Ten Kinds of Novelty
Novelty means newness, freshness. Below are ten kinds of novelty that make sense from an open and relational (process) perspective. There may be many more.
Present moment novelty: The novelty of each present moment, which arises out of the self-creativity of the moment itself, as it receives and weaves together influences from the past. As the weaving occurs, the moment is a concrescing subject. Even if the subject's weaving of past influences repeats past patterns, the weaving itself is a new activity: an activity which did not exist earlier. Whitehead says that, in the immediacy of each moment, the many become one and are increased by one. This 'increase' is the self-creativity of the concrescing subject.
Cosmic novelty: "the way the earliest single light of the evening sky, in spring, creates a fresh universe out of nothing, by adding itself." The philosopher Whitehead speaks of this as the creative advance into novelty. It is the novelty of the creative advance. It should be noted that this advance can be, but is not necessarily, progressive. Even a cosmic decline, however measured, would be something new.
The novelty of each actuality: the fact that each particular actuality or event in the universe is unique in its difference from other actualities or events, even it if resembles others in various ways. This might also be called the novelty of difference, because each actuality, as different from others, is novel in its difference.
The novelty of fresh and unexpected possibilities: The novelty of fresh possibilities which, if actualized by a concrescing subject in the immediacy of the present, are significantly different from past ways of incorporating influences. There is a contrast with past patterns. In human life qualitative novelty can be pleasurable or painful, but it is surprising and sometimes shocking.
Life-enhancing novelty: The novelty of fresh possibilities which, as actualized, yield richness of experience, strength of beauty, and the myriad qualities that make life whole: attention, connectedness, compassion, imagination, justice, playfulness, silence, mystery, and zest for life, for example. See the spiritual alphabet of Spirituality and Practice.
Life-destroying novelty: The novelty of fresh possibilities which, if actualized, yield suffering and discord, sameness, and other forms of tragedy.
Creatively chaotic novelty: The novelty that emerges out of a disruption of pre-existing forms of order, making space for the emergence of life-enhancing novelty. Sometimes chaos can be life-depleting or violent, but sometimes it can be quite good and essential to the enhancement of life.
Destructively chaotic novelty: Forms of unexpected and chaotic novelty that bring about violence and harm. They are destructive in that nothing life-enhancing comes from them.
Grace: This is the newness that is felt as influences from the past are incorporated into the present in ways that differ are healing and whole-making in the present and future. This novelty can be felt and embodied by groups as well as by individuals. Some religious people call it grace.
Holy novelty: This comes in three forms. On the one hand there is (1) the novelty that happens within God's own life as God receives new influences from the world (constructive and destructive) that, as experienced, become part of God's ongoing life. The novelty (2) of how God receives the influences and weaves them into a whole with maximum harmony and intensity, maximum richness of experience, maximum beauty. The (3) the novelty of the fresh possibilities for creative transformation and for creatively chaotic novelty that God gives to the world. This is the novelty of grace.
It is often very difficult to distinguish these forms of novelty.
- Jay McDaniel, July 24, 2020
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Most of us know people who consistently try to be the first one to get the latest smartphone or technological device. They are similar to people who will sleep on the streets to make sure they get into the first screening of a movie.
Winifred Gallagher is a former psychology editor at American Health who is now a science writer and journalist. In this fascinating book, she explores the complex origins, uses, and excesses of "neophilia" — the need to seek out novelty and change.
In our information age, this phenomenon is deeply entrenched in culture and a positively viewed aspiration at the heart of capitalism. Gallagher states that perhaps 10 to 15 percent of us are avid neophobes, always on the lookout for something new and different. Some 70 to 80 percent are moderate neophobes.
The ability to constantly cope with new situations and changes enabled our species to survive the upheavals of our evolutionary movement through time. In a very interesting chapter on "The Alchemy of Anticipation," Gallagher explains the role of dopamine in the brain's chemistry as a spur to novelty and excitement:
"Dopamine makes you want things, especially new and pleasurable ones. Whenever you encounter something that's enjoyable, like a glass of wine, or intriguingly novel, like a glamorous stranger at a neighborhood party, a spritz of dopamine jacks up your level of arousal, focuses you on that target, and mobilizes your explorative approach response — a symphonic collaboration that you experience as 'Go for it!' "
Gallagher adds material on the links between novelty and nurture, culture and curiosity, and the endless cornucopia of new stuff before baptizing neophilia as a necessary survival skill in our times. Yet she issues this warning:
"If we're to make the best use of our neophilia in a new epoch of endless novelty, we must make conscious decisions to ensure that it's working for us, rather than the other way around."
Nowadays more and more people are complaining about information overload — we consume about 100,000 words each day from various media; there are 4.5 billion cell phones on the planet and even more cameras; the average worker gets three minutes to concentrate on any task before being interrupted by e-mail or a phone call; and there is far too little restorative time in this fast-forward world. According to Gallagher, reverie has been banished from childhood since kids are texting all the time.
What we desperately need is more novel ways of stopping all of us from drowning in the tsunami of new data that has upended our lives.
Winifred Gallagher is a former psychology editor at American Health who is now a science writer and journalist. In this fascinating book, she explores the complex origins, uses, and excesses of "neophilia" — the need to seek out novelty and change.
In our information age, this phenomenon is deeply entrenched in culture and a positively viewed aspiration at the heart of capitalism. Gallagher states that perhaps 10 to 15 percent of us are avid neophobes, always on the lookout for something new and different. Some 70 to 80 percent are moderate neophobes.
The ability to constantly cope with new situations and changes enabled our species to survive the upheavals of our evolutionary movement through time. In a very interesting chapter on "The Alchemy of Anticipation," Gallagher explains the role of dopamine in the brain's chemistry as a spur to novelty and excitement:
"Dopamine makes you want things, especially new and pleasurable ones. Whenever you encounter something that's enjoyable, like a glass of wine, or intriguingly novel, like a glamorous stranger at a neighborhood party, a spritz of dopamine jacks up your level of arousal, focuses you on that target, and mobilizes your explorative approach response — a symphonic collaboration that you experience as 'Go for it!' "
Gallagher adds material on the links between novelty and nurture, culture and curiosity, and the endless cornucopia of new stuff before baptizing neophilia as a necessary survival skill in our times. Yet she issues this warning:
"If we're to make the best use of our neophilia in a new epoch of endless novelty, we must make conscious decisions to ensure that it's working for us, rather than the other way around."
Nowadays more and more people are complaining about information overload — we consume about 100,000 words each day from various media; there are 4.5 billion cell phones on the planet and even more cameras; the average worker gets three minutes to concentrate on any task before being interrupted by e-mail or a phone call; and there is far too little restorative time in this fast-forward world. According to Gallagher, reverie has been banished from childhood since kids are texting all the time.
What we desperately need is more novel ways of stopping all of us from drowning in the tsunami of new data that has upended our lives.
the way the earliest single light of the evening sky, in spring,
creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself
-- Wallace Stevens
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.
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.
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Transmutation simplifies the experience of the societies that constitute so important a part of the environment. This gives the needed order. But for novelty to flourish, there must also be parts of the environment that are not ordered in this way. Chaos also makes its contribution.
Cobb Jr, John B. Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality Process Century Press. Kindle Edition. |