​The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

​so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” like so many Williams poems, is experimental. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another. He had a famous maxim, “No ideas but in things,” which I take to mean that to speak about ideas, emotions, and abstractions, we must ground them firmly in the things of the world. 

- Craig Morgan Teicher, Poetry Foundation

​The Spectral Luminosity of Ordinary Things

​Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.  Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it might display? (Virginia Woolf)

To convey the qualities of an elusive, luminous halo: this may be the aim of theology, as much as it was the goal of Woolf’s fiction. It is, indeed, what has led me to the image of glory. Not the blinding lights of its triumphalist counterfeits, the  reflection of gold, or the glamour of celebrity, but a quality inseparable from life in all its fragility and ambiguities. Displaying both light and darkness, this halo is perhaps like the almond-shaped auras of Byzantine iconography – also called “glories.” It is the spectral luminosity of ordinary things, neither irresistible nor self-sufficient, but incessantly alluring. It is often barely perceptible, yet some-times disconcerting – even terrifying. The apparent aberrations of its depictions do not diminish a theologian’s zeal to convey its varying, hazy radiance. Drawn by passion to the glory that flickers in the midst of everyday life, theology speaks of its “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.” This is a spirit that cannot be confined to neatly defined theological concepts or categories. And yet theologians persist in our weak attentiveness, “resolute” (Keller) in our attempts to describe it, however inaccurately and distortedly. We seek, with feeble words and images to express the inexpressible, in a multiplicity of voices, languages, and genres.  

- Mayra Rivera in Glory: The First Passion in Theology.

Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies at Harvard Divinity School, offers the helpful image of how we might perceive the “spectral luminosity of ordinary things.”  She is no romantic; she doesn’t believe that ordinary things are always pleasant or good.  Sometimes they can be terrifying.  But she does believe that they are luminous: they shine forth out of their own particularity.  How might we sense this shining?  Often philosophers and theologians try to help by seeking words and images to convey it.  And how easily they – we – simultaneously fall into what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  We begin to confuse the abstract ideas in our minds with the spectral luminosity of, say, the red wheelbarrow and the chickens standing next to it.  This is especially tempting when we use big words with upper-case letters: God and Spirit, for example.  Or Ultimate Reality.  We become lost in our heads and affixed to the words.  The generalities become our gods.  We must get back to the red wheelbarrow.  Whitehead can help.  He encourages us to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/10/2021

​Whitehead on the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

​
​The aim at generalization is sound, but the estimate of success is exaggerated. There are two main forms of such overstatement. One form is what I have termed, elsewhere, the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories. Thus the success of a philosophy is to be measured by its comparative avoidance of this fallacy, when thought is restricted within its categories.

The other form of overstatement consists in a false estimate of logical procedure in respect to certainty, and in respect to premises. Philosophy has been haunted by the unfortunate notion that its method is dogmatically to indicate premises which are severally clear, distinct, and [12] certain; and to erect upon those premises a deductive system of thought.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (pp. 7-8). Free Press. Kindle Edition. 

Spectral Reminders 

• You are always more than your concept of yourself.
• Other people are always more than our concepts of them.
• The natural world is always more than our concept of it.
• God is always more than our concept of God.
• The moreness of each entity is its existence beyond our generalities: its concreteness.
• This moreness is always specific to the entity at issue.
• It is the spectral luminosity of an ordinary thing.

Interpreting the Fallacy
​
Jay McDaniel
​

 
For Whitehead each actuality in the universe, in its particularity, is more than we can say about it.  It transcends our generalizations, our ideas about it, not because it is to abstract but because it is so concrete.  If we think otherwise, we fall into what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
​
Take, for example, a single moment of human experience, your own.  A single moment of experience is, for Whitehead, truly concrete.  He speaks of it as an actual entity.  Here the word “entity” should not suggest something solid and inert, but rather something that is itself a happening or an event. Its concreteness includes each and every feeling you are having at this moment; your memories (prehensions) of past events, both conscious and unconscious; your aims for the future, both conscious and unconscious; your relations with yourself, with other people, with the natural world around you, and with the heavens, both conscious and unconscious; the value you have for yourself in the moment at hand, consciously and unconsciously; the value others have in themselves, which influences you both consciously and unconsciously; the ideas you have in your mind and your feeling of their presence; and, not least, your act of improvising a response to all that affects you, which Whitehead calls an act of ‘decision.’ 
​
It is all these factors, plus many more, that constitute your experience at this moment.  Indeed, thinks Whitehead, your experience includes felt relations with the whole history of the universe, because your experience is, in his words, a concrescence of the universe.  In his words: “An actual entity is concrete because it is such a particular concrescence of the universe.”  Put simply, your concreteness transcends any idea you or someone else might have about you and contains multitudes of other entities.   As Whitehead puts it, your immediate experience begins with the universe and in some sense possesses it: “Just as Descartes said, ‘this body is mine’; so he should have said, ‘this actual world is mine,  My process of ‘being myself’ is my origination from my possession of the world.”

If someone were to draw a generalization about your experience at this moment and say, for example, “Jill is happy” or “Jill is a good person” or “Jill is a woman” or “Jill is a Republican” or “Jill is confused,’ that person may or may not be naming a feature of your experience at this moment you embody in the moment at hand.  What the person says may be “true” or “false.”   But there is so much more to you, here and now, than the person’s generalization allows.  And if you yourself are making the generalization, there is more to you than is contained in how you think of yourself.  You do not really know yourself fully.  The actual you transcends the generalizations you make about yourself.  

And so it is for everything in the universe.  They are always more than our ideas about them, even red wheelbarrows.  We may try to ground our language in the things of this world, but even the "things of this world" elude our characterizations.  A mysticism of the concrete begins and ends with a sense of humility and amazement: a recognition that our generalizations are always transcended, not by higher generalizations, but by the concreteness of each thing.  Lesson to be learned?  Behold the red wheelbarrow and know that it is more than your beholding.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/9/2021

Process and Wheelbarrows
​

Yes, I know.  For Whitehead every actual entity is an ingression of many pure potentialities (eternal objects) that are actualized by the entity at issue.  Generalizations can themselves illuminate the potentialities.  When it comes to red wheelbarrows, "red" is one of those generalizations.  We might even speak of all red wheelbarrows and develop a cult of one sort or another.

When it comes to hauling leaves, real and specific wheelbarrows are better than metaphysical wheelbarrows.  Spectral luminosity is the intrinsic value of a given entity, a given thing, as it carries the influence of all the others.  Luminosity is always relational.  The luminosity shines forth of itself, from the entity at issue. 

Our calling, as human beings, is to live with respect for spectral luminosity, especially as it shines forth from other people, other animals, the earth and stars.  The process worldview can help.  But if the worldview gets in the way, it is best to let it slip into the background, lest its own generalities become abstract gods that take us away from the concrete things of this world, red wheelbarrows for example. 

In Whitehead's thought, even God, even the Deep Listening, is concrete in this way.  Metaphysics can speak of God, but God is not a metaphysical entity.  God is not an abstraction.  God is as actual in God's way as are wheelbarrows in their ways.  The calling we received from the Listening is to join the splendor, to listen with the Listening, and then, as needed, rake and haul the leaves.  For more on the raking, see Process Theology and Raking Leaves.  Our actions, too, are luminous.  But in the beginning, there must be a recognition of what Mayra Rivera calls the "glories" of ordinary life.  So much depends on the red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chicken.