Many of my ecologically-minded friends use the word system to emphasize interdependence and counter the myth of individual isolation. While I see the value in this language—it helps people recognize patterns, feedback loops, and interconnectedness—it can also feel impersonal, even dehumanizing. A friend from an authoritarian country once reminded me that being part of a system often means being reduced to an object, rather than honored as a subject with feelings and agency.
I turn to Alfred North Whitehead and Emmanuel Levinas to explore this tension. Whitehead’s idea of concrescence affirms that every individual is a “real being” with a private, subjective experience—a creative synthesis of the world. Levinas warns that systems thinking can flatten otherness and suppress ethical responsibility by reducing persons to categories.
Rather than reject systems thinking, what is needed is a deeper, more organic vision--living systems that honor individuality, not mechanical ones that erase it. In this view, drawn from process philosophy, the universe is an open, evolving, sentient whole—interwoven with subjective experience at every level, including the divine. True systems thinking must breathe. It must make space for uniqueness, feeling, and the unpredictable possibilities of creative becoming.
I turn to Alfred North Whitehead and Emmanuel Levinas to explore this tension. Whitehead’s idea of concrescence affirms that every individual is a “real being” with a private, subjective experience—a creative synthesis of the world. Levinas warns that systems thinking can flatten otherness and suppress ethical responsibility by reducing persons to categories.
Rather than reject systems thinking, what is needed is a deeper, more organic vision--living systems that honor individuality, not mechanical ones that erase it. In this view, drawn from process philosophy, the universe is an open, evolving, sentient whole—interwoven with subjective experience at every level, including the divine. True systems thinking must breathe. It must make space for uniqueness, feeling, and the unpredictable possibilities of creative becoming.
Individuals
A child dancing in the kitchen, a poet writing at dawn, a chef experimenting with spices, a dog running through a field, a cat stretching in the sun, a dolphin leaping from the water, a crow solving a puzzle, a bear guiding her cubs, a tree bending toward the light, a fox pausing at dusk, a rabbit rearranging straw, a river carving a new path, a horse galloping freely, a chimpanzee drumming on a tree, a sunflower following the sun, a monk meditating in silence, an elder telling stories, a person recovering from loss, a mycelial network redistributing nutrients, a beehive adapting after disruption, a photon choosing a path, an electron shifting orbitals, a quantum fluctuation birthing a particle-antiparticle pair, a neutrino oscillating between identities, and a virtual particle briefly flashing into existence—all examples of beings or events, human and more-than-human, macro and micro, who exhibit self-enjoyment and self-creativity.
Whitehead on Privacy
The concrescence, absorbing the derived data into immediate privacy, consists in mating the data with ways of feeling provocative of the private synthesis. These subjective ways of feeling are not merely receptive of the data as alien facts; they clothe the dry bones with the flesh of a real being, emotional, purposive, appreciative. The miracle of creation is described in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel: “So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.”
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 85). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 85). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
A chief danger of process philosophy and theology today is that, in seeking to counter the myth of isolated individualism, it can overemphasize patterns and systems at the expense of honoring the unique subjectivity of each living being—a subjectivity that is not reducible to participation in a system or the embodiment of a pattern. There is always more to an actual entity than the system it participates in or the patterns it embodies—namely, its own lived experience, its subjective immediacy as an individual in itself and for itself. Two key ideas in Whitehead’s philosophy help redress this imbalance. First, Whitehead emphasizes the privacy of the subjective act: each concrescing subject responds to the actual world in a way that involves its own self-creativity, subjective forms (emotions), self-enjoyment, and the determination of its own subjective aim. Second, his ontological principle affirms that the ultimate reason for things happening as they do lies not in abstract systems but in the concrete decisions of actual entities. These localized decisions are what truly make the world what it is.
Beyond Systems
Many of my ecologically-minded friends use the word system. They sometimes speak as if something like "systems thinking" can save the world.
I know why—it’s a way of naming interdependence, of emphasizing that nothing exists in isolation. It resists the myth of the atomized individual. It helps people see patterns, feedback loops, and the complex webs of cause and effect. It helps them overcome what they call the myth of separation. I respect that.
But every time I hear it, I flinch a little. I think of a friend of mine from an authoritarian country with a dictator who says to me,
“I know what it’s like to be part of a system. But in our country, our need is to be respected as individuals. We are real people with real feelings, subjects of our lives and not just objects for others." '
I think of Whitehead's use of the phrase "real beings" in the quotation above - his insistence that subjective ways of feeling clothe dry bones with the flesh of a real being, emotional, purposive, and creative - a person who privately (his word) synthesizes the world that is experienced.
The word system misses this privacy. It invites a third person perspective, but misses the reality of lived, first-person experience. Along the way it carries the chill of machinery—of lifeless diagrams and control panels. It neglects and sometimes denies the intrinsic value of individual beings—plants, animals, people—on their own terms and for their own sakes. It flattens their singularity, their uniqueness, their dignity as individuals.
This concern is echoed in the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who warned against the totalizing tendencies of systems thinking. For Levinas, the problem is not simply abstract or semantic—it is ethical. When we reduce the world to a system, we risk reducing the Other to a function of the Same, absorbing their irreducible singularity into categories that neutralize their face, their voice, their vulnerability. Systems thinking, even in its benevolent forms, can flatten difference, suppress alterity, and obscure the infinite responsibility we have to each living being. For Levinas, ethics begins not in the system, but in the face-to-face encounter—in the unassimilable presence of the other who calls us to respond.
What I long for is a language that breathes. A language that invites a sense of radical interconnectedness and that honors individuality. A language that recognizes that individual entities are parts of greater wholes and that they are subjects of their own lives who transcend the systems. All living beings are more than systems. They are their own first-person experience, as lived from the inside, moment by moment.
This is what draws me to Whitehead’s idea of concrescence—the becoming of a single momentary subject as it gathers the world into itself. Each concrescing subject depends on the entirety of the past actual world, is inwardly affected by that world, and includes that world within its own constitution. Indeed, that past actual world is immanent within the concrescing subject as the "many" that are "becoming one."
But each subject also responds to it with its own private synthesis—its own unique way of becoming. Indeed the subject is this private synthesis, moment by moment. A subject is, says Whitehead, both self-creative and self-enjoying. A subjective has subjective aims and subjective forms (emotions) of its own. Thus, individuality and relationality are not opposites; they are two sides of the same creative process. To exist is to feel the world, to respond, and to add something new.
What kinds of real beings are subjects of this sort? For Whitehead, they include human beings, to be sure, but also other animals, living cells, microbes and, at a different level, energy events (quantum events) within the depths of atoms. "Apart from the experiencing of subjects," says Whitehead, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."
It is within this context—one that remains alert to the fact that individuals have lives of their own—that we might speak meaningfully about systems. Of course, concrescing subjects participate in systems, healthy and unhealthy. So I do not reject the word system altogether. I simply hope that, when my friends use it, they remember the individuals within—each with a life, a perspective, a feeling—and that they are speaking of living systems, not mechanical ones.
Mechanistic Wholes & Living Wholes
One way to understand a system is through a mechanistic lens—like a set of billiard balls on a pool table. In this view, each part affects and depends on others but remains fundamentally separate. The primary mode of connection is through collisions—external forces acting upon objects from the outside. There’s no shared inner life or sentience. Each element is distinct, and the interactions are purely mechanical, with no sense of inner experience or feeling.
In contrast, process philosophy introduces the idea of an organic system, more akin to a family than to a collection of inanimate objects. In an organic system, the parts are not only interconnected but interdependent in deeper ways—shaped by, and shaping, one another through their felt relationships. The primary mode of connection is through felt relations—internal responses, mutual influence, and shared experience. Each member is a sentient being in its own right, capable of experiencing, feeling, and responding to the world.
The Whiteheadian perspective extends this idea even further, proposing that the universe as a whole is an organic system—a living web of relationships infused with subjectivity. There is a kind of inner life that goes all the way down to the smallest quantum events and all the way out to the vast expanses of cosmic space. Even the universe itself, and even God, are seen as sentient: affected by and responsive to the beings within them, yet also more than the sum of those parts.
Importantly, in a Whiteheadian context, the universe is not a closed system but an open one—and this includes God, who is understood as the living whole of the universe. A closed system is sealed off from novelty; its future is determined by its present, with nothing genuinely new entering the picture. By contrast, an open system is permeable to creativity, transformation, and surprise. In such a system, new possibilities continuously arise, and the future is not fixed in advance.
There is still something else that process philosophy adds to systems thinking: the idea that the universe, as a cosmic system, includes not only relations and patterns, but also values. It is not value-neutral. Truth, goodness, and beauty are not mere human projections onto an otherwise indifferent world; they are ideals that arise from, and in some sense guide, the creative advance of the universe itself. These values are not imposed from without, nor reducible to utility, but are woven into the very fabric of becoming. In Whitehead’s vision, they are part of the divine lure—possibilities that beckon each concrescing subject toward richer forms of experience. Thus, a living system. or an individual who is part of is, is not only interconnected and open to novelty—it is also responsive to the call of the good, the true, and the beautiful.