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Thusness
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​Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild (p. 116). Catapult. Kindle Edition. 
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Thusness as Nature Explaining Itself
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At this point we come back to the great question which was posed before us by our examination of the evidence afforded by the poetic insight of Wordsworth and Shelley. This single question has expanded into a group of questions. What are enduring things, as distinguished from the eternal objects, such as colour and shape? How are they possible? What is their status and meaning in the universe? It comes to this: What is the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation of final metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture. My point is that any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very being show itself as self-explanatory. By this I mean, that the sheer statement, of what things are, may contain elements explanatory of why things are. Such elements may be expected to refer to depths beyond anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension. In a sense, all explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness. My demand is, that the ultimate arbitrariness of matter of fact from which our formulation starts should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers of discernment.
 
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World (pp. 92-93). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

​The Direct Perception
of Thusness in a Sunset

Whitehead on Perceiving Concrete Facts
​ as Precious Achievements

When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness.

Thus ‘art’ in the general sense which I require is any selection by which the concrete facts are so arranged as to elicit attention to particular values which are realisable by them. For example, the mere disposing of the human body and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a sunset is a simple form of artistic selection. The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values.


Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World (p. 199). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition. 

Thusness as Self-Addition
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​
​"the way the earliest single light of the evening sky, in spring,
creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself."

​                                -- Wallace Stevens in poem "Prologues to What is Possible"
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Thusness as the Deep
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First published in 2003, Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep proposes that God is the face of the deep and also that the deep is more than God. 

As I read her work, the deep is akin to Whitehead's idea of creativity and to what Wallace Stevens calls the nothingness from which the earliest single light adds itself to the evening sky. 

If you have Buddhist leanings, you might imagine the nothingness as that creative abyss, sunyata, from which all things create themselves in response to inherited situations.  Or to the godhead of which some Christian mystics speak, Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme, for example.

​The deep is not the personal God in whom Jesus placed his faith: the Eternal Companion to the world's joys and sufferings.  It is not a still small voice within the heart luring toward wisdom, compassion and creativity.  It is not the One who seeks to creatively transform and thus redeem all that happens in the world.  It is, I suggest, the self-creativity of each and every actuality, God included.

​ A unique feature of Whitehead's work is that, in his view, the nothingness is real in its way, and God is real in God's way.  Catherine Keller offers a perfect metaphor for thinking about God.  God isn't the whole of the deep, but God is the face of the deep.

In our pandemic age, it may be tempting to think that viruses are created by God.  I think they create themselves, as do we, as does God.  I find  comfort and courage in the idea that God isn't the deep as a whole, but the face of the deep who seeks the well-being of each and all, who is a healing presence, and whose steadfast love endures forever.   And I am grateful to Catherine Keller for giving me the language.

-- Jay McDaniel, April, 2020

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Thusness as the Process
​
of each Fact in Nature, Each Thus


​Interpreting Wallace Stevens' Phrase
​ ​in a Whiteheadian Way
​
Q = Question
​S = Suggestion

​Q:     What does it mean to say that the single light adds itself?
S:      It means that the light is an  act of self-creativity: an act of decision by which the event creates itself in response to its past actual world.

Q:     How does that create a new universe?
S:     The universe is not something that already exists fully-formed.  It is always coming into existence, new at each moment.   The newness is a result of the self-creativity within its depths.  There is  more to the universe after the self-creation than there was before.  Being is  becoming, and becoming includes novelty.

Q:    Where does the act of self-creativity or decision come from?
S:     The act of decision does not come from the past, although it is responsive to the past.  It does not come from the future, although it will affect the future.  It is not generated by eternal objects (pure potentialities in the mind of God) because they have no agency of their own.  It is not created by God because, if it were, is would not be self-creative.  It comes from the spontaneous depths of the new event itself.  “Decision is the essence of actuality,” says Whitehead in Process and Reality.

Q:    So it does not come from any thing other than itself?
S:     That’s right.  It is the essence of actuality.

Q:    Is this act of self-creativity a thing?
S:     No, it is not a thing.  It is more like a no-thing, a process.  John Cobb compares it to Buddhist nothingness, as interpreted by the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy.

Q:    So the new light comes from no-thing-ness, or nothingness.
S:     Yes, it comes from nothingness.  As the poet says: the single light creates out of nothingness.

Q:     Are all events expressive of this nothingness?
S:      Yes, all actual entities, even God, create themselves out of the nothingness?

Q:     Is there another name for this nothingness than, well, nothingness?
S:      Whitehead calls it creativity. It is, for him, the ultimate reality.

Q:     Isn't God the ultimate reality?
S:      No, God is the ultimate actuality: a primordial expression of creativity.  God is the cosmic mind, the all embracing event, who embraces all other actualities in a spirit of love, creating a new universe of God's own, which then floods back into the universe, moment by moment, as traces of healing and love.

Q:    Is that what the Torah and the New Testament and the Qur'an say?
S:     In a way, yes it is.  Their focus is on the ultimate actuality not the ultimate reality.  Generally speaking, these texts were not preoccupied with the question: "Of what are all things a manifestation?"  They were preoccupied with "In whom can we place our faith?" Their answer was God.

Q:    Does this demean God?  Isn't creativity more actual than God in way?
S:     No, creativity or nothingness is actual only in its manifestations.  It has no agency other than the agency of its manifestations.  Don't think of it as in competition with God; just think of it as expressed in God's own actuality (God is self-creative, too) and in the actuality of all other existents.

Q:    I myself am influenced by the biblical faiths.  Can you point me to where this might be in the Bible?
S:     Well, some theologians, Rabbi Bradley Artson and the Christian writer Catherine Keller, say that it is like the tehom, the Great Deep, from which God creates the world in the book of Genesis.  If you wish, you can say that creativity or nothingness is the Great Deep and you can say, with Catherine Keller, that God is the Face of the Deep.

Q:     But if creatures are self-creative in some way, is it really honest to say that God creates them?
S:      God doesn't create their self-creativity.  God lures them to create themselves in ways that add vitality and beauty to the world.  In process theology this luring takes the form of 'initial aims.'

Q:     Should I have faith in creativity?
S :     No, you best have faith in God, in love.  You can awaken to creativity, but that is not enough.  That's just a kind of mysticism.  What it important is how you live.  Faith and love are much more important.

​Thusness as the Many Becoming One
​
​and being Increased by One
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interpreting Whitehead's phrase "the many become one and are increased by one"
in the context where it appears.  Lesson Nine of the Whitehead Video Series.

Whitehead Video Series

Lesson Nine considers selected passages from six paragraphs in a section of Whitehead's Process and Reality called The Category of the Ultimate.  One of the most important ideas presented in these passages is that Creativity is, in Whitehead's words, "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matters of fact."  His idea is that every actual fact in the universe -- every actual entity -- is a "production of novel togetherness."  This means that an entity is not simply "one" but also "many."  It is the many becoming one.  The video uses the example of a child's relationship to her parents to illustrate the point.  Her parents are part of who she is, and in her very inclusion of them within her own life, she is more than them.  Always she is becoming herself, and the self who becomes at any given moment becomes part of a many which influence her in the future.

​-- Jay McDaniel
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