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

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from 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

Saturday, May 20, 2023

Moving from Postmodernism to Metamodernism, Part 2 - Description




 Metamodernism Series







* * * * * *

METAMODERNISM

Metamodernism is a term that refers to a range of developments observed in many areas of art, culture and philosophy, emerging in the aftermath of postmodernism, roughly at the turn of the 21st century. To many, it is characterized as mediations between aspects of modernism and postmodernism; for others the term suggests an integration of those sensibilities with premodern (indigenous and traditional) cultural codes as well. Metamodernism is one of a number of attempts to describe post-postmodernism.

History of the term

A pendulum swinging back and forth.
To describe "the structure of feeling" of metamodernism, Akker and Vermeulen use the metaphor of a pendulum continually oscillating from the sincere seriousness of modernism to the ironic playfulness of postmodernism.[1][2]

In 1995, Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon stated that a new label for what was coming after postmodernism was necessary.[3]

Early usages

The term appeared as early as 1975, when scholar Mas'ud Zavarzadeh used it to describe a cluster of aesthetics or attitudes which had been emerging in American literary narratives since the mid-1950s.[4] In 1999, Moyo Okediji utilized the term "metamodern" applying it to contemporary African-American art that issues an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism."[5] In 2002, Andre Furlani, analyzing the literary works of Guy Davenport, defined metamodernism as an aesthetic that is "after yet by means of modernism.... a departure as well as a perpetuation."[6][7] The relationship between metamodernism and modernism was seen as going "far beyond homage, toward a reengagement with modernist method in order to address subject matter well outside the range or interest of the modernists themselves."[6] In 2007, Alexandra Dumitrescu described metamodernism as partly a concurrence with, partly an emergence from, and partly a reaction to, postmodernism, "champion[ing] the idea that only in their interconnection and continuous revision lie the possibility of grasping the nature of contemporary cultural and literary phenomena."[8]

Vermeulen and van den Akker

In 2010, cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker contributed significantly to the theorization of post-postmodernism, using the term metamodernism. [9][10] In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, they asserted that the 2000s were characterized by the return of typically modern positions that nevertheless did not forfeit the postmodern mindsets of the 1980s and 1990s. According to them, the metamodern sensibility "can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism", characteristic of cultural responses to recent global events such as climate change, the financial crisis, political instability, and the digital revolution.[9] They asserted that “the postmodern culture of relativism, irony, and pastiche" is over, having been replaced by a post-ideological condition that stresses engagement, affect, and storytelling through "ironic sincerity."[11]

An image of Herzog and de Meuron's Elbe Philharmonie, Hamburg. Notes from Modernism describes it an example of the metamodernism in architecture.
Notes from Metamodernism states that the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron is expressive of "attempts to negotiate between such opposite poles as culture and nature, the finite and the infinite, the commonplace and the ethereal, a formal structure, and a formalist unstructuring."[12]


The prefix "meta-" referred not so much to a reflective stance or repeated rumination, but to Plato's metaxy, which denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them.[9] Vermeulen and van den Akker described metamodernism as a "structure of feeling" that oscillates between modernism and postmodernism like "a pendulum swinging between...innumerable poles".[13]

According to Kim Levin, writing in ARTnews, this oscillation "must embrace doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne."[11] For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."[14]

Vermeulen asserted that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or...a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."[14] The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and the work of artists such as Bas Jan AderPeter DoigOlafur EliassonKaye DonachieCharles Avery, and Ragnar Kjartansson.[9]

Academic engagement since 2010

Metamodernism/metamodern theory has been engaged by scholars in numerous academic fields.

James MacDowell, in his formulation of the "quirky" cinematic sensibility, described the works of Wes AndersonMichel GondrySpike JonzeMiranda July, and Charlie Kaufman as building upon the "New Sincerity", and embodying the metamodern structure of feeling in their balancing of "ironic detachment with sincere engagement".[13]

The 2013 issue of the American Book Review dedicated to metamodernism included a series of essays identifying authors such as Roberto BolañoDave EggersJonathan FranzenHaruki MurakamiZadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace as metamodernists.[15][16]

In 2013, Linda C. Ceriello proposed a theorization of metamodernism for the field of religious studies, connecting the contemporary phenomenon of secular spirituality to the emergence of a metamodern episteme. Her analysis of contemporary religious/spiritual movements and ontologies posits a shift that is consonant with the metamodern cultural sensibilities identified by others such as Vermeulen and van den Akker, and which has given rise to a distinct metamodern soteriology[17]

Linda Ceriello's work with Greg Dember on popular cultural products such as Joss Whedon's seminal television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer[18] and on Whedon and Goddard's 2012 film The Cabin in the Woods proposed an epistemic taxonomy of the monstrous/paranormal to distinguish the character of metamodern monsters from those which could be read as postmodern, modern or pre-modern.[19]

In a 2014 article in PMLA, literary scholars David James and Urmila Seshagiri argued that "metamodernist writing incorporates and adapts, reactivates and complicates the aesthetic prerogatives of an earlier cultural moment", in discussing twenty-first century writers such as Tom McCarthy.[20]

In 2014, Professor Stephen Knudsen, writing in ArtPulse, noted that metamodernism "allows the possibility of staying sympathetic to the poststructuralist deconstruction of subjectivity and the self—Lyotard’s teasing of everything into intertextual fragments—and yet it still encourages genuine protagonists and creators and the recouping of some of modernism's virtues."[21]

In 2017, Vermeulen and van den Akker, with Allison Gibbons, published Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism,[22] an edited collection of essays exploring the notion of metamodernism across a variety of fields in the arts and culture. Individual chapters cover metamodernism in areas such as film, literary fiction, crafts, television, photography and politics. Contributors include the three editors, James MacDowell, Josh Toth, Jöog Heiser, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Lee Konstantinou, Nicole Timmer, Gry C. Rustad, Kuy Hanno Schwind, Irmtraud Huber, Wolfgang Funk, Sam Browse, Raoul Eshelman, and James Elkins. In the introductory chapter, van den Akker and Vermeulen update and consolidate their original 2010 proposal, while addressing the divergent usages of the term “metamodernism” by other thinkers.

In a 2017 essay on metamodernism in literary fiction, Fabio Vittorini stated that since the late 1980s, memetic strategies of the modern have been combined with the meta-literary strategies of the postmodern, performing "a pendulum-like motion between the naive and/or fanatic idealism of the former and the skeptical and/or apathetic pragmatism of the latter."[23]

The first peer-reviewed article applying metamodern theory to the study of religions was published in 2017 by Michel Clasquin-Johnson,[24]

Starting 2018 the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has funded a Metamodernism Research Network. The Network has hosted several international symposia and conferences.[25]

Timotheus Vermeulen at the Between Irony and Sincerity Lecture at Columbia GSAPP

In 2021, American philosopher Jason Josephson Storm published Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, a foundational theoretical text in metamodernist philosophy, social science, and politics. In this book, Storm establishes a novel method for critical scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities, disciplines which he refers to using the umbrella term "human sciences".[26] The metamodernist mode of analysis involves metarealism, process social ontologyhylosemiotics, Zeteticism and a "revaluation of values",[27] each of which is developed progressively in parts I-IV of the text.

Storm's philosophy of metamodernism builds on and critiques both modernism and postmodernism, arguing that those two preceding movements are not as disparate as they have been made out to be. Ultimately, while incorporating modernist and postmodernist elements, Metamodernism foregrounds the importance of reflective, self-analytical, interdisciplinary scholarship.[28] Storm asserts the need for a humble, positively and progressively oriented academy in which a collaborative and compassionate ethics serve openly as the motivation behind research and development of thought.[29] Contrasting with other strains of metamodernism, Storm articulates his project is more about creating a paradigm shift than merely describing an intellectual movement that's already happening in academia or culture writ large.[30]

Metamodernism in the arts

Drawing upon the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011 as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment."[31][32] The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child."[33][34] Instead, Turner proposed metamodernism as "the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons," and concluded with a call to "go forth and oscillate!"[35][14] In 2014, the manifesto became the impetus for LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner's collaborative art practice, after Shia LaBeouf reached out to Turner after encountering the text,[36][37] with the trio embarking on a series of metamodern performance projects exploring connection, empathy, and community across digital and physical platforms.[38][39]

A number of exhibitions devoted to metamodernism have been staged. In November 2011, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York staged an exhibition entitled No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism, featuring the work of Pilvi TakalaGuido van der Werve, Benjamin Martin, and Mariechen Danz.[40] In March 2012, Galerie Tanja Wagner in Berlin curated Discussing Metamodernism in collaboration with Vermeulen and van den Akker. The show featured the work of Ulf AmindeYael BartanaMonica Bonvicini, Mariechen Danz, Annabel Daou, Paula Doepfner, Olafur Eliasson, Mona HatoumAndy HoldenSejla Kameric, Ragnar Kjartansson, Kris Lemsalu, Issa Sant, David Thorpe, Angelika J. Trojnarski, Luke Turner, and Nastja Säde Rönkkö.[41][42][43] In 2013 Andy Holden staged the exhibition Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of M!MS. The exhibition examined the manifesto he had written in 2003 that called for art to be simultaneously ironic and sincere. The exhibition told the history of the writing of the manifesto and subsequently M!MS it now often cited as a precursor to Metamodernism as a ‘structure of feeling’.[44]

In his fourth novel, More Deaths than One, published in 2014, the New Zealand writer and singer-songwriter Gary Jeshel Forrester examined metamodernism by way of a search for the Central Illinois roots of David Foster Wallace during a picaresque journey to America.[45] In it, Forrester wrote that "[m]etamodernist theory proposes to fill the postmodernist void with a rough synthesis of the two predecessors from the twentieth century [modernism and post-modernism]. In the new paradigm, metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology all have their places, but the overriding concern is with yet another division of philosophy – ethics. It's okay to search for values and meaning, even as we continue to be skeptical."

In May 2014, country music artist Sturgill Simpson told CMT that his album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music had been inspired in part by an essay by Seth Abramson, who writes about metamodernism on his Huffington Post blog.[46][47] Simpson stated that "Abramson homes in on the way everybody is obsessed with nostalgia, even though technology is moving faster than ever."[46] According to J.T. Welsch, "Abramson sees the 'meta-' prefix as a means to transcend the burden of modernism and postmodernism's allegedly polarised intellectual heritage."[48]

A strand of metamodernism can be identified in Sci-Fi, taking the place of Postmodernism. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is seen by Pappis as an example, "in that it explores an oscillation in and transcendence of time".[49]

Bo Burnham's Inside and Eighth Grade have been described as metamodern reactions to growing up with social media.[50][51]

Developmental metamodernism

Other authors have utilized the term metamodernism in a sense that is partly related but divergent from the general academic conception and employment of the term as a cultural sensibility. These authors treat the concept as an aspirational stage in human development. Some have also related this conceptualization of metamodernism to Integral theory-- an earlier developmental paradigm with a spiritual emphasis.

Hanzi Freinacht and Nordic metamodernism

In 2017, sociologist Daniel Görtz and theory artist Emil Ejner Friis, writing under the pen name "Hanzi Freinacht",[52] published the first volume in their 'Metamodern Guide to Politics' Series, The Listening Society. Employing metamodernism as their "philosophical engine," they construe metamodernism as an active intellectual, social, and political movement emerging to meet the crises arising from globalization.

"Freinacht" articulates a progressive political program heavily informed by developmental psychology, particularly the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC), a neo-Piagetian framework developed by Michael Commons. In this context, metamodernism is for them best understood not merely as a cultural phase, but as a developmental stage, which is manifested at both the individual and the collective levels.[53] They assert that the distinct stages of their MHC correspond to cultural expressions of these stages and their associated worldviews, or "effective value memes."

Stages and their Value Memes
MHC StageCultural Code
Stage 7: Pre-operational stageArchaic
Stage 8: Primary StageAnimistic
Stage 9: Concrete StageFaustian
Stage 10: Abstract StagePost-Faustian
Stage 11: Formal StageModern
Stage 12: Systematic StagePostmodern
Stage 13: Metasystematic StageMetamodern

In September 2018, Görtz conducted a TEDx talk in Berlin outlining the development of "value memes" (influenced by the work of Clare W. Graves and Don Beck[54]) claiming that the metamodern value meme constitutes the highest form yet.[55]

In 2019, the second volume of the Series, Nordic Ideology, was published, providing Freinacht's detailed vision for a political metamodernism.

Politics

Swedish political party Initiativet is based on metamodern principles. It is a sister-party of Danish political party Alternativet.

Metamodernity and Bildung

In 2019, Lene Rachel Anderson published the book Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, in which she claims: "Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time."

2019 also saw the publication of The World We Create: From God to Market by Tomas Björkman, a work exploring the complex origins of our precarious situation today, along with a set of proposed solutions utilizing a metamodern framework.

In 2021, Perspectiva Press published Metamodernity: Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds, an anthology of essays on metamodernism and society by Jonathan Rowson and others.[56]

Criticism

Following interviews with Vermeulen and van den Akker[57] and Daniel Görtz,[58] philosopher and founder of Parallax magazine Tom Amarque criticized Metamodernism on a range of points.[59] He states that the approaches of Metamodernism provide few insights into longstanding issues such as modern warfare.[60] He has also accused its academic theoretical framework of being untranslatable to the working class.[61] He also claims that the metamodern emphasis on sincerity would assign meaning to things like sentimental Hollywood clichès.[62]

See also

References

  1. ^ Kovalova, Mariia; Alforova, Zoya; Sokolyuk, Lyudmyla; Chursin, Oleksandr; Obukh, Liudmyla (2022-10-18). "The digital evolution of art: current trends in the context of the formation and development of metamodernism" (PDF)Revista Amazonia Investiga11 (56): 114–123. doi:10.34069/AI/2022.56.08.12ISSN 2322-6307S2CID 253834353.
  2. ^ Vermeulen, Timotheus; van den Akker, Robin (2010). "Notes on metamodernism"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture2 (1): 5677. doi:10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677ISSN 2000-4214S2CID 164789817.
  3. ^ Hutcheon, Linda (2002). The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. p. 166.
  4. ^ Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud (1975). "The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives". Journal of American Studies. Vol. 9, no. 1. pp. 69–83. ISSN 0021-8758JSTOR 27553153.
  5. ^ Okediji, Moyo (1999). Harris, Michael (ed.). Transatlantic Dialogue: Contemporary Art In and Out of Africa. Ackland Museum, University of North Carolina. pp. 32–51. ISBN 9780295979335. Retrieved July 26, 2014.
  6. Jump up to:a b Furlani, Andre (2002). "Postmodern and after: Guy Davenport". Contemporary Literature43 (4): 713. doi:10.2307/1209039JSTOR 1209039.
  7. ^ Furlani, Andre (2007). Guy Davenport: Postmodernism and After. Northwestern University Press.
  8. ^ Dumitrescu, Alexandra. "Interconnections in Blakean and Metamodern Space"On Space. Deakin University. Archived from the original on March 23, 2012. Retrieved September 15, 2011.
  9. Jump up to:a b c d Vermeulen, Timotheus; van den Akker, Robin (2010). "Notes on metamodernism"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture2 (1): 5677. doi:10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677ISSN 2000-4214.
  10. ^ Eve, Martin Paul (2012). "Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems of Metamodernism" (PDF)Journal of 21st-century Writings1 (1): 7–25. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-02-23. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  11. Jump up to:a b Levin, K. (15 October 2012). "How PoMo Can You Go?". ARTnews. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  12. ^ Vermeulen, Timotheus; van den Akker, Robin (2010). "Notes on metamodernism"Journal of Aesthetics & Culture2 (1): 5677. doi:10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677ISSN 2000-4214S2CID 164789817.
  13. Jump up to:a b Kunze, Peter, ed. (2014). The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon. Palgrave Macmillan.
  14. Jump up to:a b c Potter, Cher (Spring 2012). "Timotheus Vermeulen talks to Cher Potter". Tank: 215.
  15. ^ Moraru, Christian (2013). "Introduction to Focus: Thirteen Ways of Passing Postmodernism". American Book Review34 (4): 3–4. doi:10.1353/abr.2013.0054ISSN 2153-4578S2CID 142998010.
  16. ^ Gheorghe, C. (2013). "Metamodernismul sau despre amurgul postmodernismului" (in Romanian). Observator Cultural. Retrieved 16 July 2014.
  17. ^ Ceriello, Linda C. (2018-05-30), "Toward a metamodern reading of Spiritual but Not Religious mysticisms", Being Spiritual but Not Religious, Routledge, pp. 200–218, doi:10.4324/9781315107431-13ISBN 9781315107431S2CID 187908803
  18. ^ Ceriello, Linda C. (2018). "The Big Bad and the 'Big AHA!': Metamodern Monsters as Transformational Figures of Instability". In Heyes, Michael E. (ed.). Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States. Lexington Books. ISBN 9781498550772OCLC 1050331873.
  19. ^ Ceriello, Linda C.; Dember, Greg (2019). "The Right to a Narrative: Metamodernism, Paranormal Horror, and Agency in The Cabin in the Woods". In Caterine, Darryl; Morehead, John W. (eds.). The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315184661ISBN 9781315184661S2CID 213527076.
  20. ^ James, David; Seshagiri, Urmila (2014). "Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution". PMLA129: 87–100. doi:10.1632/pmla.2014.129.1.87S2CID 162269414.
  21. ^ Knudsen, S. (March 2013). "Beyond Postmodernism. Putting a Face on Metamodernism Without the Easy Clichés". ArtPulse. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  22. ^ van den Akker, Robin; Gibbons, Alison; Vermeulen, Timotheus (2017). Metamodernism: History, Affect and Depth After Postmodernism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1783489619.
  23. ^ Vittorini, Fabio (2017). Raccontare oggi. Metamodernismo tra narratologia, ermeneutica e intermedialità. Bologna: Pàtron. p. 155. ISBN 9788855533911.
  24. ^ Clasquin-Johnson, Michel (2017-02-08). "Towards a metamodern academic study of religion and a more religiously informed metamodernism"HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies73 (3). doi:10.4102/hts.v73i3.4491ISSN 2072-8050.
  25. ^ AHRC Metamodernism Research Network (Retrieved January 2021)
  26. ^ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-226-78679-7OCLC 1249473210.
  27. ^ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-226-78679-7OCLC 1249473210.
  28. ^ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-226-78679-7OCLC 1249473210.
  29. ^ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-226-78679-7OCLC 1249473210.
  30. ^ Howard, Jeffrey (March 30, 2023). "Does Metamodernism Actually Move Us Past Postmodernism? w/ Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm (podcast)"Damn the Absolute!. Retrieved April 20, 2023.
  31. ^ Turner, L. (January 10, 2015). "Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction". Berfrois. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  32. ^ Needham, A. (December 10, 2015). "Shia LaBeouf: 'Why do I do performance art? Why does a goat jump?'"The Guardian. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  33. ^ Turner, L (2011). "The Metamodernist Manifesto"metamodernism.org. Retrieved 11 June 2017.
  34. ^ Mushava, S. (August 28, 2017). "Ain't nobody praying for Nietzsche"The Herald. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  35. ^ Cliff, A. (8 August 2014). "Popping Off: How Weird Al, Drake, PC Music and You Are All Caught up in the Same Feedback Loop"The Fader. Retrieved 25 August 2014.
  36. ^ De Wachter, Ellen Mara (2017). Co-Art: Artists on Creative CollaborationPhaidon Press. p. 216. ISBN 9780714872889.
  37. ^ Dalton, D. (July 11, 2016). "There Needs To Be More Emojis In Art Criticism"BuzzFeed. Retrieved November 22, 2017.
  38. ^ Campbell, T. (March 17, 2015). "Shia LaBeouf's heartbeat is now available for livestreaming"Metro. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  39. ^ "Sydney Opera House launches BINGEFEST 2016". CultureMad. October 7, 2016. Retrieved January 5, 2017.
  40. ^ 'No More Modern: Notes on Metamodernism' Museum of Arts and Design, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  41. ^ 'The Metamodern Mindset' Berlin Art Journal, Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  42. ^ 'Discussing Metamodernism with Tanja Wagner and Timotheus Vermeulen' Archived 2014-06-19 at archive.today Blouin ARTINFO, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  43. ^ 'Discussing Metamodernism' Archived 2013-03-28 at the Wayback Machine Galerie Tanja Wagner, Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  44. ^ Collection, Zabludowicz. "Andy Holden: Maximum Irony, Maximum Sincerity 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS - Exhibitions"Zabludowicz Collection. Retrieved 2020-08-22.
  45. ^ The Legal Studies Forum, Volume XXXVIII, No. 2, West Virginia University (2014).
  46. Jump up to:a b Deusner, Stephen M (May 16, 2014). "Sturgill Simpson Puts a Metamodern Spin on Country Music"Country Music Television. Archived from the original on 2014-12-05.
  47. ^ Pritchard, Daniel (July 24, 2013). "Weekly Poetry Links"Boston Review. Retrieved 2019-10-20.
  48. ^ Welsch, J.T. John Beer's The Waste Land and the Possibility of Metamodernism. British Association for Modernist Studies (June 26, 2014). Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  49. ^ Pappis, Konstantinos. "Back to Sincerity, Hope, and Love: Metamodernism in Sci-Fi"Our Culture. Retrieved 27 January 2021.
  50. ^ Ng, Josh Denzel (2022-05-12). "A Tedious Oscillation Between Heartfelt Knowledge and Tears: A Metamodern Essay on Bo Burnham's Work"DLSU Senior High School Research Congress.
  51. ^ Robert, M. "Virtual realities: Social media and coming of age in 'Eighth Grade'". Screen Education96: 24–31.
  52. ^ Gessen, Masha. "The Invention of a New Kind of Political Party in Sweden"The New Yorker. The New Yorker Magazine. Retrieved 20 January 2019.
  53. ^ "What Is Metamodernism? | Psychology Today"www.psychologytoday.com. Retrieved 2021-09-02.
  54. ^ Freinacht, Hanzi (2017). The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Metamoderna ApS. pp. 171, 305–310.
  55. ^ Görtz, D (September 5, 2018). Metamodern Values Explained: TEDxTUBerlinTED: Ideas Worth Spreading.
  56. ^ "Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity - [ Perspectiva ]"- [ Perspectiva ]. Retrieved 2021-09-02.
  57. ^ "Some notes on Metamodernism, with Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van der Akker and Alison Gibbons"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  58. ^ "Daniel Görtz: 12 much better rules for life / Parallax Interview with Tom Amarque"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  59. ^ "The Parallax View #53: Metamodernism is undead"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  60. ^ "The Parallax View #53: Metamodernism is undead"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  61. ^ "The Parallax View #53: Metamodernism is undead"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.
  62. ^ "The Parallax View #53: Metamodernism is undead"Parallax. Retrieved 2023-01-22.

External links


Moving from Postmodernism to Metamodernism, Part 1 - Disruption, Construction, Integration



Disruption, Construction, Integration

Metamodernism Series






* * * * * *


Image: This is America (still), Childish Gambino, 2018

Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction

January 12, 2015


Metamodernism is a term that has gained traction in recent years as a means of articulating developments in contemporary culture, which, it is argued (and our generation appears to intuitively recognise) has seen a move beyond the postmodern mode of the late 20th century. In the wake of the myriad crises of the past two decades—of climate change, financial meltdown, and the escalation of global conflicts—we have witnessed the emergence of a palpable collective desire for change, for something beyond the prematurely proclaimed “End of History.”

Ours is a generation raised in the ‘80s and ‘90s, on a diet of The Simpsons and South Park, for whom postmodern irony and cynicism is a default setting, something ingrained in us. However, despite, or rather because of this, a yearning for meaning—for sincere and constructive progression and expression—has come to shape today’s dominant cultural mode.

Whereas postmodernism was characterised by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism.

Thus, rather than simply signalling a return to naïve modernist ideological positions, metamodernism considers that our era is characterised by an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. We see this manifest as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.

The use of the prefix meta- here derives from Plato’s metaxis, describing an oscillation and simultaneity between and beyond diametrically opposed poles. This usage was first proposed by Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in their 2010 essay, Notes on Metamodernism, spawning a research project and website of the same name, as well as numerous symposia and exhibitions, to which a diverse array of academics, writers and artists from across the globe have since added their voices.

As Vermeulen and van den Akker put it, metamodernism’s oscillation should not be thought of as a balance; “rather, it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings toward fanaticism, gravity pulls it back toward irony; the moment its irony sways toward apathy, gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.”

This metamodern sensibility can be discerned in, for example, the films of Spike Jonze, Miranda July, Wes Anderson, Leos Carax, and Alejandro González Iñárritu; in the music of Donald Glover, Bill Callahan, Janelle Monáe, and Future Islands; in TV shows such as Parks and Recreation, Breaking Bad, BoJack Horseman, and Last Week Tonight; in the novels of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Roberto Bolaño; the poetry of Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Sophie Collins, and Melissa Broder’s quasi-mystical multimedia NewHive offerings. In the visual arts, we have seen a shift away from the insubstantial conceptual one-liners of the YBAs, or Jeff Koons’s vacuously overinflated ironic baubles, towards a reengagement with materiality, affect and the sublime, found in the work of artists like Olafur Eliasson, Morehshin Allahyari, and Guido van der Werve, movements such as Cybertwee and Afrofuturism, as well as my own ongoing practice with LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner.

Ours is also an age in which increasingly speculative modes of thought are thriving, with philosophies such as Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, as well as movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of extremist political factions (for better or worse, as in the case of the so-called ‘alt-Right’), empowered by network culture. However, metamodernism itself is not intended as a philosophy or an art movement, since it does not define or delineate a closed system of thought, or dictate any particular set of aesthetic values or methodologies. It is not a manifesto—although, as an artist myself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to imagine it as if it were, with my 2011 Metamodernist Manifesto an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit; at once coherent and preposterous, earnest and somewhat self-defeating, yet ultimately hopeful and optimistic.

Metamodernism does not, then, propose any kind of utopian vision, although it does describe the climate in which a yearning for utopias, despite their futile nature, has come to the fore. The metamodernism discourse is thus descriptive rather than prescriptive; an inclusive means of articulating the ongoing developments associated with a structure of feeling for which the vocabulary of postmodern critique is no longer sufficient, but whose future paths have yet to be constructed.

-----

This article was first published on Queen Mob’s Teahouse / Berfrois in January 2015, having been adapted from a talk presented at the Royal College of Art in November 2014. Image/examples updated 2018.


Friday, May 19, 2023

Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality: God and the World


To explain by what I mean by "value" or "beauty" or "generative creation" from my past article, I here use Matthew Segall's explanation of Whitehead's meaning of processual "value". And to help make Matthew's article a bit more readable I have overlaid an outline upon it in hopes of making Whiteheadian thought a bit more digestible.
One final thought. Rather than taking Whitehead's process philosophy and giving to it theological words from the bible and from a loving God, I would prefer to let the reader hear in Whitehead's words the parallel words which Process Theology will conjoin, favor, and elucidate within the greater context of a Christian Process Theology.
R.E. Slater, May 19, 2023


A Short Process Series on the God of Generative Value & Love

 


Whitehead’s Final Interpretation of Reality:
God and the World

by Matthew David Segall
April 26, 2019

Ia.

Whitehead tells us at the start of the final part of Process & Reality (“Final Interpretation”) that the chief danger in philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence. For many modern, scientifically inclined philosophers, this narrowness has taken the form of an all too easy rejection of the world’s religious traditions and the religious experience which gave rise to, and continues to, inform them. Intellectual chauvinism has led many modern scientific materialists to claim that, given the available scientific evidence, atheism is the only rational position.

From Whitehead’s point of view, the history of religious experience is part of the data that any adequate cosmological scheme must incorporate. There is something of great philosophical significance in the religious and spiritual intuitions of human beings, even if these intuitions represent “exceptional elements in our conscious experience,” as Whitehead admits (PR 343).

Ib.

He also reminds us that “the present level of average waking human experience was at one time exceptional” among our ancestors (AoI 294). It is the job of philosophy to elucidate the significance of these rare mystical experiences, to find a systematic place for them in the wider scheme such that the average level of our species’ waking consciousness may continue to deepen.

1.  Philosophy has tended to collapse reality into one or the other of the “ideal opposites” explicated by Whitehead: Permanence and Flux. Plato, for example, over-emphasized the “eminent reality” of permanence by raising his Eternal Forms above the physical world of ever-shifting sensory experience. The world of Ideas was considered ultimate, while the world of physical sensations was demoted to “mere appearance,” or worse, “illusion.”

2. On the other end of the philosophical spectrum, David Hume completely disregarded what Whitehead refers to as “the everlasting elements in the passage of fact” (PR 338). For Hume, only sensory impressions are real, while ideas are merely agglomerations of impressions. All is flux; permanence is an illusion.

II.

Whitehead’s more integral goal is to find a way to think these ideal opposites in a complementary way, such that each is understood to require the other for its meaning. For Whitehead, “perfect realization” is not a timeless perfection (as it was for Plato); rather, perfection “implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing” (PR 338). This is another way of expressing the meaning of the ingression of eternal objects into actual occasions.

Think of a sunset: its beauty is haunted by eternal values even as the sun continues to sink below the horizon into darkness. Its passing, its perpetual perishing, somehow enhances its eternal beauty, rather than subtracting from it. There is perhaps something tragic in this interplay between eternal value and temporal activity, but from Whitehead’s point of view, tragedy may indeed be the highest form of beauty that our universe is capable of realizing.

III.

Whitehead defines the “religious problem” (i.e., the general existential issue that all religions attempt to address each in their own way) as follows: “whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities, bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss” (PR 340). One of the profound dilemmas of human experience is that, while we crave novelty, we are also haunted by the loss of the past.

In Whitehead’s process theology, one source of evil arises from the fact that the past fades, that time has the nature of “perpetual perishing.” Thus, one of God’s functions in the world is to preserve the past (this is God’s consequent nature). God is not an “unmoved mover” or an “imperial ruler,” but a “fellow-sufferer who understands” (PR 351).

Whitehead says that God does not create the world, he saves it: God’s infinite patience allows for the preservation of all our sufferings, sorrows, failures, and triumphs. Nothing that occurs in the universe is lost; all is taken up into God’s experience to become unified with his consequent nature.
This grants all actual occasions a kind of immortality, though it is not the personal sort promised us by traditional interpretations of Christian heaven. Each actual occasion of experience, though it may be trivial in the value it achieves in itself (if it is a puff of smoke in far off empty space, for example), in perishing becomes an immortal contribution to the greater end realized in God’s ever-enriched, ever-deepening consequent nature.
God prehends each finite actual occasion not only for what it is (thus, God shares in each occasion’s world view), but for what it can be within God’s perfected nature. The only immortality we enjoy comes from the sense of transcendent value we experience as we perish beyond ourselves and pass into the eternal life of God.
IV.

God’s other function in the world (God’s primordial nature) is to provide the “initial Eros” or “eternal urge of desire” that lures each finite actual occasion toward the most beautiful possibilities available to it given its local circumstances.

God’s primordial nature conditions the otherwise unlimited potentialities of Creativity, ordering the realm of eternal objects so as to make this otherwise infinite sphere of potential relevant to each actual occasion’s needs. Actual occasions are NOT determined by the initial aim provided by God: they still have creative independence from God (God, too, is a creature of Creativity). But God assists finite occasions in their decision as to how to concresce by preventing them from being overwhelmed by the entire infinite array of possibilities all at once.

The “initial aim” provided by God grades these possibilities so those that are not immediately relevant are largely negatively prehended by the occasion in question. All particular occasions of experience presuppose the conceptual order provided by God’s primordial evaluation of the realm of eternal objects. God presupposes only the general metaphysical character of the creative advance. [sic, God gives to creation generative value. - re slater]

In the final chapters of Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead articulates the same ultimate interpretation, but now in terms like Beauty, Adventure, and Peace instead of using theological language.

  • He tells us that the purpose of the universe is the production of beauty.
  • He tells us that beauty is more fundamental than truth, and that truth’s importance arises because of its beauty.
  • This is not to say that truth (or the conformation of appearance with reality) is unimportant; it is rather that truth without beauty is, in a general metaphysical sense, boring. That is, it lacks importance; [that] it fails to increase the intensity of value realized in the universe, and instead just reiterates the obvious.
  • Similarly, beauty without truth is shallow, since it fails to penetrate to the deeper feelings inherent in the cosmic process: “The truth of supreme beauty lies beyond the dictionary meaning of words” (AoI 267). Beauty without truth is merely pleasing appearance. True beauty is what occurs when appearance elucidates and amplifies the finer textures of reality for experience.

V.

Whitehead defines art as the “purposeful adaptation of appearance to reality” (AoI 267). Consciousness, which results from a heightened contrast between actuality and ideality in an occasion of experience, is that factor in the universe that renders art possible. In some sense, consciousness itself is an evolutionary expression of nature’s artistry. In other words, it is via artistic expression that nature has educated itself by growing more conscious.

Said otherwise, art is the appropriation by consciousness of the infinite fecundity of nature. Art, Whitehead tells us, is a little oblivious as to morals. It focuses, instead, on adventure [sic, "creativity, novelty, originality" - re slater].

From the perspective of artistic creation, the Day of Judgment is always with us: art is in the business of “[rendering] the Day of Judgment a success, now” (AoI 269).


VI.

Whitehead defines Peace as a trust in the efficacy of beauty. We achieve consciousness of Peace when we rest in that “deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such triumph as is possible for it” (AoI 286).

Peace requires of us that we find some balance between our stoic acceptance of the impersonal order of the cosmos and our devotion to loving relationships of a more personal sort.


The Relentless Process Of A Processually Loving Cosmology



The Relentless Process of
A Processually Loving Cosmology

by R.E. Slater


I often use sources outside of Whiteheadian sources to provide perspective to a new or unfamiliar complex of ideas. Below is such a source. As I, myself, prefer reading Whitehead's process mindset across a range of topics - from theology to science, human industry to human cultures, etc - I was glad to see Bob Mesle's name come up but generally when listening to Arthur Holmes I felt his Westernized Christian background got in the way of hearing Whitehead's metaphysical cosmology as I might now hear it. Further, the commentor posting this article was circumspect in providing as honest an oversight as could be done... to which I thought it may be help then to post as an introduction amongst the many, many introductions I have posted over the years on Whitehead.

One last, Whitehead's process and reality speculation occurred a hundred+ years ago. Since then much has happened in human history. Over those years Whiteheadian theologians, philosophers, and scientists have "updated" and "integrated" process thought in an ever wider spectra of observation, testing, and correlation between the academic disciplines of all types. I say this to note the what Bob Mesle would differ from shows a growth in the overall subject of processual metaphysics and ontology. I am doing the same in my own way. A good view of the world is one which can absorb, morph and grow constructively over time and experience. I find Whitehead's cosmology of the world and universe, life and death, of extreme help in sorting through all the particulars arising in our contemporary times.

Thus my mission to bring to Christian and Non-Christian readership a valuable help in producing generative ethics and value into the many world of human pursuit. I might call this seeing God's love spread across, and embedded within, all things operating in a relational soup of experience and interaction with one another including that of the inanimate and immaterial. But as a Christian confronted with Christianity's pros and cons to the world I especially desire to recenter not only my own faith, but that of all faiths and religions, outlooks and socio-political economies back towards the center of Love.

Whiteheadian thought carries this value within it to which I, as a Christian may say, that God is Love and shared this Love with us by acts of continuing creation and by-and-through himself in the person and work of Jesus. Other religions can do the same via their origins when having been confronted by evil. As can non-religious civil outcries for liberties and justice. It is here where a value-based, generative system such as Process thought may provide a common ground of solidarity between disparate entities in regenerating our many social organs forward in the loving qualities of goodwill, truth (as we know it), peace, mercy, and forgiveness. Which is Process Theology has arisen in response to Whitehead's evolving insights to help reposition a God or religion back to it's origins... that of Love.

Imagine what a loving religion, a loving Christianity, a loving world, might accomplish with itself if it syncs up with the observed processes found throughout a universe leaning into the formation of valuative generations from every prehended event across all succeeding concrescing events? The possibility for the enrichment of life would be astounding. A Process theologian would then demand a pan-en-theistic cosmology as versus the church's mere "theistic" cosmology. One which integrates God's Imago Dei thoroughly into the metaphysics of life while maintaining the Otherness of God's own ontological being. It would more simulate birthing than adoption of God's Self into the There that was there down to its lowest DNA level.

It is also why Process theologians will contend for love in all things, all activities, all views of the world as against the "survival of the fittest" which the Church has claimed to be non-generative, non-loving, and non-God in act. The Church had gotten part of it right and most of it wrong. It's theistic cosmology did not allow it's God to extend to the lowest reaches of the earth, in a manner of speaking. As God is himself a God of process, so too is creation processual. We see this in the processual evolution of the spacetime, quantum particles, the universe itself, and planetary development urging towards "life" in its broadest meanings and senses. And within all these processes is rebirthed again and again a processual longing for more value, more structural interaction between the parts with the whole, a deep psychic push forwards towards greater and greater response against the necessary entrophy filling cosmology (see my previous post with ChatGPT on this topic).


Traditional theistic theologians may dislike Process theology's God and cosmology but when adopted in replacement to traditional Christianity's structural creeds and dogmas will immediately see the value of Love - of a loving God - insisting on reworking their thoughts of God as a God of Holiness and Penal Justice first in favor of a God who is first-and-foremost-and-at-all-times Loving through, and through, and through. And when done, God's presumed Holiness and Penal Justice must now fall inline to God's Love. A Love where a real divine holiness and divine judgment falls first upon the God of Creation (we know as Jesus) as it ever had done even in God's earliest lessons to Abram when passing God's Self through the slaughtered covenanted sacrificial carcasses.

God has ever-and-always led by Love. His holiness is ever mitigated by Love. His judgment, by Love. So that holiness is now found in presence and judgment in the indwelling Spirit of God upon the hearts of creation. As the universe is ever driven by entropy and negentrophy it's negator, so too creation's freedom to love or not love is ever driven by desire to distance, isolate, and remove the binding forces of loving fellowship between all things. Process theology leans the way of fellowship against the Church's earlier speculations of God's more austere presence. No less helped by a collection of religious narratives it inherited by Israel's confused understanding of God's Love in it's own narratives and national life.

And though Jesus and the disciples came to the Jewish priests and rabbis to correct such unloving narratives of God still they persist today in the Church's literal readings of the bible without seeing how the vary nature of the evolution of God in religion was percolating towards love. A process theologian then will read the bible processually as informing themselves that the person and work of a loving God is not immediately understood or grasped from his first followers but as the story of God and God's atoning, redeeming values of love are presently present and enlarging where it can - even in the more unloving, legalizing portions of the Church - then fellowship of all things to all things wins when Love wins across all the boundary lands of faith, organization, mechanism, and binary concept of a valuative panentheistic creation bounded and positioned, poised and oriented towards, a relentless, undying ethic of generative value against an entropy of isolation, breakage, harm, and evil.

Peace,

R.E. Slater
May 19, 2023


A synopsis of process philosophy

A great lecture by Arthur F. Holmes

At the end of my last post (no, not that last post!) I admitted to my predilection for Whitehead, the father of process philosophy and theology. Unfortunately, his magnus opus, Process and reality, is notoriously difficult. Accidentally, I came across a playlist with a lecture series on the history of philosophy by Arthur F. Holmes (The playlist also includes lectures on Leibniz, Locke, Kant, Hegel and American pragmatism, which I will probably use as a background when I will deal with Churchman’s “The design of inquiring systems”). I found the first lecture on Whitehead (there are three in total) greatly elucidating, especially after I made a concept map (see below) of the lecture. I also made a transcription of the lecture, which you can download here. What follows in this post is a short description of the concept map, so a very, very brief introduction to Whitehead’s process philosophy. Best listen to the lecture, while keeping the concept map, the transcription, and possibly this post handy. You may learn something in a jiffy that others (really, really clever guys and gals) have taken months to master.

whiteheads-process-philosophy
click to enlarge here

Process philosophy     … is nothing new. Process notions can be found in many traditions, including Buddhism (India), and Taoism (China), but also in the ideas of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (Greece, 535-475 BC). Process philosophy in its modern guise was formally launched in 1929 when Whitehead (1861-1947) published his Process and reality.

Alfred North Whitehead    … was a ground-breaking philosopher (of science), physicist and mathematician from Thanet in Kent, UK. His main influences as a philosopher were modern science, Hegel, 19th century Romanticism and the Alexandrian fathers. His prime concern is the distinction between science and ethics, the separation of value and fact, a problem that also troubled Churchman (hence perhaps my liking of the two).

Mathematician and physicist   While in Cambridge he wrote Principia mathematica with Bertrand Russell. While teaching at London University he wrote about quantum physics and relativity theory. He reformulated the relational implications of both in a number of fallacies of science, including the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (esp. in relation to mechanistic abstractions) and the fallacy of simple location (which is based on non-relational ideas).

Hegel’s influence     … came to Whitehead mostly through the work of F.H. Bradley, a British idealist philosopher, who rejected empiricism – as did Whitehead. Hegel´s philosophy is best characterized as evolutionary idealism, in which the ‘free, creative spirit’ unfolds into self-consciousness using the well-known triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. This spirit is not a substance or thing, but a process, which Hegel studies by means of a phenomenology of human existence and history. Whitehead borrows most of these ideas from Hegel, with the exception of the ‘spirit’ idea (idealism). He is staunchly monistic (as am I) and prefers his evolutionary process to be naturalistic.

The evolutionary naturalism     … of Whitehead emphasizes process (instead of substance), relations (instead of non-relational, atomistic things), and an organic world view (instead of a mechanistic universe). Whitehead also adopts a phenomenological approach to the study of process as the basic notion of reality. His main subject of phenomenological study is human consciousness, as it is most directly accessible to us.

Sense perception      Of all the processes that make up human consciousness, Whitehead uses sense perception as the paradigm event to exemplify all the processes that constitute the universe. Whitehead’s theory of where our ideas come from differs from that of many of his predecessors. Sense perception follows from the intrusion of real, objective 
paradigm-event
data (first step), which prompt us to consider a range of possibilities (second step) as to what this intrusion amounts to. In a third step, we select one of these possibilities or ideas as our ‘working hypothesis’. This hypothetical idea symbolically refers to the objective data that intruded upon our consciousness in the first place, be it by way of sound, touch, vision or otherwise. Whitehead is without doubt a realist (or naturalist) and not an idealist.

Eternal possibilities    The question now is as to where the possibilities of the second step come from? One could say it comes from our “stock of experiences”, as Dewey suggests. Whitehead prefers them to come from the so-called “logos structure” of God as developed by the Alexandrian church fathers such as Clemens and Origenes in the 2nd and 3rd century CE. These possibilities are possibilities of novelty that must have been created in some way. Without novelty no creative process is possible. To Whitehead God is the highest manifestation of creativity, whose stock of possibilities drives the cosmic process of creation. Whitehead does not claim any knowledge of the starting or end point of creation. On the basis of the evidence available to us there is only on-going creation.

Value     … can be observed at two points. In the first place in the range of possibilities, each of them being value-laden, whether it is for good or for bad. The second point is where we opt (or decide) for one possibility or the other. Whitehead wanted a cosmology that has a place for value. Modern science claims itself to be value-free by restricting itself to the facts and nothing but the facts, whereas Whitehead experiences aesthetic and moral value in the world and in nature. This experience of value is also expressed in Romanticism as exemplified by e.g. Wordsworth, whose poetry was a source of inspiration for Whitehead.

Process theology       Whitehead’s metaphysics has greatly inspired Christian theology and perhaps the theologies of other faiths. Important process theologians include Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and John B. Cobb (1925), who co-founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin (1939) in 1973. Dr. Cobb maintains a blog, answering questions regarding process thought and faith. A very pleasant introduction to process theology is the one by C. Robert Mesle. The Divinity School of the University of Chicago was the place where process theology developed for at least 60 years.

Criticism    … of Whitehead and process philosophy comes from a variety of sources. Whitehead’s early friend and collaborator, Bertrand Russell, obviously criticized the theological aspects of process philosophy, since he believed religion to be little more than often harmful superstition. Arthur Holmes (who delivered the Youtube lecture on which most of the concept map of this post based) thinks Whitehead may have stretched his event-based monism too far by applying it to persons.

God     Whitehead leaves many questions on the nature of God unanswered. Perhaps he did so on purpose, to leave open the possibility of process naturalism as suggested by Mesle, who holds that “the world of finite, natural creatures is unified”, but not “in such a way as to give rise to a single divine Subject,” even of a non-supernatural kind as in process theism. A naturalistic God then may be conceived as the subjective projection of a unified world of finite, natural creatures, i.e. an ideal without the unified existence ascribed to it by theists, but well worth approximating as a conception in one way or another. Such a conception leaves ample room to position oneself as an atheist, agnostic or theist, all the while producing a lot of common ground between the three.

Appreciation     There can be no doubt that Whitehead’s philosophy is a valiant effort to bring value or the human quest for meaning and fact or the scientific quest for truth together in a single scheme. The scheme as a whole cannot be understood and appreciated by looking at it from a single angle. Taking human consciousness as a starting point for obtaining a phenomenological description of a paradigm event of cosmic process, both at macro-scale and micro-scale, as well of human as of divine reality,  was brilliant. Once theism is accepted, then the logos structure gives it a new twist (panentheism) that inspired many theologians, including Wieman and untold (not just Unitarian) others. There is also the romantic view of aesthetic and moral value in nature, which aligns well with this type of panentheism. Bertrand Russell, despite his criticism, could not possibly disprove of that.

Systems approach      What I like about the phenomenological description of the “paradigm event” of process is the way it fits with the systems approach. It is important to note that an event can be anything, from somebody’s biography (or life) to the history of the universe. A systems version of Holmes´ account of an event could be: a process (or project or policy) that experiences an intrusion of sorts (a “wicked problem”), which then may become the subject of an inquiry in a systemic way to suggest an infinite range of possibilities, which enables a decision in favour of one option or another. Another aspect of process philosophy is its process-relational vision, its view that reality is relational, through and through. Reality as a social process. Freedom is inherent in the world. To be an individual is to be self-creative, i.e. to take decision after decision. Furthermore, in Mesle’s words, “Experience is rich and complex. The clarity of sense experience is grounded in deeper but vaguer experiences of our relatedness to the world process. Adequacy to this wealth of experience [SH: which can be tapped by taking into account the perspectives of others] is the ultimate test of our ideas.” The value of the systems approach lies in its potential for finding better approximations to such adequacy.