Ensembles Everywhere:
A Jazz-Inspired Reading of Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
Jay McDaniel
Sheila is an imagined jazz pianist who leads an imagined musical group called the Concrescence Jazz Ensemble. She sees everything in terms of creative agents helping to create larger wholes, like the music she and her fellow musicians make. “The universe is an ensemble of ensembles of ensembles,” she says. “Quarks, atoms, molecules, people, other animals, plants, planets, stars, and galaxies—all are ensembles. The parts help create the wholes”
She adds that some wholes are more than the sum of their parts; some have first-person perspectives of their own, like the musicians in her jazz group. “But we are ensembles, too,” she says. “We couldn’t be ourselves without our bodies, our communities, and our feelings of one another. We are acts of the many becoming one and creating unified wholes out of our creativity.
As I listen, I think of Whitehead’s notion of “societies.” His societies are wholes created out of many creative parts. They include far more than human beings and human communities; they include atoms and molecules, hills and rivers, solar systems and galaxies, just as Sheila says. I also think of Whitehead's notion of "concrescence," which is, in its way, a momentary ensemble of the many becoming one, amid which the concrescing subject adds something new,
Might his societies be understood as social ensembles, partly created by the participants that compose them? Might even the cosmic mind in whose consciousness the universe unfolds—the Harmony of Harmonies —likewise be an ensemble? Maybe there no self-contained individuals: none at all! Maybe there are only ensembles.
She adds that some wholes are more than the sum of their parts; some have first-person perspectives of their own, like the musicians in her jazz group. “But we are ensembles, too,” she says. “We couldn’t be ourselves without our bodies, our communities, and our feelings of one another. We are acts of the many becoming one and creating unified wholes out of our creativity.
As I listen, I think of Whitehead’s notion of “societies.” His societies are wholes created out of many creative parts. They include far more than human beings and human communities; they include atoms and molecules, hills and rivers, solar systems and galaxies, just as Sheila says. I also think of Whitehead's notion of "concrescence," which is, in its way, a momentary ensemble of the many becoming one, amid which the concrescing subject adds something new,
Might his societies be understood as social ensembles, partly created by the participants that compose them? Might even the cosmic mind in whose consciousness the universe unfolds—the Harmony of Harmonies —likewise be an ensemble? Maybe there no self-contained individuals: none at all! Maybe there are only ensembles.
Ensembles Everywhere
The word ensemble is used in many settings, including fashion and mathematics.
What links these uses is distinct elements forming a whole. The elements need not be identical, and in music especially, each contributes something of its own.
A familiar story tells of someone who insists that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what supports the turtle, the storyteller replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Borrowing this image, I propose that there are ensembles all the way down—and up, too. Even the living unity of the universe—even God—is an ensemble, embracing the many within an ongoing unity of experience.
A word to my Whiteheadian friends. I am using the word "ensemble" in two ways: as a name for what Whitehead calls "societies" and also for what he calls "occasions of experience" or, to say the same thing, "concresing subjects." I speak of occasions of experience as "ensemble moments," because they are gatherings of many into one in a single moment of experience.
I suggest that everything in the actual world is an ensemble of one sort or another, whether an ensemble moment or an ensemble of ensemble moments, Quarks, atoms, molecules, minerals, plants, animals, hills, rivers, stars, planets, galaxies, and the universe as a whole—a single moment of experience in a person, a living cell, or in God - all are ensembles: wholes whose constituents have creative agency.
Moreover, they are nested ensembles: wholes within wholes within wholes. Some ensembles have first-person experience. They are unified by a seat of awareness that coordinates their activities. They are living wholes. Others are free standing without such a center. They are networked wholes. Many are somewhere in between. But such ensembles, in one form or another, are the fundamental units of reality, But the word "unit" is an odd one, because ensembles are neither one nor many. They are one in many and many in one. They are, to quote Whitehead, "many becoming one."
The word ensemble has, for me, a nice ring to it. It suggests creativity and experience all the way down—and up, too. But it should not suggest perfect harmony. Ensembles can collide and compete at almost every level, except perhaps the divine level. Their members can work at cross-purposes, and their relationships can involve tension, conflict, and suffering as well as cooperation and mutual enrichment. To call something an ensemble is to recognize a multiplicity of creative participants whose relationships help constitute the whole. Harmony, when it emerges, is an achievement, and sometimes a fragile one. At the divine level, we may imagine a living unity that receives these tensions into an encompassing love, without erasing their differences or denying their pain. God is, says Whitehead, a Harmony of Harmonies whose nature is love.
- Music: A group of performers playing or singing together, such as a jazz ensemble or string ensemble.
- Fashion: A coordinated outfit, such as a jacket, shirt, and trousers worn as an ensemble.
- Mathematics and statistics: A collection of objects or possible outcomes considered together. In probability, an ensemble might be the set of all possible results of an experiment.
What links these uses is distinct elements forming a whole. The elements need not be identical, and in music especially, each contributes something of its own.
A familiar story tells of someone who insists that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what supports the turtle, the storyteller replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Borrowing this image, I propose that there are ensembles all the way down—and up, too. Even the living unity of the universe—even God—is an ensemble, embracing the many within an ongoing unity of experience.
A word to my Whiteheadian friends. I am using the word "ensemble" in two ways: as a name for what Whitehead calls "societies" and also for what he calls "occasions of experience" or, to say the same thing, "concresing subjects." I speak of occasions of experience as "ensemble moments," because they are gatherings of many into one in a single moment of experience.
I suggest that everything in the actual world is an ensemble of one sort or another, whether an ensemble moment or an ensemble of ensemble moments, Quarks, atoms, molecules, minerals, plants, animals, hills, rivers, stars, planets, galaxies, and the universe as a whole—a single moment of experience in a person, a living cell, or in God - all are ensembles: wholes whose constituents have creative agency.
Moreover, they are nested ensembles: wholes within wholes within wholes. Some ensembles have first-person experience. They are unified by a seat of awareness that coordinates their activities. They are living wholes. Others are free standing without such a center. They are networked wholes. Many are somewhere in between. But such ensembles, in one form or another, are the fundamental units of reality, But the word "unit" is an odd one, because ensembles are neither one nor many. They are one in many and many in one. They are, to quote Whitehead, "many becoming one."
The word ensemble has, for me, a nice ring to it. It suggests creativity and experience all the way down—and up, too. But it should not suggest perfect harmony. Ensembles can collide and compete at almost every level, except perhaps the divine level. Their members can work at cross-purposes, and their relationships can involve tension, conflict, and suffering as well as cooperation and mutual enrichment. To call something an ensemble is to recognize a multiplicity of creative participants whose relationships help constitute the whole. Harmony, when it emerges, is an achievement, and sometimes a fragile one. At the divine level, we may imagine a living unity that receives these tensions into an encompassing love, without erasing their differences or denying their pain. God is, says Whitehead, a Harmony of Harmonies whose nature is love.
Historical Precedents for Ensemble Thinking
- Buddhist analysis of the skandhas: The five aggregates—form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness—invite us to understand personal life through changing processes rather than a permanent, self-contained self. Buddhist not-self differs from Whitehead’s account of a momentary subject, but offers an important precedent for understanding persons as multiplicities.
- Huayan Buddhism and Indra’s net: Each jewel in the net reflects every other jewel. The image suggests a world in which each member is distinct yet internally related to all the others, without requiring the net as a whole to have one first-person perspective.
- The Christian Trinity: Christian doctrine speaks of one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It brings unity and relationship together, though the Trinity is not simply a group of three separate beings. It offers an inspiration for imagining divine unity as intrinsically relational.
- The Confucian understanding of family: Parents, children, siblings, and elders shape one another through enduring relationships. Family life offers a human example of distinct persons participating in a shared life, with responsibilities of care across generations. Its unity grows through relationships among its members.
- Daoist understandings of the ten thousand things: Daoist traditions situate the myriad beings of the world within the unfolding of the Dao. Their attention to transformation, spontaneity, and the interplay of differences offers an inspiration for understanding ensembles as changing configurations within a larger living process.
- Indigenous traditions of kinship and reciprocity: Many Indigenous traditions understand human life through relationships with animals, plants, waters, and lands, although these understandings vary among peoples. Wampanoag traditions, for example, emphasize enduring relationships with the beings and places of their homeland and responsibilities of reciprocal care. Such traditions offer an inspiration for understanding ensembles as communities of relationship extending beyond the human.
There are still more, including African philosophies of ubuntu, which emphasize personhood through relationships with others; the ancient Stoic vision of the cosmos as an interconnected whole; Spinoza’s understanding of particular beings as expressions of one encompassing reality; and Leibniz’s account of a universe of distinct centers of experience, each reflecting the whole from its own perspective. These traditions differ from one another and from Whitehead, but each offers resources for imagining a world in which individuality and participation belong together. They are historic precedents and parallels to Whiteheadian Ensemble Philosophy.
Ensemble Metaphysics
- Ensemble metaphysics: understands reality through creative participants and the wholes they form, drawing its guiding metaphor from musical ensembles. A jazz group illustrates how each participant contributes something distinctive to a shared life.
- Social ensembles correspond to Whitehead’s societies: wholes whose constituent occasions share a pattern without losing their own agency. Examples include atoms, molecules, living cells, organisms, and human communities.
- Momentary ensembles correspond to actual occasions: acts of concrescence in which inherited manyness becomes a new subjective unity. A moment of human experience, gathering bodily feelings, memories, sounds, and possibilities into one experience, offers an illustration.
- Pluralistic ensembles have no encompassing subjective center; their collective life arises through relationships among their parts. Possible examples include an ecosystem, a jazz ensemble, and a plant understood as lacking an encompassing experiential center.
- Partially centered ensembles have an emerging or limited encompassing center that integrates and coordinates some aspects of the whole. Speculative examples include a developing animal embryo as an experiential center emerges, or a future AI system with limited experiential unity.
- Centered ensembles have an encompassing experience and agency of their own, while retaining the agency of their constituent parts. Possible examples include a human being, a dog, and an octopus understood as a centered organism with substantial local agency.
- Nested ensembles are ensembles within ensembles: cells within organisms, organisms within ecosystems, and communities within wider societies. A human being, for example, includes cellular ensembles while participating in familial, social, and ecological ensembles.
- Ensembles in Transition: Ensembles can move from pluralistic toward centered forms, or from centered toward partially centered and pluralistic forms. The emergence of an experiential center during an animal’s development, and the dissolution of organismic unity at death, offer possible illustrations.
- Distributed subjectivity and distributed intelligence can occur in all three forms. A jazz ensemble illustrates distinct experiencing subjects contributing to collective intelligence; a centered organism can likewise include responsive capacities distributed among its parts.
- Ensembles and novelty: Ensembles inherit the past while creating something new. In momentary ensembles, novelty arises through the distinctive way each occasion gathers its many influences into one experience. In social ensembles, creative interactions among participants can generate new patterns, capacities, and possibilities, sometimes transforming the participants themselves. A jazz improvisation illustrates both: each musician responds creatively, and their interplay produces music none could have planned alone. Novelty need not depend on an encompassing subjective center
- Gradations of value: Ensembles differ in the richness, intensity, harmony, and possibilities for flourishing they embody. Every experiencing subject has intrinsic value through its own self-enjoyment, while relationships among subjects can generate further value. Greater centeredness can make new forms of experience possible, but does not automatically make an ensemble more valuable. A flourishing ecosystem, a loving community, and a richly integrated personal experience embody different forms of value.
- Dimensionality of ensembles: Ensembles can exist in many dimensions; their relationships and forms of unity need not be confined to three-dimensional space. In this speculative extension of ensemble philosophy, possibilities include ensembles in additional physical dimensions and spiritual ensembles whose members are related through forms of experience beyond ordinary spatial location.
- The universe as an evolving ensemble of ensembles: The universe is an ensemble of ensembles, including countless momentary and social ensembles. Considered without an encompassing subjective center, it is pluralistic; considered as gathered into God’s experience, its manyness contributes to a centered divine life.
- God as the centered ensemble (the living whole) of the evolving universe: In a Whiteheadian interpretation, God gathers the manyness of the universe into an encompassing subjective unity. A bird’s enjoyment, a person’s grief, and a community’s creativity contribute to divine experience while retaining their own reality and agency. God is thus the universe’s encompassing life of feeling: a centered ensemble whose unity includes the creativity of the many.
Cosmic Trinitarianism:
Overheard at an Imaginary Christian Jazz Bar
The more I listen, the more Trinitarian I become. I used to think of God as one being who creates the world—a “one” that comes before “the many.” But now I imagine God as an ensemble of partners creating one another, as in a jazz performance. One partner is what Whitehead calls the primordial nature, offering possibilities; another is the consequent nature, receiving the world into divine experience; and a third is the superjective nature, giving back to the world what has been received and transformed. Moreover—and this is somewhat heretical, I fear—I imagine the universe as participating in that ensemble. God is an ensemble of ensembles of ensembles: a living unity whose life includes the creativity of the many. Call it Cosmic Trinitarianism.