Photographs by Tristan Norman
I am a Process Millennial
One student’s journey in Process Thought and Fat Soul Philosophy
Tristan Norman (age 21)
I am writing this for millennials (roughly ages 18-30) who are interested in process philosophy and its relevance to their lives. This page consists of two essays showing how I have been influenced by process philosophy: its cosmology (what the world is like) and its understanding of human fulfillment (I call it Fat Soul philosophy.) I borrow the phrase “Fat Soul” from two process thinkers, Patricia Adams Farmer and Jay McDaniel; the phrase builds upon the idea of a "soul with size" articulated by an early process philosopher named Bernard Loomer. You find two essays on this page: "Why Fat Soul Philosophy?" and "Why Whitehead?" The first is more personal; the second is a bit more philosophical. Both are process in spirit. We millennials are a diverse group, and I know that my own experience is shaped by my ethnicity (I am white), class (I am middle class), nationality (I am American) and many other factors. I know that my questions are not everybody's questions; and that my evolving identity is not necessarily shared by other millennials, including process millennials. A recognition of this limitation is itself a process idea. The idea is that our very souls are relational and do not evolve in a vacuum, and that they can be nourished, but are also limited, by our local situations and particular circumstances. I am self-creative to some degree, and I am also created by my context to some degree. This, too, is a process idea. We are both context-influenced and self-determining, always at the same time.
I've written these essays with other millennials in mind, including millennials in China, where process philosophy is growing under the rubric of "constructive postmodernism." I will be studying in China next spring (2019). I hope that these essays might be a platform for conversations with Chinese my age, and that I might learn about other ways of being a process millennial and also, of course, a millennial as such, process or otherwise. I have much to learn.
-- Tristan Norman
I've written these essays with other millennials in mind, including millennials in China, where process philosophy is growing under the rubric of "constructive postmodernism." I will be studying in China next spring (2019). I hope that these essays might be a platform for conversations with Chinese my age, and that I might learn about other ways of being a process millennial and also, of course, a millennial as such, process or otherwise. I have much to learn.
-- Tristan Norman
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Why Fat Soul Philosophy?
Finding a Spiritual and Moral Compass without Falling into Dogmatism:The Appeal of Fat Soul Philosophy Growing up, I was a double agent. Not a double agent in the suave James Bond, "shaken not stirred" sense, but in the spiritual and philosophical sense. My family is Church of Christ and Lutheran with a splash of agnostics and atheists. Concepts revolving around God were common practice and essential to my older family’s identity. I went through the motions of being a devout Christian and understood God as the being behind the chess board. However, on the weekends I would visit my father, a staunch agnostic with a weariness of organized religion, and my aunt, a flower-child Buddhist and Vegan, who would take me to the Ecumenical Buddhist Center in Little Rock. I would meditate with her and she would try to explain the nature of the Buddha, while scribbling down notes for her college exam. Adding to this, I went to a special school where the majority of my teachers were Muslim and they orientated their lives according to their beliefs. Confusing, right? How in the world can a kid operate under so many influences? It is because I am a millennial. Plurality and ambiguity are the foundations of my reality and my quest of meaning. Plurality and Ambiguity What do I mean by plurality and ambiguity? Think of the state of the times today with our growing global culture and interconnectedness due to the inventions of the internet and the successes of education tailored to diversification. We are constantly being altered by various influences. All I have to do is launch myself onto the internet and explore to my heart's content. The sheer weight of this knowledge is startling, and this weight includes the pluralistic society that we see emerging. Peoples of various gender, nationality, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and/or spiritual progress. We are overwhelmed with a need to decide among options, and yet there are so many options it is difficult to decide on any of them. And those of us with “progressive” mindsets somehow think that all the options must be represented when we speak about the world, lest we be deemed ‘politically incorrect.’ Furthermore, the internalization of human rights and the progress of cultural rights give all religions, philosophies, and principles a degree of human dignity and value. The Effects of Plurality The fact of plurality affects how we speak, think, operate, or teach; all variations in identity must be represented. My friends and I have often talked about how this has created a whole new set of social rules when we interact in public. This creates a large amount of openness to new forms of thought but also fosters a vacuum of what I call spiritual ambiguity. Spiritual ambiguity arises from the impact of the 60's with many families blending their beliefs around science, psychology, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions/philosophies. Call it a blend of East and West. Table-for-two. A delicate tango of two different perspectives. In this sense, The Good Life is one that is extremely personal and should be discovered by the individual. We can trace the influence of the counter culture through the music of the Beatles and growing interest in Yoga and Mindfulness meditation. There was a void that needed to be filled. This new wave of American spirituality is against dogmatism and materialism; accompanied with a growing disillusionment with the American Dream. We no longer want to follow the ideas that came before because of their negative material and spiritual impact. Combine this Spiritual Ambiguity with the Internet and we have a vast void of Spiritual Possibility. It is not acceptable among many to pass through many different religious traditions and seize upon elements from all of them, because it smacks of smorgasbordism and elitist appropriation. You can call it "Spiritual but Not Religious." And yet, at least in my experience, there is some inevitability to this impulse to learn from many sources for the sake of personal wholeness. I like to call it a "Search for Fat Soulhood". Plurality, ambiguity, and the need to learn from many sources without privileging any of them; this is the background for a millennial perspective such as my own. An older generation might say: "What does this have to do with discovering spirituality? Your generation just seems confused and restless." To answer these, I cannot speak for others, but I can speak for myself. I will share a word about my personal views and opinions on spirituality. The Need for a Moral and Spiritual Compass A few years ago, I was confronted with an existential crisis. I came to the realization that I had no idea what I believed and that I could not explain this world around me. Bible School would have me believe that the world was created in seven days and was God's Spirit. Science would tell me that the universe is infinitely more complex and older than any religious text declares. Buddhism would say that the world simply is and that there is no permanent essence to any of it. So many vastly different views converged at once; and yet all I wanted was a moral and spiritual compass for my own life. Eventually, I would just look up to the stars late at night for answers and felt extremely humbled by its immaculate beauty but also how strangely impersonal it was to me. This is typical From a millennial perspective, we have learned to rely solely on ourselves and our abilities. I have as well. In my teenage years and into my adult life, I often feel anxiety, lost, and insecure about many things in my life. Often, afraid of going numb, I would act, since I did theatre; and would put on a smile and charisma for my friends and some of my family. But I so rarely felt this way. Both Sides of Life In my own experience, the path towards understanding is one of deep introspection, mistakes, and conflicts of identity. To make it a miraculous journey full of wonders and insights is to sometimes be distracted from the things that are not always beautiful, not always good, and not always just. Both sides of life need to be faced. I feel that, despite my optimism and capacity for wonder, I have to become open to both sides, and resilient. My independent personality and striving for independence of thought was something that I learned and grew in myself in my own pursuit of meaning making. So, when I looked at those stars laying in the grass of a golf course in Arkansas, I imagined what it would be like to be fully alive in every moment, what it would feel like to possess a community of all people, and how great we all could be if we realized our own human dignity. Affirming it in ourselves and in others, as they exist as extensions of ourselves. Discovering the World of Feeling Feeling small and insignificant was a powerful thing because it allowed me to escape myself and delve deeper into the possibility that I am not at odds with the universe around me, but that I may be connected to it and nurtured by it. So I began to read, think, and write. Philosophy, religious texts, histories, psychology, books on cosmology, poetry; I delved into them all. And what emerged in me was something that I had not expected: hope, indignation, and commitment. I was amazed by the wealth of knowledge and the possibility of meaning behind it all. The possibility of feeling with such a depth that it fills you up and crucifies your pain on the altars of your understanding. This required my constant attention. How best to live with aliveness: aliveness to my own possibilities for feeling and to those of others as well? How do I live for others and for myself. What is peace? And what is justice? More importantly, what is a just peace? How do I contribute to that? I am still trying to figure these out. We are guided by emotions and feelings, so we learn from process philosophy. It presents us with a universe of mutual becoming and shared feeling, sometimes harmonious and sometimes violent, but always intense. Within this universe, so we also learn from process philosophy, we all yearn for our deeper selves and we think in terms that relation to that quest of spiritual and existential possibility. We all have our subjective aims for harmony and intensity of experience in community with others. Plurality and Ambiguity Millennials are unique in this journey because of their (our) acceptance of plurality and ambiguity. We do not look to our world through the lens of tradition, convention, or blind belief. We want truth, authenticity, and justice. In this desire, it is no longer taboo to be non-religious. Nor is it a shock to have and to affirm many representations of truth and belief, without insisting that one of them be "final" or "absolute." We are pushing our society to foster diversity and acceptance because we know what it means to live with the absence of it. We can find meaning in anything: a poem we heard recited by a friend, a film that made us cry, the conflicted lyricism of a Bob Dylan song, the weekend journey to a music festival or a Buddhist Meditation retreat. The sources of inspiration are endless. We have many forms of spirituality but with different names. Many voices of the same song. To the millennial, spirituality is best represented in creative transformation and individual journey, although in consort and communion with others. When all doors are open; you experience the true crux of the millennial Spirituality: the necessity and difficulty of choice and the plurality of experience. We sample, we take, and we move on. But above all we demand authenticity and transparency. Which brings me to my concluding comments on Fat Soulhood. Fat Soul Philosophy Fat Soul Philosophy is a manner of viewing and conducting life according to the characteristics of Fat Soulhood. I introduced the general idea in the essay on the right. These characteristics are: "the capacity for loving relationships, a form of open-mindedness, an openness to complexity, a tolerance to enriching tensions, a form of personal integrity, and a concrete sense of Individuality". This philosophy wishes to bring together all variations of religious thought, spiritual practice, race, nationality, and belief system to the table. It encourages us to find contentment within ourselves and accept the plurality of experience. It pushes us to live authentically and with compassion to all forms of life. To go through the acts of creative transformation and to form authentic relationships with others that promote our sense of interconnectedness. This must make room for the actual lived experience of others which includes pain, the effects of discrimination, racism, and cultural trauma. Our nation is beset by the ghosts of racism, institutional and structural violence, poverty, gun violence, and rises in manic depression. To a millennial such as myself, these are the problems of our times and the topics of our interest because we, perhaps in our youthfulness, believe that we have the capacity and dignity to change it. The Fat Soul philosophy serves as the staging point for this deeper conversation with who I am. It makes me ask these questions and tests how much I can feel for myself, for others, and for the many nameless faces that yearn for fullness, aliveness, and security. Justice and Mysticism I am a white, middle class, privileged male. My notion of spirituality must be one that is aligned with justice, and without that alignment I myself am inauthentic. In the striving for it, I find the small moments of beauty, exaltation, triumph, and ecstasy. I find it through the arts, music, writing, marches, imagining, and dreaming. I find a strength in me, a capacity to "resist" the powers of deception and injustice, for despair and shallowness: resistance of the spirit for the possibilities of the future. Recently, as of this writing, I have been listening to Soul and Blues music, and I have found that they are my favorites. The depth of the lyrics, the moods of the chords, and the weighted rhythm evoke all of these emotions, narratives, and stories that comprise the journey of life: my journey and the journeys of others. Along with justice I am also concerned with ecstasy in the mystical sense: a dropping away of ego along with an immersion in something deeper and wider. I love the writings of Jallaludin Rumi (the great Muslim poet), Meister Eckhart (the great Christian mystic), Kahlil Gibran (the wonderful Lebanese poet), and Walt Whitman (the American poet.) To me, they express what is possible in the world and what I strive for in my own growth. To millennials like me, the coalescence of justice and ecstasy is essential. We strive for a center, for community, for acceptance, for answers, for love, for compassion, for peace, for happiness, for mindfulness, and for dreams. If this is not an expression of the spiritual capacity of millennials, then I do not know what is. It is a quest for awakening in an age of distraction, for vision in a sea of disillusionment. A journey to the soul, by the soul, and for the soul, in community with others who are also on a journey. |
Why Whitehead?
How Whitehead Helps Me Understand the World and My Experience: The Appeal of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy I am a student at Hendrix College, a liberal arts school in the American South. I am 21 years old and have a love for being outdoors, films, traveling, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. In this I am like other young Americans my age. Eager to connect with others with passports in hand. I was born in San Pietro Clarenza, Italy and moved to the United States when I was a baby. Since then I have spent time living in an area just outside of San Francisco, in the United Kingdom, and in the small state of Arkansas. I grew up quiet and very much a loner, but always curious and ambitious. I wanted to be everything and feel the vitality of creating things, even though my artistic skills were laughable. Some days, I wanted to be an actor and perform Shakespeare theatre. Other days, I wanted to retire into a library and imagine what it would be like to be a Professor. Coming to college, I was a adamant about following my cousin’s footsteps and being a National Geographic photographer and journalist. Imagine a charismatic young man with an assorted collection of leather jackets, cameras, and journals from his motorcycle tours in the Himalayas in India. That is my cousin. I hope to take photos with him one day. That is always in the back of my mind and while I recognize it as a dream, I have never once in my life stopped being a dreamer. Discovering Whitehead One of the things I appreciate about the philosophy of Whitehead is that it takes the act of dreaming so seriously. For him our minds are shaped by the past but also by the possibilities we imagine for the future, and we ourselves, in each moment, lie at the intersection of the past and future, influenced by the past yet lured by the future. This is true to my experience. I also appreciate the fact that, for Whitehead, our experience is an act of feeling (or, in his words, prehending). The physical dimensions of our lives – our relationship with our bodies and the physical influences of the surrounding word – are acts of feeling (prehending) the past actual world. But the mental dimensions of our lives – our hopes for the future, our acts of imagining what ‘can be,’ our simple pleasure in exploring ideas – are also acts of feeling. And this feeling is a universal. A German writer in the 18th century, whose pen name was Novalis, wrote a novel fragment called the Novices of Sais, which is a combination of poetry, philosophy, and imaginative journey. Novalis was influenced by the German Romantic movement, not unlike the way, much later, Whitehead was influenced by English Romanticism. In the Novices of Sais, Novalis writes: “Thinking is the dream of feeling.” I think Whitehead could have written the same sentence. Whitehead's philosophy is not unlike poetry in some ways. Whitehead would then have added that feeling goes all the way down into the depths of matter, and that it unfolds in moments of experience. Something like feeling or experience is everywhere, say process philosophers. They call it pan-experientialism. I am a pan-experientialist, too. Photography as Lures for Feeling One of my media for articulating the world of feeling is photography. Over the past few years, I have taken up photography and have found it to be one of my greatest forms of expression and joy, along with writing. Photography served as a way for me to engage with and construct nostalgia and feeling. So that, when I look back on one of my photos, I feel the elements of the photo, and I am taken into a deep layer of feeling, and I am mindful of how I myself have evolved over time in process. To me, photos capture all that is unique and beautiful about the world and the multiplicities of experience that exist within them. So in the paragraphs that follow, I write to share a bit more about the moments of feeling in my life and how Process Thought added a deeper dimension to them. Fat Soul Philosophy and Creative Transformation I first encountered Process Thought and Whitehead during the first class of my Freshman year at Hendrix College. I was taking a course on Art and Spirituality; and Dr. Jay McDaniel was teaching in the front on the different dimensions of a what he (along with a process-oriented writer named Patricia Adams Farmer) called the Fat Soul. They have coined the phrase as a way of naming what another process philosopher, Bernard Loomer, calls a Soul with Size. Here is the way Loomer speaks of it: "By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature." Along the way, Dr. McDaniel mentioned the work of Alfred North Whitehead and, in particular, the idea creative transformation. Creative transformation is John Cobb’s way of naming Whitehead’s idea that every moment of experience is a new experience, and that we ourselves can be changed or transformed along the way, by being open to new possibilities for thought and action. This made immediate sense to me, and the general idea was illustrated in the many particularities of daily life. As I write these words at my computer, I am being creatively transformed by the words and, at the same time, I am creatively transforming my past, not by changing its content, but by interpreting it in a new way. I am adding a deeper layer of meaning and feeling. In a way, as you read this, you are doing the same thing. In short, upon hearing this talk about creative transformation, I was amazed. And being the avid bookworm that I was, I went to the library and found a copy of Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. I grabbed a cup of espresso and spent the next few hours reading over the pages. It was with that that a whole new avenue of exploration and discovery emerged in my life. The Wide Scope of Process Philosophy I later took a course on Process Philosophy my sophomore year, and we read Whitehead’s book Process and Reality very carefully, a very dense and challenging read but worth the effort. I was also introduced in that course to other leading process thinkers. From then on I began to use process thought as a guiding beacon for how I conceptualize and feel the world around me. Process Thought has become a foundation for how I structure and design initiatives centered around people and ecological environments. In my mind, it offers essential skills and ideas that I can apply to anything that I pursue because it deals with the nature of change, relationality, potential, concrescence (which is my favorite term), and process. And it is a philosophy of peace and of ecological civilizations. In China, according to my understanding, many people, young and old, are working to create ecological civilizations and communities. This is admirable and necessary. The United Nations thinks so as well. To me, this is one of the most pressing of the issues that we face today and is something that I am very passionate about. Arkansas is known for its nature preserves and rich biodiversity. Walking the trails near my home and in the Redwood forests of Northern California reminds me of the need for ecological consciousness and, a term that Philip Clayton imagined, Organic Marxism. Whitehead also has much to say about ecological sustainability and his emphasis on an organismic philosophy. For me, process thought has relevance to the concerns of the world, too. I am active in my college planning events on a wide range of social issues: social justice, peace, and interfaith concerns. I am also an avid student, taking courses in an array of subjects: sociology, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, psychology, and language. When I do my studies at university or try to design new events centered around community and dialogue, I am consistently reminded of the relevance of three more Whiteheadian themes: empathy (feeling the feelings of others), narrative, and identity. These are the key elements in how we make sense of the world and of ourselves, as well as, some of the keys issues that we face in the modern world. In dealing with people around me I try to have empathy for them (feeling their feelings to the best of my ability, understand the stories of their lives (their narratives), and have a sense of the identities that are important to them, or imposed upon them, by society. These three issues extend to macro-issues such as human rights, trans-nationalism, globalization, religion, spirituality, community development, and ecological civilization. And they extend to micro-issues or personal issues as well: anxiety, joy, depression, happiness, dialogue, meaning-making, and music. Popular music plays an important role in my life, because it helps me understand what I and others can feel, have felt, or might feel. I hear this in the music of Bob Marley, John Lennon, Leon Bridges, or Michael Franti, an American musician and spoken word artist. and you will see my point. One thing that Process Thought has done is that it has given me a platform by which to take the arts seriously (photography, film, literature, music) and address macro-issues and micro-issues in a dynamic and meaningful way. A Bid for Freedom Whitehead reminds me that ‘Life is a bid for freedom’ and is a coalescence of entities seeking novelty, satisfaction, and aliveness. I am one of those entities (or a series of them, to be technical) but I am one among many, not one over many or one beneath many. We “entities’ in the world are part of a community of communities of communities gathered into a larger, evolving whole; and in a sense we are all family, and we are all self-creative. The world, so I learn from Whitehead, is inherently self-creative and is a complex collective feeling. Thus, when I work with people, I am reminded that they also want to experience novelty, satisfaction, and aliveness in a way that is not dissimilar from my life. I have a foundation for empathy with that shared desire. They, along with myself, construct personal narratives that aim at reaching these points of novelty. Some do so through art. Some music. Some find it in spirituality. But this can be an agonizing process, it is full of many paths, misunderstandings, triumphs, failures, and other conflicting narratives. Often, along that process of creating this world of satisfaction, we are held up on ideas, identities, creeds, and ideologies. With these identities, we define and bind ourselves to certain dimensions of the world. In these, we feel intensities of experience and feelings. Think of the bonds with friends, family, or memories. In some cases, even an idea. Many atrocities around the world are because of these conflicts of identity, ranging from wars, genocide, and nationalism to problems of ecological sustainability. So are many of its solutions. However, there is a reduction of identity to biography, where the mystery of who we are disappears by how narrow and constructed our self-identity is. I have found that when I look deeper into who I am and who many of my friends are, we are recreated in every moment through acts of togetherness and a care towards that which guides us towards inner and outer beauty. It calls us forward and choreographs how we become. Production of Novel Togetherness Whitehead taught me that, in a concrescence, there is a ‘production of novel togetherness’. In this, events, feelings, and modes of becoming combine together in that creative advance towards novelty. Sometimes in constructive ways, other times in destructive ways. This togetherness is the crux of process-relational philosophy because in this self-creating universe we are also in process. I have partial control over how I will become because I am a creative person. However, I am also determined by how I feel my environment. In my bid for freedom, I am partially determined by everything else. My favorite writer, Kahlil Gibran once said that: ‘“They say to me, “Should you know yourself your would know all men.” And I say, “Only when I seek all men shall I know myself.”” I believe that process thought has invoked in me this sense of relationality between all things, people, and events. It also has shown that, in order to discover my identity, I must engage with the world in all of its depth, contradictions, and inconsistencies because it makes me what I am. This has evoked in me a responsibility and a desire to help and inspire others, create communities and avenues of dialogues, and address some of the key issues we face in the modern world. I think that through this process I am discovering what it means to be uniquely human. It is with Process Thought that I designed Peace events in Arkansas, became a student ambassador to Japan through the Tomodachi Kakehashi Initiative, made a documentary on happiness and joy, and will, come this February, will be studying Entrepreneurial classes at the United International College in Zhuhai, China. To think that this journey began with Whitehead is quite strange but the more I consider it, the more it makes sense to me. A Process Millennial This novel togetherness in this continual process of substantial becoming and perpetual perishing is what has solidified my identity as a "process" millennial. I have found meaning and purpose through it and have found a way in which I can contribute to this creative advance towards novelty, community, and satisfaction. Process philosophy has taught me how to channel my deep reservoirs of feeling and help create a world that I found personally meaningful and beautiful. As I look back at the moments in my life and the constantly shifting notions of identity that I have experienced, I am reminded of the singular constant: feeling. I felt each moment and continue to feel them in my own way. Every conversation, every smile, every new idea, and every disappointment. It is in this production of novel togetherness that I become Tristan Norman, a boy who always wanted to be someone who was needed, only to discover that I am needed and wanted because I am together with others. I hope that one day, I will meet you along this path and we can talk about how we will create a better world. 
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