Lures for Feeling
Reading Whitehead in
the Spirit of Chinese Script
I want to encourage us to read Process and Reality in the spirit that we might approach a classical Chinese text—even if we don’t know Chinese. That is, to read it not merely as a sequence of logical propositions arranged alphabetically, but as a constellation of visual meanings, analogous to Chinese characters. To read it, in other words, as if it were logographic rather than phonetic.
To move toward this possibility, imagine for a moment that Process and Reality was not originally a written text but an oral event—a series of living expressions, perhaps spoken in lecture or conversation. Like a Homeric epic, an indigenous creation story, or a Socratic dialogue, it began as spoken word. Only later was it rendered into written English, a language built on discrete phonemes encoded in symbols and arranged into linear chains of meaning. The oral became textual.
Many of us take the written English version as definitive. Yet we might wonder whether alphabetical language, with its linear, analytic structure, fully captures the dynamic, fluid character of Whitehead’s thought.
Alphabetical writing tends to dissect and define. It unfolds like a syllogism, step by step, inviting argument and resolution. But Process and Reality is not simply a work of logic. It is a meditation on the becoming of the world, on the rhythm of experience, on the aesthetic unfolding of life.
What if Whitehead’s cosmology had been composed in a logographic script—like Chinese, Sumerian cuneiform, or Egyptian hieroglyphs—where symbols signify not sounds, but meanings? Where each mark crystallizes a concept, a vision, a world in miniature?
In such a system, terms like “actual occasion,” “eternal object,” or “prehension” would not appear as units in a sentence to be decoded. They would be ideograms—visual propositions, lures for feeling, invitations to intuition. Each would offer itself less as a definition and more as a symbol to be dwelled within, meditated upon, slowly prehended.
A logographic Process and Reality might resemble a landscape more than a book—constellations of concepts arranged for wandering rather than linear traversal. Not a straight line but a field. Not a chain of reasoning, but a pattern of resonances. Perhaps, in this form, the structure of the text would more closely mirror its metaphysical content: a world not of inert substances and fixed categories, but of evolving relations, intensities, and aesthetic contrasts.
Can English-speaking readers, even those unfamiliar with Chinese, still read Process and Reality in this spirit? Can we read it logographically?
Some would say we must—if we hope to truly enter into its depths. Though written in a linear, alphabetic language, the text continually gestures beyond that linearity. It invites us not just to decode propositions but to enter into conceptual fields—to feel their texture, their rhythm, their aesthetic and emotional force.
To read Process and Reality this way is to slow down. To treat each key term not merely as a tool in an argument, but as a symbolic node in a vast metaphysical web. “Actual occasion,” “eternal object,” “prehension,” “concrescence”—these are not just terms to be memorized. They are ideogrammatic concepts, compressed worlds of meaning, shimmering with ambiguity and insight. Like Chinese characters, they condense experience into suggestive form. They are, in Whitehead’s own language, lures—not conclusions, but openings into new ways of thinking and feeling.
Read this way, Process and Reality becomes something more than a philosophical treatise. It becomes a kind of cosmic calligraphy—written in English, but calling forth a mode of reading that is nonlinear, intuitive, imagistic. To read it logographically is to approach it as one might a painting or a classical Chinese poem—not to extract a conclusion, but to undergo a transformation.
It is to see Whitehead’s thought not as a static system but as an unfolding field of vision—an aesthetic experience, a journey into the texture of becoming. It is to recognize that his concepts are not merely tools for analysis, but invitations to dance with the world.
To move toward this possibility, imagine for a moment that Process and Reality was not originally a written text but an oral event—a series of living expressions, perhaps spoken in lecture or conversation. Like a Homeric epic, an indigenous creation story, or a Socratic dialogue, it began as spoken word. Only later was it rendered into written English, a language built on discrete phonemes encoded in symbols and arranged into linear chains of meaning. The oral became textual.
Many of us take the written English version as definitive. Yet we might wonder whether alphabetical language, with its linear, analytic structure, fully captures the dynamic, fluid character of Whitehead’s thought.
Alphabetical writing tends to dissect and define. It unfolds like a syllogism, step by step, inviting argument and resolution. But Process and Reality is not simply a work of logic. It is a meditation on the becoming of the world, on the rhythm of experience, on the aesthetic unfolding of life.
What if Whitehead’s cosmology had been composed in a logographic script—like Chinese, Sumerian cuneiform, or Egyptian hieroglyphs—where symbols signify not sounds, but meanings? Where each mark crystallizes a concept, a vision, a world in miniature?
In such a system, terms like “actual occasion,” “eternal object,” or “prehension” would not appear as units in a sentence to be decoded. They would be ideograms—visual propositions, lures for feeling, invitations to intuition. Each would offer itself less as a definition and more as a symbol to be dwelled within, meditated upon, slowly prehended.
A logographic Process and Reality might resemble a landscape more than a book—constellations of concepts arranged for wandering rather than linear traversal. Not a straight line but a field. Not a chain of reasoning, but a pattern of resonances. Perhaps, in this form, the structure of the text would more closely mirror its metaphysical content: a world not of inert substances and fixed categories, but of evolving relations, intensities, and aesthetic contrasts.
Can English-speaking readers, even those unfamiliar with Chinese, still read Process and Reality in this spirit? Can we read it logographically?
Some would say we must—if we hope to truly enter into its depths. Though written in a linear, alphabetic language, the text continually gestures beyond that linearity. It invites us not just to decode propositions but to enter into conceptual fields—to feel their texture, their rhythm, their aesthetic and emotional force.
To read Process and Reality this way is to slow down. To treat each key term not merely as a tool in an argument, but as a symbolic node in a vast metaphysical web. “Actual occasion,” “eternal object,” “prehension,” “concrescence”—these are not just terms to be memorized. They are ideogrammatic concepts, compressed worlds of meaning, shimmering with ambiguity and insight. Like Chinese characters, they condense experience into suggestive form. They are, in Whitehead’s own language, lures—not conclusions, but openings into new ways of thinking and feeling.
Read this way, Process and Reality becomes something more than a philosophical treatise. It becomes a kind of cosmic calligraphy—written in English, but calling forth a mode of reading that is nonlinear, intuitive, imagistic. To read it logographically is to approach it as one might a painting or a classical Chinese poem—not to extract a conclusion, but to undergo a transformation.
It is to see Whitehead’s thought not as a static system but as an unfolding field of vision—an aesthetic experience, a journey into the texture of becoming. It is to recognize that his concepts are not merely tools for analysis, but invitations to dance with the world.
Beyond the Alphabet
As you read this sentence, you are using and interpreting an alphabetic script. If you are like me, you take this for granted, rarely pausing to consider how deeply this writing system shapes your habits of thought. Moreover, you may unconsciously believe that the ideas I am trying to communicate are themselves necessarily linked with the script I am using to present them.
Early in Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead invites his readers to disabuse themselves of the idea that "language" is an adequate expression of what he calls "propositions." Of course, he is using language to make the point, but he also tells his readers that, on many of the most important points he is making, "the sole appeal is to intuition."
Indeed, Whitehead himself found a need to invent new words in English to make his points—"superject," for example. And his own mode of presentation does not proceed in a strictly linear form. If, as some propose, alphabetical languages are overly linear, then perhaps non-alphabetical languages might be better suited to expressing his ideas. It is worth considering whether a language more attuned to relationality, ambiguity, and intuitive resonance might convey process thought with a depth that more rigidly linear scripts cannot achieve.
Alphabetic writing refers to a system of written symbols in which each symbol (or letter) typically represents a single sound or phoneme of a spoken language. Unlike logographic or syllabic systems, which may represent whole words or syllables, alphabetic scripts break language down into its smallest spoken units and encode them with a limited set of recurring characters. Examples of alphabetic systems include the Greek alphabet, which played a crucial role in shaping Western philosophical discourse; the Latin alphabet, used widely in English and other European languages; and the Arabic alphabet, which supports both scriptural and scientific traditions.
These systems contrast with logographic systems like Chinese, where each character represents a word or meaningful part of a word and often carries rich visual and symbolic associations. In contrast, alphabetic writing systems use a limited set of letters, each representing an individual sound or phoneme of a spoken language. Rather than conveying meaning through symbolic or visual imagery, alphabetic scripts reduce speech to its smallest phonetic components and encode these using recurring symbols. This approach allows for wide adaptability and efficiency but may also favor more linear and analytical cognitive styles compared to the associative and multidimensional nature of logographic systems.
It is important to keep in mind that, at one point in history, alphabetical script was itself new. The invention of the alphabet, first developed by the Phoenicians around 1200 BCE, marked a significant shift in human communication. Unlike earlier writing systems such as cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics, which used hundreds of symbols representing words, ideas, or syllables, the alphabet reduced language to a small set of symbols—typically 20 to 30—that correspond to individual sounds (phonemes). This innovation made writing far more accessible and adaptable, encouraging wider literacy and enabling the spread of ideas across time and space with greater ease.
And yet, it is possible that alphabetic writing, while opening certain doors, also closed others. By favoring sequential, rational, and reductionist modes of expression, it may have restricted imagination, thought, and reflection to certain habitual patterns, potentially limiting more intuitive, holistic, or nonlinear ways of knowing. In this light, oral speech—independent of writing—had its own distinct advantages. It fostered memory, performative expression, communal participation, and a kind of fluid adaptability that written language often lacks. Likewise, other forms of written language—such as logographic or pictographic systems—offered alternative ways of shaping and transmitting meaning, often emphasizing the visual, symbolic, or associative aspects of thought. Each form of expression brings forth different aspects of the human mind.
In any case, one thing is clear: the capacity for literary imagination, symbolic thought, and deep reflection does not depend on alphabetic writing. Long before the development of the alphabet, ancient civilizations composed works of great depth and beauty using non-alphabetic scripts. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the wedge-shaped cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia, explores universal themes—mortality, friendship, power, loss, and the longing for meaning. Its enduring power reveals that human beings were capable of profound storytelling and philosophical reflection even with complex and visually dense writing systems. Alphabetic language may shape certain cognitive habits, such as linearity and abstraction, but the roots of myth, poetry, and metaphysical wondering go much deeper.
This truth is further affirmed by the Chinese tradition, where a logographic script gave rise to one of the world's richest legacies of philosophy and poetry. Without an alphabet, Chinese thinkers such as Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi offered lasting insights into ethics, nature, paradox, and freedom. Chinese poets, especially during the Tang and Song dynasties, composed verses of exquisite emotional and philosophical resonance using characters that combine visual symbolism and layered meaning. These examples show that while different writing systems may encourage different styles of expression and thought, none holds a monopoly on wisdom or creativity. The richness of human insight transcends the form of the script, reminding us that our minds are shaped not only by the tools we use, but also by the depth of experience and imagination we bring to them.
Even in cultures that rely on alphabetical language, such as English-speaking contexts, we must be careful not to conflate the insights of philosophy, literature, and poetry with the alphabetic medium through which they are conveyed. Ideas are not identical with the symbols that express them. The thoughts of Plato, Shakespeare, or Emily Dickinson are carried by alphabetic signs, but their power lies beyond those signs, in the web of meanings and associations they awaken in us. To assume that such ideas are reducible to the alphabet is to mistake the vessel for the wine.
Whitehead's concept of propositions offers a metaphysical way to frame this distinction. In process philosophy, a proposition is not merely a statement about the world, but a "lure for feeling": a pattern of potentiality that invites an emotional and conceptual response. It involves a relation between what might be (eternal objects) and what is (actual entities), held together in a prehension—a felt, unified act of experience. From this perspective, the language of a proposition—whether alphabetic or otherwise—is but one mode through which deeper patterns of possibility are disclosed and felt.
What matters, then, is not merely the writing system we use, but the way it lures us into meaning. The alphabet may be a powerful tool for communication, but it is not the essence of thought. The truths we seek and the beauty we create reside in the lived encounter between potential and actuality, feeling and form, symbol and soul. Across scripts, across cultures, across time, this dance continues.
Three Systems of Writing
in Human History
There are three major types of writing systems in human history: alphabetical, syllabic, and logographic. Each system represents language in a different way and reflects the unique structure of the spoken languages they serve. Alphabetical systems use a relatively small set of letters, with each letter typically representing a single sound, or phoneme. This allows speakers to build words by combining letters, as seen in languages like English, Greek, and Russian. These systems are often efficient to learn and flexible in representing new words and foreign sounds.
Syllabic systems take a different approach by assigning one symbol to each syllable, rather than to individual sounds. This is especially effective for languages with relatively simple and consistent syllable structures. For instance, the Japanese language uses two syllabaries—hiragana and katakana—where each symbol corresponds to a syllable such as ka, shi, or mu. While syllabic systems require more symbols than alphabets, they can make reading and writing intuitive for certain language patterns.
Logographic systems, on the other hand, represent entire words or meaningful parts of words with single characters. The most well-known example is Chinese, where thousands of characters correspond to distinct words or concepts. Logographic writing offers the advantage of conveying meaning across dialects, even when pronunciation varies. However, it also requires extensive memorization, since fluency demands familiarity with a vast number of characters. Together, these three systems—alphabetical, syllabic, and logographic—illustrate the creative ways humans have invented to turn spoken language into written form.
Syllabic systems take a different approach by assigning one symbol to each syllable, rather than to individual sounds. This is especially effective for languages with relatively simple and consistent syllable structures. For instance, the Japanese language uses two syllabaries—hiragana and katakana—where each symbol corresponds to a syllable such as ka, shi, or mu. While syllabic systems require more symbols than alphabets, they can make reading and writing intuitive for certain language patterns.
Logographic systems, on the other hand, represent entire words or meaningful parts of words with single characters. The most well-known example is Chinese, where thousands of characters correspond to distinct words or concepts. Logographic writing offers the advantage of conveying meaning across dialects, even when pronunciation varies. However, it also requires extensive memorization, since fluency demands familiarity with a vast number of characters. Together, these three systems—alphabetical, syllabic, and logographic—illustrate the creative ways humans have invented to turn spoken language into written form.
Process Philosophy across
Linguistic Worlds
Meaning includes but transcends Language
The ideas we express are not identical with the symbols we use. Deep meanings can transcend linguistic form. A word or sentence may serve as a vessel for meaning, but the meaning itself is shaped by the context, the felt experience, and the web of associations it evokes in a listener or reader. The same idea may find richer expression—or more intuitive resonance—when conveyed in a different language or symbolic form. This is why translations, adaptations, and even gestures or images can sometimes carry meaning more effectively than the original words. Language points toward meaning, but it does not contain it entirely.
Writing Systems Shape but Do Not Define Thought
Writing systems influence the way we organize and express ideas. Alphabetic scripts encourage certain habits—like abstraction, categorization, and linear progression—but these are only one dimension of thought. Human beings are capable of metaphor, intuition, paradox, and symbol-based reasoning regardless of script. Cultures with non-alphabetic scripts, and even pre-literate oral cultures, have produced profound poetry, spiritual insight, and philosophical depth. The medium of expression shapes the message’s tone and texture, but not its ultimate imaginative range. In this sense, script is a lens, not a limit.
Alphabetic Writing emerged Historically
It’s easy to assume that alphabetic writing is the natural or superior vehicle for human thought because it dominates so much of modern life. But the alphabet was a historical invention—emerging among the Phoenicians and later adapted by Greeks, Romans, and others. Its spread owes much to economic utility and colonial power, not inherent expressive superiority. Recognizing this contingency reminds us that the alphabet’s dominance reflects a historical pathway, not a metaphysical necessity. It opens the door to appreciating the philosophical richness that can emerge from logographic, pictographic, and oral traditions, each of which reveals different facets of human consciousness.
Alphabetic Systems Encourage Linearity
Alphabetic scripts tend to promote sequential and analytical thinking because they break down language into discrete, ordered units—individual letters—arranged linearly from left to right (or right to left, depending on the language). This format reflects and reinforces a step-by-step mode of processing that mirrors the structure of formal logic, written argumentation, and procedural reasoning. As a result, it favors clarity, precision, and control, but can also marginalize non-linear, intuitive, and multidimensional ways of knowing that are more naturally expressed through imagery, metaphor, spatial arrangement, or rhythm.
Whitehead’s Thought Challenges Alphabetic Limits
Whitehead’s use of new terms and intuitive appeals shows how philosophy can exceed the limits of ordinary language. His writing in Process and Reality often resists linear exposition, circling around ideas, returning to key terms, and building meaning gradually through a kind of conceptual improvisation. This suggests that his ideas are not only difficult to convey in conventional English but may actually find fuller expression in languages or scripts more attuned to ambiguity, non-linearity, and relational thinking. A logographic language like Chinese, with its layered visual-conceptual associations, may be better equipped to evoke the dynamic, interrelated nature of process thought than an alphabetic system committed to sequential precision and abstraction.
Non-Alphabetic Traditions Offer Unique Strengths
Logographic scripts and oral cultures foster different patterns of understanding—often more associative, rhythmic, symbolic, or visual. Oral traditions, in particular, rely on memory, performance, repetition, and community participation, which can cultivate a more embodied and collective approach to knowledge. Meanwhile, logographic systems like Chinese often carry layered meanings within a single character, merging visual art with conceptual insight. These forms can capture nuance, ambiguity, and relationality in ways that escape more rigid, linear writing systems.
Whitehead’s Philosophy Can Be Expressed Mathematically
Mathematical language, like artistic expression, offers a powerful alternative to natural language. It can express relationships, structures, and transformations with unmatched precision. Whitehead himself was a mathematician before turning to philosophy, and his early work in logic and mathematics reflects a belief in the deep, often ineffable structure of reality. His process philosophy—with its emphasis on becoming, relations, and patterns—can also be explored and expressed through mathematical or symbolic models. These forms may help clarify dynamic interconnections that are difficult to articulate in everyday language. Though mathematics may lack the emotional resonance of poetry or narrative, it offers a universal medium for articulating complex, dynamic systems in a way that bypasses cultural and linguistic variability. Though mathematical notation borrows letters from alphabetic systems, its symbolic function is non-phonetic and conceptually driven, making it a distinct kind of language altogether—one more aligned with relational structure than spoken syntax.
Whitehead’s Philosophy Can Be Expressed Artistically
Whitehead’s separation of language from the deeper reality of propositions suggests that the ideas of process philosophy might be powerfully, perhaps even more effectively, communicated through non-linguistic modes. Visual art, music, dance, and embodied performance offer ways of expressing complexity, flow, contrast, and relationality that are central to process thought. These media operate through rhythm, color, gesture, and feeling—resonating with Whitehead’s emphasis on prehension, experience, and the lure of feeling. Unlike alphabetic scripts, which often prioritize linearity and verbal abstraction, non-linguistic forms can engage the whole body, awaken the senses, and invite participation. A dance performance may communicate interdependence and becoming more fully than a paragraph of prose. A piece of music may evoke tension and resolution in a manner closer to actual experience than syllogistic reasoning. Just as Whitehead sought to stretch the limits of language, these forms can bypass those limits altogether, offering direct encounters with meaning that words alone may only point toward.
The Future of Communicating Process Thought
In the future, process philosophy can be communicated through multiple script traditions—alphabetic, logographic, oral—and enriched through mathematical models and the expressive power of the arts. No single form of communication should be privileged as the definitive mode. The key lies in embracing a pluralistic approach that honors the relational and multifaceted character of process thought itself. By supplementing alphabetic language with diverse forms of expression, we allow process philosophy to evolve across cultures, media, and sensibilities, cultivating deeper resonance and accessibility in an increasingly interconnected world.
The Alphabet
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the feat of astonishing intellectual engineering which provides us with millions of words in hundreds of languages. At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world? With Eleanor Robson, historian of Ancient Iraq and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Alan Millard, Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool; Rosalind Thomas, Professor of Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Language and the Living Earth
A Whiteheadian Exploration
This essay is based on a talk given at the International Symposium on Linguistic Studies from the Perspective of Process Philosophy and the Linguistic Thought of Professor Lu Shuyuan, held on March 28, 2025.
I want to thank Professor Lu Shuyuan for his remarkable exploration of language in Transcendence in Language: A Psychological Study of Literary Language. I deeply appreciate his examination of the psychological and experiential process of living in language. At the outset of his book, he acknowledges that, among Western philosophers of language, he aligns more closely with Bergson than Saussure. His focus is on the lived experience of language rather than on discerning formal structures that language may or may not exemplify.
Whitehead, Bergson, and the Process of Becoming
In this talk, I draw upon the work of another philosopher of experience often aligned with Bergson: Alfred North Whitehead. Just as Bergson saw life as a process, so Whitehead saw life as a process of becoming, with lived experience at its core. For Whitehead, this process of becoming is both experiential and relational: every moment of experience is an act of being in relation to other sentient beings—other beings with perspectives of their own, both human and non-human. These beings are part of the living Earth, itself a part of the living universe. This essay offers an exploration of language and the living Earth, complementary to the spirit of Professor Lu’s marvelous book.
The Living Earth and Communication Beyond Words
Language begins in a world beyond words. This world beyond words is the living Earth. This living Earth is not lifeless or inert. It is filled with feeling and energy. And it is not beyond communication. Living beings—animals, plants, trees, hills, rivers—communicate with one another constantly through exchanges of energy and feeling. As part of the living Earth, human beings also communicate in wordless ways. Indeed, before infants acquire language, they communicate through touch, gaze, gesture, and sound. Words are a particular form of communication, but they emerge alongside and out of pre-verbal interchange. Even as we might communicate with others linguistically, we feel their presence pre-linguistically. Before there are sentences, before even the first spoken sounds, there is relational experience—raw, immediate, and felt.
Language as Meaning-Making and Poetic Communication
Language—whether written, spoken, sung, or signed—always occurs within the larger context of lived experience, or, in Whitehead’s terms, concrescence. It is not a detached system of symbols but an active process of meaning-making that occurs within and amidst lived experience and its preverbal dimensions. Language, too, is part of the living Earth, fostering a special kind of communication, one dimension of which, important to Professor Lu and to those of us in the Whiteheadian tradition, is poetic communication. Whitehead was especially appreciative of what Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) could communicate to us, in poetic language, about the spirituality of the Earth. He saw their language as transcending the valuable but more prosaic accounts of the scientist. His Science and the Modern World was itself an exploration, trying to show how science and poetry provide illumination into the vitality and beauty of a living Earth in a living Universe.
The Poet by the River: Language Emerging from Experience
Consider a poet sitting by a river, composing a poem about “sitting by the river.” Before a single word is written, the poet experiences the river directly—the flow of water, the rustling of leaves, the shifting light on the surface. This moment is not isolated; it carries the echoes of past encounters with rivers, past readings of poetry, and a personal history of language itself. Then, in an act of linguistic creation, the poet selects words that capture this experience, shaping it into something new. These words are not mere labels affixed to an external world but emerge from the poet’s concrescence, infused with memory, emotion, and expectation.
Subjective Forms and the Emotional Tones of Language
Yet they carry something more: the poet’s words are always clothed in subjective forms, Whitehead’s term for the emotional tones that qualify lived experience. Language is never merely a vehicle for neutral information—it is always imbued with feeling. Even in the most abstract expressions, such as mathematical equations or scientific descriptions, there is an underlying emotional charge, however subtle, shaping how meaning is felt and conveyed.
The Earth as a Living Expression
The poet’s experience is not separate from the larger life of the Earth. The river, too, has a history; it has flowed through landscapes for centuries, shaping valleys, nourishing ecosystems, and carrying the imprints of rain, rock, and life along its course. The leaves that rustle in the wind are responding to unseen atmospheric currents, themselves shaped by global patterns of heat and motion. The light that dances on the water is part of the Earth’s ongoing relationship with the sun, a cosmic rhythm that governs seasons and cycles of life. In this way, the poet is not merely observing the world but participating in its ongoing process of becoming.
Like the poet selecting words to shape an experience into a poem, the Earth, too, expresses itself. The rivers move, the wind whispers through trees, birds sing, and flowers unfold silently in the morning light. The world is full of signs, gestures, and rhythms, a vast and living language that does not require human words to speak. If the poet listens deeply, their words do not impose meaning onto the river but emerge in response to the river’s own story, woven into the greater web of communication that binds all living things. Language, then, does not merely represent the world; it emerges from a dynamic interplay of feeling, possibility, and selection.
Whitehead’s Propositions: The Lure of Feeling
What, then, are the units of language?
We ordinarily think of them as phonemes, morphemes, words, sentences, and idioms. These conventional units help structure and convey meaning, allowing us to analyze how language functions. However, their significance extends beyond mechanics; they shape the way we express and experience the world. This foundation sets the stage for Whitehead's unique addition to our understanding of language: the proposition. Unlike a grammatical sentence, a proposition in Whitehead’s philosophy is not simply a statement about reality but a lure for feeling, an invitation to experience the world in a particular way. It does not function merely as a truth claim but as a possibility, an opening toward new ways of perceiving and responding to the world.
The Call and Response of Language and Life
Propositions, in this sense, are not confined to human discourse; they are present in the very fabric of existence—offered to each moment as potential ways of becoming. Just as the poet responds to the lure of a phrase that captures something essential, so too does the river respond to the lure of gravity, the tree to the lure of sunlight, and the bird to the lure of the wind. Just as the river murmurs and the wind whispers, the baby’s cry calls out, and the parent responds, drawn into a shared moment of meaning.
A Living Language in a Living Earth
Long before structured words emerge, the call and response between baby and caregiver reveal the deeper nature of language: not merely a tool for transmitting information, but a dynamic, felt engagement with the world. The baby is in the tradition of the river, carried by currents of feeling and response, just as the river is in the tradition of the baby, shaping its course in relation to the world around it. Both are engaged in acts of communication, immersed in their environments, responding to the rhythms and energies around them. The baby’s cry echoes the river’s murmur; the river’s movement, like the baby’s laughter, invites interaction. Just as the river carves its path through the landscape, shaping and being shaped by its surroundings, the baby’s voice shapes and is shaped by the world it enters. Neither stands apart; both are embodiments of a living Earth, whose language is not only spoken but also felt, heard, and lived.
There is a need in our time for poetic explorers: that is, for people who have the courage and creativity to drift in the ways of language, to explore new ways of speaking and writing, that open up new possibilities for dwelling lightly on the Earth and gently with one another. Philosophers influenced by Whitehead often speak of the importance of developing a new and different kind of civilization - an Ecological Civilization - in which people live with respect and care for the community of life, including one another, and with no one left behind. It is sometimes thought that this kind of civilization can only emerge, if at all, through the practical wisdom of science and engineering. Poetic language is thought to be a luxury, an afterthought. But Professor Lu in his way, and the philosopher Whitehead in his way, point to another possibility. It is that the poetic language, emerging out of a sense of creativity and wonder, of respect for life and respect for one another, may itself be essential to any needed salvation. Only when we hear connections between the baby's laughter and the gurgling of the stream, the river's murmer and the sighs of those who suffer, can we move into a world that is more healing and whole-making, for human beings and the more than human world. An Ecological Civilization needs poetry as much as science. Professor Lu and Whitehead remind us to take our place within the living Earth, and then to sing.