsworth speaking here in a psychological or in an ontological register?

Whitehead’s characterization of Wordsworth’s poetry as exhibiting a sensitivity to the interpenetrating “prehensive unities” of nature, “each suffused with modal presences of others,” is meant to classify him as an ontologically committed panpsychist. His poetry is overflowing with hymns to the Anima Mundi, with references to the “the Life/ of the great whole,” and to the way “every natural form, rock, fruit or flower/…Lay bedded in a quickening soul.”28 Even here, however, just as Wordsworth appears to fully confirm his cosmological orientation, the tension of the poles of spirit and nature begin vibrating, as if hovering in superposition. Does Wordsworth mean that all these natural forms lay bedded in his quickening soul? In the same lines from The Prelude cited above, he could be read as congratulating himself for rousing nature from her sleep: “To every natural form…/I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,/Or linked them to some feeling…/…all/That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”29 But just a few lines later, Wordsworth again reverses the vector of his experience back from the idealistic to the cosmological pole, finding his mind “as wakeful” to the changing face of nature “as waters are/To the sky’s motion,” becoming to her activity as “obedient as a lute/That waits upon the touches of the wind.”30 Perhaps Wordsworth’s tendency to waver on this issue betrays one of the key differences between a visionary poet, focused on capturing the vividness of each fading moment, and a systematic philosopher, focused on characterizing the ultimate generalities characterizing all experience.

Though it is beyond the scope of the present essay, many parallels could also be drawn between Whitehead’s conception of a dipolar divinity and Wordsworth’s visions of the World Soul, “the Imagination of the whole.” Briefly, like all other actual occasions, Whitehead’s God has two poles, an intellectual/mental and an emotional/physical. Unlike all other actual occasions, God’s primordial pole is intellectual rather than physical, consisting in an evaluative ordering of all eternal objects. This ordering serves to condition the unfolding of the universe by making relevant novelties available to the concrescence of each finite occasion of experience. These finite occasions are free to make their own decisions and evaluations, but these decisions are made amidst the set of possibilities provided by the wisdom of God. Through God’s consequent pole, the creative becoming of the physical world is taken back up into divine experience as through a loving embrace to be harmonized with God’s primordial nature. To quote Whitehead at length: “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He 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.”31 The everlasting pulsations of divine concrescence are the macrocosmic analogy of Wordsworth’s autobiographical journey from childhood paradise, through the impairment and on to the final restoration of Imagination. “From love, for here/Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,/All truth and beauty, from pervading love,/That gone, we are as dust.”32


Footnotes

1 Understanding Whitehead (1962), 257.
2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819).
3 What Coleridge Thought (1971), 90.
4 WCT, 90.
5 Science and the Modern World (1925), 79.
6 SMW, 79-80.
7 SMW, 55.
8 SMW, 84.
9 SMW, 80.
10 The Prelude (1805/1970), 27.
11 Process and Reality (1929/1979), 89.
12 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799/2004), 198. Nature here is natura naturans, the generative abyss from which all finite form arises and into which it dies; this is akin to Whitehead’s category of ultimate generality at the base of all actuality, Creativity.
13 PR, 172.
14 Modes of Thought (1938/1966), p. 74-75.
15 The Prelude, 209.
16 PR, 172.
17 PR, 113.
18 The Prelude, 210.
19 SMW, 80.
20 The Prelude, 12.
21 The Prelude, 12.
22 Symbolism (1927/1955), 50.
23 UW, 184.
24 The Prelude, 10.
25 The Prelude, 238.
26 The Prelude, 125.
27 The Prelude, 218.
28 The Prelude, 37.
29 The Prelude, 37. Italics are mine.
30 The Prelude, 37-38.
31 PR, 525.
32 The Prelude, 233.