Artists, Builders, and Scholars
Three Vocations for Cultivating a Whiteheadian Ethos
Recently I heard a podcast featuring the authors of a coffee-table book on the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. They explained that their editors wanted them to create a book that would appeal to skimmers, swimmers, and divers. If you imagine a coffee-table book on Whitehead, the editors might recommend the same. They might say:
"Write for the skimmers who want to encounter the general idea of Whitehead and then move on, for the swimmers who glide over the surface but pause to explore a little more deeply at selected points, and for the divers who want to immerse themselves in Whitehead's philosophy in all of its conceptual richness."
There is much to admire in this advice. It reminds us that people engage ideas at different levels of depth and with different kinds of curiosity.
Yet, when applied to the process movement itself, the metaphor can also be misleading. It suggests that the divers are somehow the most important because they go deepest. If the goal of the process movement were simply to produce Whitehead scholars, that conclusion might follow.
But if the larger goal is to cultivate a Whiteheadian ethos capable of shaping persons, communities, and civilizations, then another way of imagining participation is needed.
Rather than thinking in terms of skimmers, swimmers, and divers, I find myself thinking in terms of three complementary vocations: Artists, Builders, and Scholars.
Artists seek to understand and communicate the central ideas of the process tradition in ways that touch the heart and awaken the imagination. They are especially interested in a transformation of consciousness.
Builders take those ideas into particular domains of life, exploring their implications for education, ecology, psychology, theology, business, politics, medicine, the arts, and many other fields of thought and practice.
Scholars devote themselves to the careful interpretation, criticism, and further development of the philosophical tradition itself, preserving its conceptual integrity while extending its reach through dialogue with other intellectual traditions and new forms of inquiry.
These are not ranks in a hierarchy but complementary vocations within a living movement. Many people embody more than one of them, and the long-term vitality of the process movement depends on the creative interplay among all three. Moreover, these vocations speak to different aspects of human life and, in some instances, to different audiences.
My aim in this essay is first to reflect on the larger aims of the process movement and then to suggest that people can participate in that movement through one—or, more often, some combination—of these three vocations.
The Whiteheadian Ethos: An Eightfold Path
As noted above the overall aim of the process movement, inspired by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and many others, is not to create Whitehead scholars. It is to help create a world nourished by what I will call the ethos—or perhaps the dao—of Whitehead: a way of living that recognizes the relational, creative, experiential, and value-laden character of reality and fosters societies that live with respect and care for the community of life and for one another. Scholarship is indispensable to this task, but it is not its ultimate goal.
Whitehead's own philosophy offers a way of understanding the nature of an ethos. It includes emotions as well as ideas, attitudes as well as facts, aspirations as well as memories. When rendered in terms of ideas, the Whiteheadian ethos becomes, as it were, an eightfold path:
These ways of living come to life only when embodied in actual lives and communities. They are not abstract principles imposed from above but habits of heart and mind that take shape within particular cultures, languages, and traditions. Expressed through diverse civilizational inheritances, they become not a single uniform worldview but a shared and evolving ethos for our time.
A Historical Parallel
A parallel to my emphasis on ethos can be found in the way historians understand the Western Enlightenment and, in response to it, the Romantic movement. The Enlightenment, they say, was not simply a set of specific ideas advanced by philosophers such as Voltaire, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. It was also a mood that permeated much of Western European society: a mood of optimism, trust in reason, and confidence in the possibility of progress through the use of reason.
The Romantic movement, too, was more than the poetic and philosophical writings of figures such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. It was also a mood: one that emphasized feeling as well as reason, imagination as well as analysis, nature as a living presence rather than a mere mechanism, individuality and creativity, reverence for mystery, and a sense of the sacred woven into the natural world.
My suggestion is that many participants in the process movement carry with them a hope, whether explicit or implicit, that something of the mood or ethos of a Whiteheadian approach to life might become part of the twenty-first century and beyond, thereby contributing in a positive way to the evolution of human consciousness.
Beyond China and the West
This ethos will include aspects of both Enlightenment and Romantic ways of thinking, but it will by no means be grounded exclusively in Western European or American traditions, philosophical or otherwise. Aspects of what Wang Zhihe and Fan Meijun call a Second Enlightenment, one that includes Chinese ways of thinking, have already been articulated in their influential book Second Enlightenment (第二次启蒙) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011). Their vision moves beyond the limitations of the first Enlightenment by integrating process philosophy, Chinese traditions, ecological civilization, and an aesthetic appreciation of the world.
Certainly, given China's emergence as one of the world's leading economic, scientific, technological, and cultural powers, the prominence of Chinese sensibilities is rightly understood as an essential feature of any Whiteheadian ethos that might become part of world history. References to Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Chinese Buddhism, and other Chinese traditions may one day become as common within the Whiteheadian world as references to Whitehead himself. Indeed, Whitehead's philosophy will itself be reframed, interpreted, and further developed in distinctively Chinese ways.
Still, for this ethos to become genuinely influential, it must involve much more than a synthesis of Chinese and Western sensibilities. It must also be shaped by African, South Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Oceanian, and Indigenous ways of seeing and inhabiting the world, and it must be communicated through diverse cultural expressions, each carrying its own distinctive feel. They will be, as it were, variations on a shared theme.
If such an ethos does emerge, it will not belong to Whiteheadians alone. It will belong to all who find in it a way of perceiving, valuing, and living that helps foster a more compassionate, creative, ecological, and life-giving future. Whitehead's philosophy may remain one of its deepest intellectual sources, but the ethos itself will take on a life of its own, continually renewed through its embodiment in diverse cultures and communities around the world.
Artists, Builders, and Scholars:
Three Complementary Vocations
If this is the larger aim of the process movement, then people who identify with it may find themselves drawn toward one or another of three complementary vocations: Artists, Builders, and Scholars. As note above, these are not ranks in a hierarchy but different ways of contributing to a living tradition. Indeed, many people embody more than one vocation over the course of their lives, or even at the same time.
Artists are explorers and communicators, attentive to matters of the heart. They discover fresh possibilities for seeing and feeling the world and communicate those possibilities through stories, conversations, sermons, music, poetry, visual art, film, essays, podcasts, and countless other forms of creative expression. Their calling is not simply to explain process philosophy but to awaken imagination, deepen empathy, and invite others into the Whiteheadian ethos.
Builders ask what this vision means in practice. They develop process approaches to education, psychotherapy, ecology, business, medicine, theology, politics, architecture, conflict resolution, agriculture, economics, and the arts. They translate a worldview into habits, institutions, professions, and ways of life. They help weave the Whiteheadian ethos into the institutions and practices of everyday life.
Scholars devote themselves to interpreting, criticizing, refining, and extending the philosophical tradition. They preserve its conceptual integrity, engage it with other intellectual traditions, recover neglected insights, and open new paths for inquiry. Their work provides the intellectual depth that enables the movement to remain creative rather than superficial.
A Living Ecology
Each vocation depends upon the others. Artists awaken imagination. Builders embody vision. Scholars deepen understanding. None is more important than the others, because each serves a different purpose within the larger ecology of the movement. If Whitehead's philosophy is to become more than an academic specialty—if it is to become a living ethos capable of influencing local communities and world history—it will be because Artists, Builders, and Scholars work together, each contributing in distinctive ways to the cultivation of that ethos.
"Write for the skimmers who want to encounter the general idea of Whitehead and then move on, for the swimmers who glide over the surface but pause to explore a little more deeply at selected points, and for the divers who want to immerse themselves in Whitehead's philosophy in all of its conceptual richness."
There is much to admire in this advice. It reminds us that people engage ideas at different levels of depth and with different kinds of curiosity.
Yet, when applied to the process movement itself, the metaphor can also be misleading. It suggests that the divers are somehow the most important because they go deepest. If the goal of the process movement were simply to produce Whitehead scholars, that conclusion might follow.
But if the larger goal is to cultivate a Whiteheadian ethos capable of shaping persons, communities, and civilizations, then another way of imagining participation is needed.
Rather than thinking in terms of skimmers, swimmers, and divers, I find myself thinking in terms of three complementary vocations: Artists, Builders, and Scholars.
Artists seek to understand and communicate the central ideas of the process tradition in ways that touch the heart and awaken the imagination. They are especially interested in a transformation of consciousness.
Builders take those ideas into particular domains of life, exploring their implications for education, ecology, psychology, theology, business, politics, medicine, the arts, and many other fields of thought and practice.
Scholars devote themselves to the careful interpretation, criticism, and further development of the philosophical tradition itself, preserving its conceptual integrity while extending its reach through dialogue with other intellectual traditions and new forms of inquiry.
These are not ranks in a hierarchy but complementary vocations within a living movement. Many people embody more than one of them, and the long-term vitality of the process movement depends on the creative interplay among all three. Moreover, these vocations speak to different aspects of human life and, in some instances, to different audiences.
My aim in this essay is first to reflect on the larger aims of the process movement and then to suggest that people can participate in that movement through one—or, more often, some combination—of these three vocations.
The Whiteheadian Ethos: An Eightfold Path
As noted above the overall aim of the process movement, inspired by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and many others, is not to create Whitehead scholars. It is to help create a world nourished by what I will call the ethos—or perhaps the dao—of Whitehead: a way of living that recognizes the relational, creative, experiential, and value-laden character of reality and fosters societies that live with respect and care for the community of life and for one another. Scholarship is indispensable to this task, but it is not its ultimate goal.
Whitehead's own philosophy offers a way of understanding the nature of an ethos. It includes emotions as well as ideas, attitudes as well as facts, aspirations as well as memories. When rendered in terms of ideas, the Whiteheadian ethos becomes, as it were, an eightfold path:
- Living in Relationship – Recognizing that our lives are deeply connected with other people, other living beings, and the Earth itself. None of us exists in isolation.
- Living Creatively and Responsibly – Receiving what life gives us while responding with freedom, imagination, and care. We cannot choose everything that happens to us, but we can help shape what comes next.
- Respecting the Worth of Every Being – Honoring the inherent value of each person, each creature, and each moment, rather than treating them merely as means to an end.
- Seeking Beauty in Life – Cultivating lives that combine harmony with adventure, stability with creativity, and inherited wisdom with fresh possibilities.
- Leading Through Inspiration Rather Than Force – Influencing others through listening, example, persuasion, encouragement, and shared purpose rather than domination or coercion.
- Honoring the Living World – Approaching nature with humility and wonder, recognizing that experience and value extend far beyond the human world.
- Being Guided by Enduring Ideals – Orienting our lives toward truth, beauty, goodness, creativity, adventure, and peace as realities worthy of our devotion.
- Living in Fourfold Harmony – Seeking a balanced life that nurtures harmony with ourselves, with other people, with the more-than-human world, and with the larger mystery of existence.
These ways of living come to life only when embodied in actual lives and communities. They are not abstract principles imposed from above but habits of heart and mind that take shape within particular cultures, languages, and traditions. Expressed through diverse civilizational inheritances, they become not a single uniform worldview but a shared and evolving ethos for our time.
A Historical Parallel
A parallel to my emphasis on ethos can be found in the way historians understand the Western Enlightenment and, in response to it, the Romantic movement. The Enlightenment, they say, was not simply a set of specific ideas advanced by philosophers such as Voltaire, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. It was also a mood that permeated much of Western European society: a mood of optimism, trust in reason, and confidence in the possibility of progress through the use of reason.
The Romantic movement, too, was more than the poetic and philosophical writings of figures such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. It was also a mood: one that emphasized feeling as well as reason, imagination as well as analysis, nature as a living presence rather than a mere mechanism, individuality and creativity, reverence for mystery, and a sense of the sacred woven into the natural world.
My suggestion is that many participants in the process movement carry with them a hope, whether explicit or implicit, that something of the mood or ethos of a Whiteheadian approach to life might become part of the twenty-first century and beyond, thereby contributing in a positive way to the evolution of human consciousness.
Beyond China and the West
This ethos will include aspects of both Enlightenment and Romantic ways of thinking, but it will by no means be grounded exclusively in Western European or American traditions, philosophical or otherwise. Aspects of what Wang Zhihe and Fan Meijun call a Second Enlightenment, one that includes Chinese ways of thinking, have already been articulated in their influential book Second Enlightenment (第二次启蒙) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011). Their vision moves beyond the limitations of the first Enlightenment by integrating process philosophy, Chinese traditions, ecological civilization, and an aesthetic appreciation of the world.
Certainly, given China's emergence as one of the world's leading economic, scientific, technological, and cultural powers, the prominence of Chinese sensibilities is rightly understood as an essential feature of any Whiteheadian ethos that might become part of world history. References to Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, Chinese Buddhism, and other Chinese traditions may one day become as common within the Whiteheadian world as references to Whitehead himself. Indeed, Whitehead's philosophy will itself be reframed, interpreted, and further developed in distinctively Chinese ways.
Still, for this ethos to become genuinely influential, it must involve much more than a synthesis of Chinese and Western sensibilities. It must also be shaped by African, South Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Oceanian, and Indigenous ways of seeing and inhabiting the world, and it must be communicated through diverse cultural expressions, each carrying its own distinctive feel. They will be, as it were, variations on a shared theme.
If such an ethos does emerge, it will not belong to Whiteheadians alone. It will belong to all who find in it a way of perceiving, valuing, and living that helps foster a more compassionate, creative, ecological, and life-giving future. Whitehead's philosophy may remain one of its deepest intellectual sources, but the ethos itself will take on a life of its own, continually renewed through its embodiment in diverse cultures and communities around the world.
Artists, Builders, and Scholars:
Three Complementary Vocations
If this is the larger aim of the process movement, then people who identify with it may find themselves drawn toward one or another of three complementary vocations: Artists, Builders, and Scholars. As note above, these are not ranks in a hierarchy but different ways of contributing to a living tradition. Indeed, many people embody more than one vocation over the course of their lives, or even at the same time.
Artists are explorers and communicators, attentive to matters of the heart. They discover fresh possibilities for seeing and feeling the world and communicate those possibilities through stories, conversations, sermons, music, poetry, visual art, film, essays, podcasts, and countless other forms of creative expression. Their calling is not simply to explain process philosophy but to awaken imagination, deepen empathy, and invite others into the Whiteheadian ethos.
Builders ask what this vision means in practice. They develop process approaches to education, psychotherapy, ecology, business, medicine, theology, politics, architecture, conflict resolution, agriculture, economics, and the arts. They translate a worldview into habits, institutions, professions, and ways of life. They help weave the Whiteheadian ethos into the institutions and practices of everyday life.
Scholars devote themselves to interpreting, criticizing, refining, and extending the philosophical tradition. They preserve its conceptual integrity, engage it with other intellectual traditions, recover neglected insights, and open new paths for inquiry. Their work provides the intellectual depth that enables the movement to remain creative rather than superficial.
A Living Ecology
Each vocation depends upon the others. Artists awaken imagination. Builders embody vision. Scholars deepen understanding. None is more important than the others, because each serves a different purpose within the larger ecology of the movement. If Whitehead's philosophy is to become more than an academic specialty—if it is to become a living ethos capable of influencing local communities and world history—it will be because Artists, Builders, and Scholars work together, each contributing in distinctive ways to the cultivation of that ethos.