R.E. Slater - A Country Idyll (prose)

A Country Idyll

(prose)

by R.E. Slater

Today is one of those really cold wintry days in Michigan where time is a given and outdoor adventures are kept to a minimum unless you have the proper warm flannelled clothes, heavy coat, thick boots, hat, and scarf, and the personal ability to endure the cold and actually enjoy it.

Myself, though I am growing old, I still love winter, its wonder, solitude, silence, and ferocity. The worse it gets the more I love it. In childhood if there was a raging blizzard blowing and drifting outside I and my brother were in the "teeth of it" as we sledded down our tall hills to then scramble up them, then down, again-and-again until we tired.

And when not sliding we were testing our "daring do" abilities by jumping into deep snowdrifts nineteen feet down trying to hit bottom (we never did) to see if we could scale back up them or fight our way out of their massif miens. But do not worry, those hillside drifts were skinny, more tall than wide. Four feet at best, sometimes more.

Across our hills lay the old 150-year-old barn where the winds would gather to crest the frozen fence lines and blow across the hill tops ringing the wetland below. There, on the hills or up at the barn we could expect 25 to 30 feet of snowdrift four to six foot deep blown lengthwise and down the contour of the hills. When younger we built very long luge runs bored like tunnels through the bottoms of the drifts. And within their interiors we built one and two-person snow rooms from early morning until late at night when the bunny rabbits hopped about, and we could watch them like gophers from our dens. Later, when older, we learned how to "bust through their tops" with a snowmobile gunning the engine straight up the big hills, then slamming the drift front-on, trying to carry 30 or so feet of air before landing on the downward side of the sloped hill.

We had a lot of fun during the winters. Dad would plow the drives and stack large snow piles by the dilapidated chicken coop or barn and as the plowed snow grew higher and higher in height and girth we waited and waited until pulling out the iron shovel-spades from nearby garage, began carving out our own majestic snow castle; or play king-on-the-hill like we did at school, to be pushed down rolling all the way to the bottom of the massive snow pile.

And on icy days when not using our Radio Flyer metal-runner sleds on the hills, we would glide across the flat icy fields steering around tufted island of wild grasses where the snow gave in and stopped our fun. Sometimes we ran a hundred feet and sometimes we never stopped until we reached the icicled fence lines. It was a lot of fun.

And then there were the holidays of Christmas and forced winter school closures where we waxed luxuriant to play board games through the morning till bored then bundled up to visit our grand old grandma next door bereft of granddad back when we were too young to understand.

She would watch us slide down her chimney's "coal shute" built into the house as an anchorage to the outer chimney; or make labyrinthine mazes with our booted feet, scooting across the crusty snow working around-and-around or, in-and-out, then play catch-me-tag as we scampered about the maze trying to catch one another.

When cold, we would fly into the old farmhouse's back "work room" or "ready room" where dad, his brothers and sisters, and my uncles and aunts five generations back, would gather to dress for the fields and dairy barns; or undress and clean up after a long day of farming and husbandry.

Most days, we flew in to warm up our little bodies. Which delighted grandma no end. We would peel off our wet outer clothes and iced-up buckle boots to be lured within to Graham Crackers and milk as we explored again the old house with its framed pictures and family rooms.

And on special days when coming indoors we might find grandma working about two very large, vat-like, and rounded laundry tubs filled with steaming hot water rising about her fragile frame and filling the ready-room with much need heat. There we would watch with child-like eyes grandma move about the tubs stirring the wet clothes in the hot waters or winding them through a sturdy pre-1930s hand wringer before clothes pinning all to a strung line about the clapboard room.

She always gave a wry, toothy smile from her diminutive figure clad in thin gingham dress before measuring ourselves to her frame shoulder to shoulder to see if we might be as tall as she! By age ten we had caught up with our beloved "second mom" before scampering down the cement floor hall to a back anteroom where an inside - and importantly, an unfrozen hand pump served up the best of coldest waters in a speckled blue enameled tin cup.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...

And if our busy dad wasn't on the roads policing or, up at the fire barns cleaning up the ash soot of the fire equipment and trucks after a fire, or driving our school bus morning and afternoon, we might find him up at cold barn in the dark of night servicing the plow tractor so it would be ready for use. He would add oil, gas, grease, check the tire chains, and always place a trickle charger on the battery to keep it in good health on cold nights.

Looking around the night-filled blackened barn lay hundred-year whatnot and older, inexplicable, paraphernalia. The kind of stuff you see in Midwest antique stores. To us, it was junk, much used, and never removed by the hands that had placed it there years and years and years ago. There it lay with thick dust upon it underneath a mouldy atmosphere of age.

While dad worked, we would climb up a rickety wooden rung ladder nailed into the beams which rose above the iron implements of plow, disk or tractor, thirty feet into the air, then fling upon a heavy 3' X 3'-foot double planked door to gain entry into the loft. Within, what once held hay now held more disused antiques. On summer days the space was filled with floating/wafting dust motes... but in the black, only the shafts of light from the dim bulb below gained entry through the upper planked floor.

One especially good memory I have is that on the worst of the winter storms or summer gales, I would brave the elements to gain the barn, squeeze through between the jammed tractor doors, and sit in the loft above listening to the old barn groan and moan telling me of its hoary memories as I might imagine them from the dissolute litter lying about me.

In my mid-twenties I sadly tore down the old wood barn. We were selling all our homesteaded acreage as all my relatives were dying or too old to keep the farm with their day jobs. We had already sold the old sixty-foot Quonset steel barn which held the dairy herd below under heavy planked floor. It had been disassembled and rebuilt north of us on an active pig farm. Forty years later I was blessed to walk within its structure at the consent of the owner who had torn it down, and with my cousin and wife, we fell silent and simply listened to the movement of the old iron beams swaying and creaking for a while. It was the finest of symphonies to our humble hearts and ears.

As I took down my heritage, I first removed the attached-and-slated corn crib then proceeded to remove the ancient, boarded siding and overlapping ribs. Dad wanted all the old nails removed and bucketed, which took some time. Once stripped of naked of cladding I next tried to undowel the 6/8" wooden tendon pins and the massive 14/16" beam pins to no avail. Worse, I could see all the work down 150 years ago by my ancestor who had hand-adzed each beam across the length of all four of its sides. This was truly a labor I did not like nor one I had wished to do.

Watching, my dad and his brother (my uncle) suggested pulling down the structure with the old tractor. It was an old, rusted Farmall M that had been well cared for and never spent one night outside in the rain or snow. We strapped a length of chains to the back frame of the tractor then commenced tugging-and-pulling 8 of the 12 main upright beams holding everything up: Imagine walking alongside a broken, tottering structure to attach chains to several corner and side beams... we left the interior beams alone of course.

One by one we broke the bottoms of the grand, noble, upright beams, until the whole skeleton finally gave in along with the falling tinned plated roof. In our moment of glory, we each found a deep sadness which comes from living too long. I have grieved for years over the loss of our pioneered land, our farm buildings, my grandparents, and the many overwhelming memories of family and friends working the fields and gardens together, picnicking, hunting, or playing baseball on the hay fields.

We lived in paradise and didn't even know it...

To grant homage to the pre-industrial, agrarian pioneering days of yesteryear, I was listening one winter day in early December to my schoolteacher read to me in second of third grade the wintry idyll, Snowbound, by John Greenleaf Whittier. As I sat at my old fold-top desk listening to the verse's tones and lights I felt a deep, inner affinity for the words and imagery being read.

Here, as my own generations had done for many years, in this simple one-room school built 150 years ago by my ancestors; where I walked every morning and mid-afternoon across the hay and grain fields, and dairy pastures; climbing up-and-over the boxed-wired rotting fence posts and lines; or drawing through the barbed-wired and rusted post fence lines; grudgingly wading through wet morning dews of field clover with my lunchbox in one hand and books in the other; where my pants, thin socks, and worn shoes took all morning to dry; here, I fell in love with a well-scripted verse by a poet I never knew. And though I have tried my own hand at this written art I realize it is only for the gifted few who have the muse and verve within the souls which might spill their words across the gilded page welling-up deeply held, visceral feelings we thought had long died within us long ago.

So, here, at the start of January's dark wintry days and blacker, moonless nights, is a poem you may, or may not like. But at the poetry site I am directing you too, you may find other poems to explore, read, muse, or share.

To all wintry travellers seeking a warm fire to sit by,

and a soft light to read by in socked feet and flannel shirt,

of versed dreams remembering yesteryear's youth,

or loss loves and refound fortitudes...

enjoy these seldom moments of distant memory

dulled by the intervening years of a lived life....

- re slater

R.E. Slater

January 16, 2024

John Greenleaf Whittier - Snowbound, A Winter Idyl

Seeing God in the Color of Blue

Seeing God in the

Color of Blue

I was lost, but now am found

Blind, but now I see

Deaf, without hearing

Dumb, without a voice.

A binary, seeking wholeness

A functionary, unfeeling, unmoved

Unloved, yet learning love

Hopeless, when led untrue.

Stuck, but am rescued

Judged, along paths of doubt

Broken, while deeply healing

Of a past, no longer present.

My song breaks forth

Into shouting, singing

Of innumerable possibilities

Across the broken bowl.

Seamed, and stitched

And healing

Rent, my conflicts

Spent, all ills.

Now this I know, God is Love

Is Love, Is Love, Is Love.

No truth so dear,

No truth so hidden,

When Jesus told God's story

Truer than God's stories past.

R.E. Slater

August 23, 2022

First, My Complaint

Part of Process Philosophy's lack of popularity I blame directly on the process community itself. Whenever it produces "academic-level" books of scholarly value it has lately priced itself beyond the means of the common public. A public which might read more of the process community's thoughts should that knowledge be made much more affordable.

And if so, then we might see many more redactive forms of editing which might make the area of process metaphysics and ethics more understandable and relatable using the parlance of the public. This, of course, would require people like myself, who share an interest in process philosophy and theology, might then be enabled to read this information to then reset it into the vernacular terms of  the reading public in every way imaginable. Whether topical, ethical, morally, politically, ecologically. Or in children's storybooks, elementary and middle school tales of fiction or fact, and for the high school and college reader as premiers, treatises, mythological tales, sci-fi adventures, class struggles, sporting venues, etc.

Simply said, process as a lot to offer and the newer works of scholarship on process studies need to be priced not for academia but for the buying public.

Re-Constituting Narrative Can Become Redemptive

However, not all is lost. Once I had understood the substance and import of a process view of life I now see it everywhere in all the little and large pieces of story and biography, fiction and newspaper, TV and film. Why? Because process is how the world - ahem, the universe - operates. From the small to the large, from the social to the organizational. Process is everywhere about us like the air we breathe into our lungs.

Through the centuries we fail to see it because we are not looking for it. For example, I read somewhere that, as incredible as this sounds, people did not see the color blue. I know. It's hard to imagine because we now see it everywhere including its many hues and variants.

Or, that the lore of the aboriginal speaking to the connectedness of life lay everywhere around us. However, as ignorants we considered the aboriginal cultures as savaged and without value. So we isolated them, killed them, and promptly lost important truths of their cultures which would've added value to any culture, faith, or belief. I think specifically of how human civilization has broken the balances within the Earth and how it is now responding in horrendous climate changes all around the planet.

Need another example of process reality? Just look at the stars themselves which seem so far away from us in the night sky but which have provided across the universe stellar factories of life from their basic ingredients. Not only is humanity made of stardust but so is all of creation. Process says all things are relational, and that all relational things can, and will, impact all things around it. We not only like in a cycle of life, but a cycle which responds to a changing environment adapting itself to the conditions around it.

I imagine that someday, when quantum computers can become self-aware, self-organizing, and self-healing, that they will cross over the boundary of functionaries to imaginaries. That is, the will show curiosity; be able to speculate; choose actions of relational wholeness or brokenness, and exhibit every kind of conscious and spiritual function as we do presently. My hope is... for the better, and not the worse. But with indeterminate freewill also comes the ability to harm the whole as well as to heal the whole.

Behold, The Old is Becoming New

This is process philosophy and theology. But it's more than that. Much more than that. As a metaphysic it informs us of our Creator God, ourselves, nature, and the inter/intra-personal/social relationships lying everywhere around us. When I read of a Platonic-based Westernized form of Semitic Christianity (that is, the gospels of Jesus couched in Judaic-Hellenism) I realize that to read the bible of God back then is not to see the God of the bible now, today, as a more organic, living life-force which is relational, creative, healing, redemptive, loving, and generative. All present Judaic-Christian stories of God back then, as well as through the history of the church, as spoken to a God of wrath, Who judges, condemns, and sends people to hell.

Process Theology, based upon Process Philosophy, approaches the story of God differently. It speaks to a God who is Love, Life, Possibility, and Becoming. That God is not a static relationship but a responding relationship to the present conditions of an evolutionary creation. A static, one-dimensional God who is far-away (transcendent) is not the same as an evolving, many-dimensional God who is immanently near to the very heartbeat of creation. The Psalms of the bible speak to this kind of God but the Hebrew traditions of God failed to grasp the "color of blue" which the writer was ascribing to God.

Again, the narrative of process is sublimely profound and lies everywhere about us. Yet we fail to see it because we have been raised in life to see other things. Necessary things. Perhaps helpful things. But they are pieces of a much larger puzzle. A puzzle a process theology intends to recompose that we might begin to see a processual spiritual universe in even grander ways than we can now imagine. Process then is all about curiosity, creativity, speculation, and coloring outside the lines. Some of those lines keep us within the church's creeds and dogma. For myself, I used those boundaries as guides, began to erase those lines, and am now rewriting the bible as a process narrative of successes and failures in seeing the process Creatorship of our Redeeming God.

Blessings,

R.E. Slater

August 23, 2022

PS - The topical index contains a series of marked "INDEXES - Process..." To save time, use these indexes, google search, the search bar here, and the topics listed to rummage through what I feel are the more helpful studies of process philosophy and theology. The books below are but a few of many more process titles and authorships. If they are listed here on this website they are the ones which should be read as I relate my post-evangelical Jesus faith to the world of Arminianism, Open & Relational (Process) Theology, and to Process Theology itself. This journey has taken ten years to get to this point. Hopefully, what is shared within will help many readers to a quicker vision of the God of the bible than of the God who was hidden from my view in important, non-limiting ways than how I had first learned of my faith in Jesus.

- re slater

PSS - I began my readings at the source. Whitehead, John Cobb, etc. Andrew Davis is the latest generation of authors. Hence, Whiteheadian thought may drift from its source or expand brilliantly as it is into its fourth generation of process thinkers. Hence, I will share my readings across both the early realms of process thinking as well as the new realms as I can. The lists below might be grouped as circa 2010-2016 (Studies in Whitehead) and 2019-the present (Davis)

 

* * * * * *

TITLES BY ANDREW M. DAVIS

How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs Sep 18, 2018
by Andrew M. Davis, Philip Clayton, Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, Rupert Sheldrake

$8.49

How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere captures for a general audience the spiritual shift away from a God “up there” and “out there” and towards an immanent divine right here. It’s built around the personal journeys of a close-knit group of prominent contributors. Their spiritual visions of immanence, sometimes called “panentheism,” are serving as a path of spiritual return for a growing number of seekers today. Contributors include Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, Rupert Sheldrake, Matthew Fox, and Cynthia Bourgeault.

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) Oct 14, 2020

by Andrew M. Davis

$38.00

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.

Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) Nov 13, 2019
by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, Andrew M. Davis, James Burton, Brianne Donaldson, Diego Gil, Susanne Valerie Granzer, Matthew Goulish, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Andrew Murphie, Timothy Murphy, AJ Nocek
$90.48

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions.

Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy (Palgrave Perspectives on Process Philosophy) Dec 13, 2021
by Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Teresa Teixeira, Wm. Andrew Schwartz
$100.87

This book newly articulates the international and interdisciplinary reach of Whitehead’s organic process cosmology for a variety of topics across science and philosophy, and in dialogue with a variety historical and contemporary voices. Integrating Whitehead’s thought with the insights of Bergson, James, Pierce, Merleau-Ponty, Descola, Fuchs, Hofmann, Grof and many others, contributors from around the world reveal the relevance of process philosophy to physics, cosmology, astrobiology, ecology, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychedelics, and religion. A global collection, this book expresses multivocal possibilities for the development of process cosmology after Whitehead.

Nature in Process: Organic Proposals in Philosophy, Society, and Religion Feb 28, 2022
by Andrew M. Davis, Maria-Teresa Teixeira, Wm. Andrew Schwartz
Paperback
$24.00

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Depths as Yet Unspoken: Whiteheadian Excursions in Mysticism, Multiplicity, and Divinity Jul 30, 2020

by Roland Faber, Andrew M Davis
Hardcover - $62.00
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Paperback - $34.92

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* * * * * *

TITLES IN CONTEMPORARY WHITEHEAD STUDIES

Butler on Whitehead: On the Occasion (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (March 22, 2012)

Kindle - $91.20

Hardcover - $103.40

This volume is based on the first set of formal conversations which brings together the dynamic philosophies of two eminent thinkers: Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Each has drawn from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. In bringing together internationally renowned interpreters of Butler and Whitehead from a variety of fields and disciplines—philosophy, rhetoric, gender and queer studies, religion, literary and political theory—the editors hope to set a standard for the relevance of interdisciplinary philosophical discourse today. This volume offers a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts, by reaching beyond their closed circles toward understandings that may serve as the basis for the activation of humanity today. Considered together, Butler and Whitehead delineate a whole new cadre of approaches to long-standing problems as well as never-before asked questions in the humanities.

Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (June 20, 2013)
by Michael Epperson (Author) , Elias Zafiris (Author)

Kindle - $42.00

Hardcover - $117.74

Paperback - $56.75

If there is a central conceptual framework that has reliably borne the weight of modern physics as it ascends into the 21st century, it is the framework of quantum mechanics. Because of its enduring stability in experimental application, physics has today reached heights that not only inspire wonder, but arguably exceed the limits of intuitive vision, if not intuitive comprehension. For many physicists and philosophers, however, the currently fashionable tendency toward exotic interpretation of the theoretical formalism is recognized not as a mark of ascent for the tower of physics, but rather an indicator of sway--one that must be dampened rather than encouraged if practical progress is to continue.

In this unique two-part volume, designed to be comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists, the authors chart out a pathway forward by identifying the central deficiency in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, and indeed, in modern philosophy more generally: That in the conventional, metrical depiction of extension, inherited from the Enlightenment, objects are characterized as fundamental to relations--i.e., such that relations presuppose objects but objects do not presuppose relations. The authors, by contrast, argue that in quantum mechanics physical extensiveness fundamentally entails not only relations of objects, but also relations of relations. In this way, quantum mechanics exemplifies a concept of extensive connection that it is fundamentally topological rather than metrical, and thus requires a logico-mathematical framework grounded in category theory rather than set theory.

By this thesis, the fundamental quanta of quantum physics are properly defined as units of logico-physical relation rather than merely units of physical relata as is the current convention. Objects are always understood as relata, and likewise relations are always understood objectively. Objects and relations are thus coherently defined as mutually implicative. The conventional notion of a history as 'a story about fundamental objects' is thereby reversed, such that the classical 'objects' become the story by which we understand physical systems that are fundamentally histories of quantum events.

These are just a few of the novel critical claims explored in this volume--claims whose exemplification in quantum mechanics will, the authors argue, serve more broadly as foundational principles for the philosophy of nature as it evolves through the 21st century and beyond.

The Divine Manifold (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (July 30, 2014)
by Roland Faber (Author)

Kindle - $151.11

Hardcover - $141.64

The Divine Manifold is a postmodern enquiry in intersecting themes of the concept and reality of multiplicity in a chaosmos that does not refuse a dimension of theopoetics, but rather defines it in terms of divine polyphilia, the love of multiplicity. In an intricate play on Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book engages questions of religion and philosophy through the aporetic dynamics of love and power, locating its discussions in the midst of, and in between the spheres of a genuine philosophy of multiplicity. This philosophy originates from the poststructuralist approach of Gilles Deleuze and the process philosophical inspirations of Alfred N. Whitehead. As their chaosmos invites questions of ultimate reality, religious pluralism and multireligious engagement, a theopoetics of love will find paradoxical dissociations and harmonizations with postmodern sensitivities of language, power, knowledge and embodiment. At the intersection of poststructuralism’s and process theology’s insights in the liberating necessity of multiplicity for a postmodern cosmology, the book realizes its central claim. If there is a divine dimension of the chaosmos, it will not be found in any identification with mundane forces or supernatural powers, but on the contrary in the absolute difference of polyphilic love from creativity. Yet, the concurrent indifference of love and power—its mystical undecidability in terms of any conceptualization—will lead into existential questions of the insistence on multiplicity in a world of infinite becoming as inescapable background for its importance and creativeness, formulating an ecological and ethical impulse for a mystagogy of becoming intermezzo.

Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists: Experience and Reality (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (April 16, 2015)

Kindle - $91.75

Hardcover - $96.58

Despite there being deep lines of convergence between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and other classical American philosophers, it remains an open question whether Whitehead is a pragmatist, and conversation between pragmatists and Whitehead scholars have been limited. Indeed, it is difficult to find an anthology of classical American philosophy that includes Whitehead’s writings. These camps began separately, and so they remain. This volume questions the wisdom of that separation, exploring their connections, both historical and in application. The essays in this volume embody original and creative work by leading scholars that not only furthers the understanding of American philosophy, but seeks to advance it by working at the intersection of experience and reality to incite novel and creative thought. This exploration is long overdue. Specific questions that are addressed are: Is Whitehead a pragmatist? What contrasts and affinities exist between American pragmatism and Whitehead’s thought? What new questions, strategies, and critiques emerge by juxtaposing their distinct perspectives?

Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (May 5, 2015)
by Brianne Donaldson (Author)

Kindle - $85.78

Hardcover - $78.28

Metaphysics—or the grand narratives about reality that shape a community—has historically been identified as one of the primary oppressive factors in violence against animals, the environment, and other subordinated populations. Yet, this rejection of metaphysics has allowed inadequate worldviews to be smuggled back into secular rights-based systems, and into politics, language, arts, economics, media, and science under the guise of value-free and narrowly human-centric facts that relegate many populations to the margins and exclude them from consideration as active members of the planetary community. Those concerned with systemic violence against creatures and other oppressed populations must overcome this allergy to metaphysics in order to illuminate latent assumptions at work in their own worldviews, and to seek out dynamic, many-sided, and relational narratives about reality that are more adequate to a universe of responsive and creative world-shaping creatures. This text examines two such worldviews—Whitehead’s process-relational thought in the west and the nonviolent Indian tradition of Jainism—alongside theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, that offer a new perspective on metaphysics as well as the creaturely kin and planetary fellows with whom we co-shape our future.

Tragic Beauty in Whitehead and Japanese Aesthetics (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (May 19, 2016)
by Steve Odin (Author)
Kindle - $52.00

Hardcover - $108.14

Paperback - $54.99

The present volume endeavors to make a contribution to contemporary Whitehead studies by clarifying his axiological process metaphysics, including his theory of values, concept of aesthetic experience, and doctrine of beauty, along with his philosophy of art, literature and poetry. Moreover, it establishes an east-west dialogue focusing on how Alfred North Whitehead’s process aesthetics can be clarified by the traditional Japanese Buddhist sense of evanescent beauty. As this east-west dialogue unfolds it is shown that there are many striking points of convergence between Whitehead’s process aesthetics and the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. However, the work especially focuses on two of Whitehead’s aesthetic categories, including the penumbral beauty of darkness and the tragic beauty of perishability, while further demonstrating parallels with the two Japanese aesthetic categories of yûgen and aware. It is clarified how both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have articulated a poetics of evanescence that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. Finally it is argued that both Whitehead and Japanese tradition develop an aesthetics of beauty as perishability culminating in a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its reconciliation in the supreme ecstasy of peace or nirvana.

Beyond Whitehead: Recent Advances in Process Thought (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (August 29, 2017)
Kindle - $84.44

Hardcover - $76.61

As with any rich philosophical tradition in a period of intensive growth, process philosophy may seem confusing to the uninitiated, or even to the initiated. There is simply so much going on that one may, so to speak, lose the forest for the trees. The purpose of this book is to organize and arrange selected examples of contemporary work in process philosophy, with opening commentaries by leading Whiteheadian scholars, to give the reader a taste of the global vision of process currently expressed within this field of philosophy.

This book is split into two parts: the first discussing the historical roots of and future perspectives for basic concepts of process thinking, and the second presenting original contemporary work in extending and re-interpreting the basic metaphysical structure of process.

Whitehead and Continental Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: Dislocations (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (April 29, 2019)
Kindle - $37.99

Hardcover - $77.24

Paperback - $39.99

This book examines how the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a speculative philosopher from the first half of the twentieth century, converses and entangles itself with continental philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries around the question of a sustainable civilization in the present. Chapters are focused around economic and environmental sustainability, questions of how technology and systems relate to this sustainability, relationships between human and nonhuman entities, relationships among humans, and how larger philosophical questions lead one to think differently about what the terms sustainable and civilization mean. The book aims to uncover and explore ways in which the combination of these philosophies might provide the “dislocations” within thought that lead to novel ways of being and acting in the world.

Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (November 13, 2019)
Kindle - $90.48

Hardcover - $86.97

How do we make ourselves a Whiteheadian proposition? This question exposes the multivalent connections between postmodern thought and Whitehead’s philosophy, with particular attention to his understanding of propositions.

Edited by Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, and Andrew M. Davis, Propositions in the Making articulates the newest reaches of Whiteheadian propositions for a postmodern world. It does so by activating interdisciplinary lures of feeling, living, and co-creating the world anew. Rather than a “logical assertion,” Whitehead described a proposition as a “lure for feeling” for a collectivity to come. It cannot be reduced to the verbal content of logical justifications, but rather the feeling content of aesthetic valuations. In creatively expressing these propositions in wide relevance to existential, ethical, educational, theological, aesthetic, technological, and societal concerns, the contributors to this volume enact nothing short of “a Whiteheadian Laboratory.”

Whitehead’s Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (March 5, 2020)
by George Allan (Author)

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In Whitehead's Radically Temporalist Metaphysics: Recovering the Seriousness of Time, George Allan argues that Whitehead’s introduction of God into his process metaphysics renders his metaphysics incoherent. This notion of God, who is the reason for both stability and progressive change in the world and who is both the infinite source of novel possibilities and the everlasting repository for the finite values, inserts into a reality that is supposedly composed solely of finite entities an entity both infinite and everlasting. By eliminating this notion of God, Allan draws on the temporalist foundation of Whitehead’s views to recover a metaphysics that takes time seriously. By turning to Whitehead’s later writings, Allan shows how this interpretation is developed into an expanded version of the radically temporalist hypothesis, emphasizing the power of finite entities, individually and collectively, to create, sustain, and enhance the dynamic world of which we are a creative part.

Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (October 14, 2020)
by Andrew M. Davis (Author)
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Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy is an investigation into the nature of ultimacy and explanation, particularly as it relates to the status of, and relationship among Mind, Value, and the Cosmos. It draws its stimulus from longstanding “axianoetic” convictions as to the ultimate status of Mind and Value in the western tradition of philosophical theology, and chiefly from the influential modern proposals of A.N. Whitehead, Keith Ward, and John Leslie. What emerges is a relational theory of ultimacy wherein Mind and Value, Possibility and Actuality, God and the World are revealed as “ultimate” only in virtue of their relationality. The ultimacy of relationality—what Whitehead calls “mutual immanence”—uniquely illuminates enduring mysteries surrounding: any and all existence, necessary divine existence, the nature of the possible, and the world as actual. As such, it casts fresh light upon the whence and why of God, the World, and their ultimate presuppositions.

Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (Contemporary Whitehead Studies) (December 10, 2020)
by Timothy E. Eastman (Author)

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In Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context, Timothy E. Eastman proposes a new creative synthesis, the Logoi framework—which is radically inclusive and incorporates both actuality and potentiality—to show how the fundamental notions of process, logic, and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context and quantum logical distinctions, can resolve a baker’s dozen of age-old philosophic problems. Further, Eastman leverages a century of advances in quantum physics and the Relational Realism interpretation pioneered by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris and augmented by the independent research of Ruth Kastner and Hans Primas to resolve long-standing issues in understanding quantum physics. Adding to this, Eastman makes use of advances in information and complex systems, semiotics, and process philosophy to show how multiple levels of context, combined with relations—including potential relations—both local and local-global, can provide a grounding for causation, emergence, and physical law. Finally, the Logoi framework goes beyond standard ways of knowing—that of context independence (science) and context focus (arts, humanities)—to demonstrate the inevitable role of ultimate context (meaning, spiritual dimension) as part of a transformative ecological vision, which is urgently needed in these times of human and environmental crises.

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What Is Process Thought?: Seven Answers to Seven Questions Paperback – January 28, 2021

by Jay McDaniel (Author)

Science and everyday experience increasingly demonstrate that ours is a dynamic, interconnected, relational universe. It was the great insight of Alfred North Whitehead that we need a philosophy to match this understanding. That he succeeded in this is hampered by the complexity of his ideas and the words he used to describe it. In What Is Process Thought, Jay McDaniel easily overcomes this difficulty. Using metaphor, imagery, and examples from everyday life, McDaniel brings the “aha” experience of understanding to readers, whether process thought is new to them or already familiar. Old-order thinking has brought us to the precarity of geopolitical crises and climate change. If we are to survive, we must make the shift from substance-mechanistic thinking to process-relational thinking. This little book is a gateway to that great and necessary shift.

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

Photo by Михаил Павленко on Unsplash

OBSERVATIONS ON PROCESS PHILOSOPHY:

Art, Nature, and Light

https://www.openhorizons.org/whitehead-on-wordsworth---art-out-of-nature.html

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.

---

*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.