The Future of the Process Movement:
One Person's Perspective
Jay McDaniel
I have been committed to the process movement for over forty years. I want to talk about its future, suggesting that it is moving from a Whitehead phase to a more Expansive phase. The Expansive phase includes, but is more than, the Whitehead phase. Its expanded horizons include different kinds of people, different interests, and different modes of communication, including artistic modes.
Let me emphasize at the outset that talking about the future of the process is not the only purpose of this page. Another purpose of this page is to identify twenty key ideas that people in the process movement hold in common. These ideas represent what I mean by a process outlook on life. Still another is to offer a video series for those interested in reading Whitehead's Process and Reality. And still another is to offer links to multiple sources for those interested in the process movement. On, then, to the movement.
I am among the very few in the process movement who avoid the word "worldview." I don't expect many or any to follow my lead but I'd like to begin by explaining my reservations with the word. While many use the word worldview rather than the phrase outlook on life, I prefer outlook for two reasons.
First, the word worldview can suggest a very precise way of understanding reality, whereas, at least for me, the word outlook suggests instead a more general gestalt that need not be filled in with more precision. In my experience over the years, many who are part of the process community are more interested in a general gestalt than in an excess of precision, and many others are turned off to process thought itself because it too often leans too much into precision, often with jargon attached. I remember a friend once saying something to the effect: "I like much of what process philosophers, but I think they say too much. It's death by precision."
Second, and here I am influence by Heidegger, the world "worldview" can suggest a conceptual box, mental frame, verbal grid, or airtight system into which the whole of experienced reality must be fit. This idea of fitting the world into a conceptual box is itself part of the problem today. Another name for it is the will-to-power. For my part, I want to avoid the idea that everything needs to be fit into a box and thus controlled conceptually. The process movement, whatever it is, needs to make space for mystery: that is, for a world whose beauty is always more than any mental maps we might find to understand it.
Nevertheless, I realize that for many people the word worldview does not suggest excessive precision or an airtight system, so I will use the word "worldview" and "outlook on life" synonymously. The question that really concerns me here is the future of the process movement.
Process Movement as a Global Affinity Group
The movement consists of people around the world who form a global affinity group. Some are philosophers, theologians, sociologists, economists, and scientists. Others are poets, accountants, clerks, farmers, musicians, homemakers, artists, attorneys, and small business owners. Many of them are over forty, but some are millennials and younger. See, for example, Process and Generation Z and Why are Some Young People in China drawn to Process Thought: It's a Lifestyle and I am a Process Millennial.
Some might wrongly think that the movement today is primarily Christian, due to the heavy influence of Christian process theology, so it can help to name the different types of people who, today, are part of the movment. I borrow the language from the field of Religious Studies. Process practioners include:
These various types can be, and are combined, in the lives of many who belong to the process community. The community includes Christian theists and non-theists, Zen Buddhists and Pure Land Buddhists, Conservative Jews and Progressive Muslims, and many Nones. Amid their differences they share a common outlook on life and an aspiration to live in the world in an open and relational way. One easy way to understand their common outlook is offered below with my list of Twenty Key Ideas in Process Thought. Most subscribe to at least fifteen of the twenty key ideas, having internalized aspects of a process worldview or outlook on life.
A Movement with Two Phases: The Whitehead Phase and the Expansive Phase
Before turning to the twenty ideas, however, I want to say more about the current phase of the process movement itself. I suggest that it has two phases.
The first phase of the process movement was the Whitehead Phase and the second is the Expansive Phase. The first phase was once centered in, but not limited to, the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, which has now moved to Salem, Oregon. Its luminaries include John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Suchocki, Mary Elizabeth Moore, Philip Clayton, Roland Faber, Monica Coleman, and its current director, Andrew Schwartz. One of its legacies in Claremont is the Cobb Institute for Process Studies.
The Expansive Phase is indebted to Whitehead and those who introduced him to the wider world, including and perhaps especially John Cobb. Indeed, John Cobb's own career spans both phases, and in much of his work he has spawned this second phase with books such as For the Common Good and The Liberation of Life and, too often neglected, his books for laypeople in Christian churches such as Praying for Jennifer. Cobb has been instrumental in democratizing and internationalizing the process movement with his work in China, Korea, and Japan. In many respects he is a bridge between the two phases.
How the Expansive Phase differs from the Whitehead Phase
The phrase Expansive Phase could suggest that it has moved past Whitehead. This is not necessarily true. Many participants in the Expansive Phase are very interested in the philosophy of Whitehead, as am I. Indeed, in a section below, I offer a video series that can help people read Whitehead's Process and Reality.
Nevertheless, the Expansive Phase of the process movement builds upon, but also moves beyond, the Whitehead phase in several ways.
A Threefold Path
Thus the question emerges, around what is the process movement centered? What is its public face? Its brand?
For my part, I see the Process Way as having three sides of life philosophical, ethical, and spiritual. Most participants in the process community emphasize:
For many in the process movement, the spiritual component is very important, even if they are not religiously affiliated or do not find themselves believing in God. The diagram below, developed by Spirituality and Practice, illustrates the emotional and thematic range of process spirituality:
Let me emphasize at the outset that talking about the future of the process is not the only purpose of this page. Another purpose of this page is to identify twenty key ideas that people in the process movement hold in common. These ideas represent what I mean by a process outlook on life. Still another is to offer a video series for those interested in reading Whitehead's Process and Reality. And still another is to offer links to multiple sources for those interested in the process movement. On, then, to the movement.
I am among the very few in the process movement who avoid the word "worldview." I don't expect many or any to follow my lead but I'd like to begin by explaining my reservations with the word. While many use the word worldview rather than the phrase outlook on life, I prefer outlook for two reasons.
First, the word worldview can suggest a very precise way of understanding reality, whereas, at least for me, the word outlook suggests instead a more general gestalt that need not be filled in with more precision. In my experience over the years, many who are part of the process community are more interested in a general gestalt than in an excess of precision, and many others are turned off to process thought itself because it too often leans too much into precision, often with jargon attached. I remember a friend once saying something to the effect: "I like much of what process philosophers, but I think they say too much. It's death by precision."
Second, and here I am influence by Heidegger, the world "worldview" can suggest a conceptual box, mental frame, verbal grid, or airtight system into which the whole of experienced reality must be fit. This idea of fitting the world into a conceptual box is itself part of the problem today. Another name for it is the will-to-power. For my part, I want to avoid the idea that everything needs to be fit into a box and thus controlled conceptually. The process movement, whatever it is, needs to make space for mystery: that is, for a world whose beauty is always more than any mental maps we might find to understand it.
Nevertheless, I realize that for many people the word worldview does not suggest excessive precision or an airtight system, so I will use the word "worldview" and "outlook on life" synonymously. The question that really concerns me here is the future of the process movement.
Process Movement as a Global Affinity Group
The movement consists of people around the world who form a global affinity group. Some are philosophers, theologians, sociologists, economists, and scientists. Others are poets, accountants, clerks, farmers, musicians, homemakers, artists, attorneys, and small business owners. Many of them are over forty, but some are millennials and younger. See, for example, Process and Generation Z and Why are Some Young People in China drawn to Process Thought: It's a Lifestyle and I am a Process Millennial.
Some might wrongly think that the movement today is primarily Christian, due to the heavy influence of Christian process theology, so it can help to name the different types of people who, today, are part of the movment. I borrow the language from the field of Religious Studies. Process practioners include:
- Single Religious Affiliates: Bahai's, Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, Daoists, Jews, Muslims, Naturalists, Pagans, Skeptics, and Unitarian Universalists.
- Multiple Religious Affiliates: Christians influenced by Buddhism; Chinese influenced by Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Marxism, and Chinese Folks Traditions; Jews influenced by Buddhism; and Muslims with Christian sympathies.
- Spiritually Interested Nones: people who are spiritually interested but do not identify with any religious tradition
- Theists (God is a fellow sufferer who understands),
- Non-Theists (God is a force or energy, of the moral arc of the universe, but not a person),
- Non-Dual Mystics (God is a creative abyss of which all things are manifestations)
- Gentle Non-Believers (people who believe in love and wisdom and openness, but who are not inclined to believe in any kind of higher power or deeper source, and who do not think of themselves as "believing in God")
These various types can be, and are combined, in the lives of many who belong to the process community. The community includes Christian theists and non-theists, Zen Buddhists and Pure Land Buddhists, Conservative Jews and Progressive Muslims, and many Nones. Amid their differences they share a common outlook on life and an aspiration to live in the world in an open and relational way. One easy way to understand their common outlook is offered below with my list of Twenty Key Ideas in Process Thought. Most subscribe to at least fifteen of the twenty key ideas, having internalized aspects of a process worldview or outlook on life.
A Movement with Two Phases: The Whitehead Phase and the Expansive Phase
Before turning to the twenty ideas, however, I want to say more about the current phase of the process movement itself. I suggest that it has two phases.
The first phase of the process movement was the Whitehead Phase and the second is the Expansive Phase. The first phase was once centered in, but not limited to, the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, which has now moved to Salem, Oregon. Its luminaries include John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Suchocki, Mary Elizabeth Moore, Philip Clayton, Roland Faber, Monica Coleman, and its current director, Andrew Schwartz. One of its legacies in Claremont is the Cobb Institute for Process Studies.
The Expansive Phase is indebted to Whitehead and those who introduced him to the wider world, including and perhaps especially John Cobb. Indeed, John Cobb's own career spans both phases, and in much of his work he has spawned this second phase with books such as For the Common Good and The Liberation of Life and, too often neglected, his books for laypeople in Christian churches such as Praying for Jennifer. Cobb has been instrumental in democratizing and internationalizing the process movement with his work in China, Korea, and Japan. In many respects he is a bridge between the two phases.
How the Expansive Phase differs from the Whitehead Phase
The phrase Expansive Phase could suggest that it has moved past Whitehead. This is not necessarily true. Many participants in the Expansive Phase are very interested in the philosophy of Whitehead, as am I. Indeed, in a section below, I offer a video series that can help people read Whitehead's Process and Reality.
Nevertheless, the Expansive Phase of the process movement builds upon, but also moves beyond, the Whitehead phase in several ways.
- Non-Whiteheadian Sources: The Expansive Phase draws upon many sources not fully recognized in the Whitehead phase. These include other process perspectives as found, for example, in various western traditions (Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Giles Deleuze) as well as Daoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and contemplative Christian traditions.
- Not as Focused on the Whiteheadian System: The Expansive Phase focuses more on "thinking in a Whiteheadian mode" than in "fitting everything into a Whiteheadian box." (I borrow this language from Roland Faber.)
- Interested in Urgent Problems: The Expansive Phase is often more interested in urgent problems of the day than in metaphysics. These practical problems include global climate change, economic disparities, political repression, a violation of human rights, environmental despoliation, the abuse of animals, and the debilitating effects of consumer culture.
- International Participation: The Expansive Phase is (or is becoming) post-western and more international in spirit and scope. (Some of this internalization occurs with the help of the International Process Network and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and also by means of writers living outside the United States developing process perspectives: e.g. Farhan Shah developing a Muslim process theology influenced by Muhammad Iqbal.)
- Not just academic: The participants in the Expansive Phase are not necessarily academics in any formal sense. They include many people who are not especially interested in Whitehead's philosophy, but who are drawn to the twenty key ideas identified below.
- A Role for the Arts: Many of its participants seek to articulate the process way artistically and poetically, not simply philosophically.
- Online Presence: It has a stronger online presence and is not as fixed upon the idea of a book-in-print.
- Younger Participants: It has a small but growing number of younger participants, especially in East Asia, who are adding fresh energy to what otherwise might be an aging group.
- Small Process Communities: It has spawned small, localized "process communities" that are interested in exploring the process outlook and way artistically and musically, not simply philosophically.
- Ecological Civilization as Social Ideal: Many of its participants are drawn to the idea of Ecological Civilization as the social ideal of the movement.
A Threefold Path
Thus the question emerges, around what is the process movement centered? What is its public face? Its brand?
For my part, I see the Process Way as having three sides of life philosophical, ethical, and spiritual. Most participants in the process community emphasize:
- an organic way of thinking about the world (process philosophy, process thought, and process theology)
- a compassionate way of living in the world (process practice, process ethics)
- an ongoing process of being open to the many modes of emotional intelligence that can enrich human life (process spirituality)
For many in the process movement, the spiritual component is very important, even if they are not religiously affiliated or do not find themselves believing in God. The diagram below, developed by Spirituality and Practice, illustrates the emotional and thematic range of process spirituality:
But spirituality ought not be elevated above the others. The three dimensions - worldview, ethics, and spirituality --are all important. There is no need to say that worldviews come first and actions second, or that spirituality is more important than worldviews and actions. The three dimensions feed into one another and form a holistic way of living available to individuals and communities. It might best be called the process way.
The Hope of the Process Way: Personal Fulfillment in Local Contexts and Ecological Civilization
Of course the process way is but an abstraction, unless embodied in, and enriched by, local commmuties, customs and rituals, friends and family, and concrete social circumstances. It need not be named "the process way" in order to be effective. Others call it an "open and relational way" or simply "a deeply humane way." The hope of those who practice the way is not that process philosophy or process theology or the process outlook on life will "save the world." It is that it might be combined with, and enriched by, local traditions, cultural and religious, thereby adding joy to people at a personal and inter-personal level, and empowering them to help heal a broken world, to the best of their abilities.
For many in the process community, the image of a healthy world is that of an Ecological Civilization. The building blocks of such a civilization are local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, diverse, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. Many see Ecological Civilization as a needed alternative to more modernist or neo-liberal approaches to life that over-emphasize individuality at the expense of community, novelty at the expense of tradition, urban values at the expense of rural values, corporate power at the expense of people power, money over love.
It is only in light of this more general image of a way of living that I turn to what I take to be the Twenty Key Ideas in process thinking and then, after that, the philosophy of Whitehead. If you are interested in understanding his philosophy, I encourage you to take a look at twenty-one short videos for reading Process and Reality. The following twenty ideas form what I would take to be the process gestalt.
The Hope of the Process Way: Personal Fulfillment in Local Contexts and Ecological Civilization
Of course the process way is but an abstraction, unless embodied in, and enriched by, local commmuties, customs and rituals, friends and family, and concrete social circumstances. It need not be named "the process way" in order to be effective. Others call it an "open and relational way" or simply "a deeply humane way." The hope of those who practice the way is not that process philosophy or process theology or the process outlook on life will "save the world." It is that it might be combined with, and enriched by, local traditions, cultural and religious, thereby adding joy to people at a personal and inter-personal level, and empowering them to help heal a broken world, to the best of their abilities.
For many in the process community, the image of a healthy world is that of an Ecological Civilization. The building blocks of such a civilization are local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, diverse, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. Many see Ecological Civilization as a needed alternative to more modernist or neo-liberal approaches to life that over-emphasize individuality at the expense of community, novelty at the expense of tradition, urban values at the expense of rural values, corporate power at the expense of people power, money over love.
It is only in light of this more general image of a way of living that I turn to what I take to be the Twenty Key Ideas in process thinking and then, after that, the philosophy of Whitehead. If you are interested in understanding his philosophy, I encourage you to take a look at twenty-one short videos for reading Process and Reality. The following twenty ideas form what I would take to be the process gestalt.
Twenty Key Ideas
in the Process Worldview
1. Process: The universe is an ongoing process of development and change, never quite the same at any two moments. Every entity in the universe is best understood as a process of becoming that emerges through its interactions with others. The beings of the world are becomings.
2. Interconnectedness: The universe as a whole is a seamless web of interconnected events, none of which can be completely separated from the others. Everything is connected to everything else and contained in everything else. As Buddhists put it, the universe is a network of inter-being.
3. Continuous Creativity: The universe exhibits a continuous creativity on the basis of which new events come into existence over time which did not exist beforehand. This continuous creativity is the ultimate reality of the universe. Everywhere we look we see it. Even God is an expression of Creativity.
4. Nature as Alive: The natural world has value in itself and all living beings are worthy of respect and care. Rocks and trees, hills and rivers are not simply facts in the world; they are also acts of self-realization. The whole of nature is alive with value. We humans dwell within, not apart from, the Ten Thousand Things. We, too, have value.
5. Ethics: Humans find their fulfillment in living in harmony with the earth and compassionately with each other. The ethical life lies in living with respect and care for other people and the larger community of life. Justice is fidelity to the bonds of relationship. A just society is also a free and peaceful society. It is creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually satisfying - with no one left behind.
6. Novelty: Humans find their fulfillment in being open to new ideas, insights, and experiences that may have no parallel in the past. Even as we learn from the past, we must be open to the future. God is present in the world, among other ways, through novel possibilities. Human happiness is found, not only in wisdom and compassion, but also in creativity.
7. Thinking and Feeling: The human mind is not limited to reasoning but also includes feeling, intuiting, imagining; all of these activities can work together toward understanding. Even reasoning is a form of feeling: that is, feeling the presence of ideas and responding to them. There are many forms of wisdom: mathematical, spatial, verbal, kinesthetic, empathic, logical, and spiritual.
8. Relational Selfhood: Human beings are not skin-encapsulated egos cut off from the world by the boundaries of the skin, but persons-in-community whose interactions with others are partly definitive of their own internal existence. We depend for our existence on friends, family, and mentors; on food and clothing and shelter; on cultural traditions and the natural world. The communitarians are right: there is no "self" apart from connections with others. The individualists are right, too. Each person is unique, deserving of respect and care. Other animals deserve respect and care, too.
9. Complementary Thinking: The process way leans toward both-and thinking, not either-or thinking. The rational life consists not only of identifying facts and appealing to evidence, but taking apparent conflicting ideas and showing how they can be woven into wholes, with each side contributing to the other. In Whitehead’s thought these wholes are called contrasts. To be "reasonable" is to be empirical but also imaginative: exploring new ideas and seeing how they might fit together, complementing one another.
10. Theory and Practice: Theory affects practice and practice affects theory; a dichotomy between the two is false. What people do affects how they think and how they think affects what they do. Learning can occur from body to mind: that is, by doing things; and not simply from mind to body.
11. The Primacy of Persuasion over Coercion: There are two kinds of power – coercive power and persuasive power – and the latter is to be preferred over the former. Coercive power is the power of force and violence; persuasive power is the power of invitation and moral example.
12. Relational Power: This is the power that is experienced when people dwell in mutually enhancing relations, such that both are “empowered” through their relations with one another. In international relations, this would be the kind of empowerment that occurs when governments enter into trade relations that are mutually beneficial and serve the wider society; in parenting, this would be the power that parents and children enjoy when, even amid a hierarchical relationship, there is respect on both sides and the relationship strengthens parents and children.
13. The Primacy of Particularity: There is a difference between abstract ideas that are abstracted from concrete events in the world, and the events themselves. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness lies in confusing the abstractions with the concrete events and focusing more on the abstract than the particular.
14. Experience in the Mode of Causal Efficacy: Human experience is not restricted to acting on things or actively interpreting a passive world. It begins by a conscious and unconscious receiving of events into life and being causally affected or influenced by what is received. This occurs through the mediation of the body but can also occur through a reception of the moods and feelings of other people (and animals).
15. Concern for the Vulnerable: Humans are gathered together in a web of felt connections, such that they share in one another’s sufferings and are responsible to one another. Humans can share feelings and be affected by one another’s feelings in a spirit of mutual sympathy. The measure of a society does not lie in questions of appearance, affluence, and marketable achievement, but in how it treats those whom Jesus called "the least of these" -- the neglected, the powerless, the marginalized, the otherwise forgotten.
16. Evil: “Evil” is a name for debilitating suffering from which humans and other living beings suffer, and also for the missed potential from which they suffer. Evil is powerful and real; it is not merely the absence of good. “Harm” is a name for activities, undertaken by human beings, which inflict such suffering on others and themselves, and which cut off their potential. Evil can be structural as well as personal. Systems -- not simply people -- can be conduits for harm.
17. Education as a Lifelong Process: Human life is itself a journey from birth (and perhaps before) to death (and perhaps after) and the journey is itself a process of character development over time. Formal education in the classroom is a context to facilitate the process, but the process continues throughout a lifetime. Education requires romance, precision, and generalization. Learning is best when people want to learn.
18. Religion and Science: Religion and Science are both human activities, evolving over time, which can be attuned to the depths of reality. Science focuses on forms of energy which are subject to replicable experiments and which can be rendered into mathematical terms; religion begins with awe at the beauty of the universe, awakens to the interconnections of things, and helps people discover the norms which are part of the very make-up of the universe itself.
19. God: The universe unfolds within a larger life – a love supreme – who is continuously present within each actuality as a lure toward wholeness relevant to the situation at hand. In human life we experience this reality as an inner calling toward wisdom, compassion, and creativity. Whenever we see these three realities in human life we see the presence of this love, thus named or not. This love is the Soul of the universe and we are small but included in its life not unlike the way in which embryos dwell within a womb, or fish swim within an ocean, or stars travel throught the sky. This Soul can be addressed in many ways, and one of the most important words for addressing the Soul is "God." The stars and galaxies are the body of God and any forms of life which exist on other planets are enfolded in the life of God, as is life on earth. God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. As God beckons human beings toward wisdom, compassion, and creativity, God does not know the outcome of the beckoning in advance, because the future does not exist to be known. But God is steadfast in love; a friend to the friendless; and a source of inner peace. God can be conceived as "father" or "mother" or "lover" or "friend." God is love.
20. Faith: Faith is not intellectual assent to creeds or doctrines but rather trust in divine love. To trust in love is to trust in the availability of fresh possibilities relative to each situation; to trust that love is ultimately more powerful than violence; to trust that even the galaxies and planets are drawn by a loving presence; and to trust that, no matter what happens, all things are somehow gathered into a wider beauty. This beauty is the Adventure of the Universe as One.
Explanation:
Process thinking is an attitude toward life emphasizing respect and care for the community of life. It is concerned with the well-being of individuals and also with the common good of the world, understood as a community of communities of communities. It sees the world as a process of becoming and the universe as a vast network of inter-becomings. It sees each living being on our planet as worthy of respect and care.
People influenced by process thinking seek to live lightly on the earth and gently with others, sensitive to the interconnectedness of all things and delighted by the differences. They believe that there are many ways of knowing the world -- verbal, mathematical, aesthetic, empathic, bodily, and practical - and that education should foster creativity and compassion as well as literacy.
Process thinkers belong to many different cultures and live in many different regions of the world: Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, North America, and Oceania. They include teenagers, parents, grandparents, store-clerks, accountants, farmers, musicians, artists, and philosophers.
Many of the scholars in the movement are influenced by the perspective of the late philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead. His thinking embodies the leading edge of the intellectual side of process thinking. Nevertheless, a mastery of his ideas is not necessary to be a process thinker. Ultimately process thinking is an attitude and outlook on life, and a way of interacting with the world. It is not so much a rigidly-defined worldview as it is a way of feeling the presence of the world and responding with creativity and compassion.
The tradition of process thinking can be compared to a growing and vibrant tree, with blossoms yet to unfold. The roots of the tree are the many ideas developed by Whitehead in his mature philosophy. They were articulated most systematically in his book Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. The trunk consists of more general ideas which have been developed by subsequent thinkers from different cultures, adding creativity of their own. These general ideas flow from Whitehead's philosophy, but are less technical in tone. The branches consist of the many ways in which these ideas are being applied to daily life and community development. The branches include applications to a wide array of topics, ranging from art and music to education and ecology.
Much of this website -- Open Horizons - is devoted to the branches and trunk. Of course, some people will be interested in the roots. For those interested in gaining knowledge of the roots, we have created a free course of short videos which provides an introduction to Alfred North Whitehead's organic philosophy and serves as a guiding companion to Whitehead's seminal work, Process and Reality. These twenty six-minute videos are offered below. They can be viewed in sequence or in parts, depending on your interests. If you would like to get started on this short course to better understand the roots of process thinking, go to What is Process Thought? The ideas above represent the twenty key ideas in the trunk.
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Lesson OneLesson FourLesson SevenLesson TenLesson ThirteenLesson SixteenLesson Nineteen |
Lesson TwoLesson FiveLesson EightLesson ElevenLesson FourteenLesson SeventeenLesson Twenty |
Lesson ThreeLesson SixLesson NineLesson TwelveLesson FifteenLesson Eighteen |
Thumbnail Sketch of the Videos
Introduction
Process Thought is an Attitude and Outlook on Life,
International in Scope, Influenced by the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
This video introduces process thought and explains the purpose of the series. Dr. Jay McDaniel (the narrator) introduces himself and presents process thought as an attitude toward life emphasizing creativity, interconnectedness, and respect for life. He gives you a sense of who and where process thinkers are, and he introduces a diagram -- the Tree Diagram -- which compares process thought to a growing tree.
The roots are Whitehead's philosophy; the trunk consists of twenty key ideas that flow from his philosophy; and the brances consist of application. The twenty key ideas can be found in English and Chinese on the JJB website: Twenty Key Ideas. JJB also introduces many applications of process thinking on a wide variety of topics: ecology, education, culture, spirituality, science, art, music, and food culture, for example.
For example, if you are interested in practical applications to ecology, see John Cobb's Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet. Or if you are interested in spirituality, see Replanting Yourself in Beauty or Trust in Beauty.
However, this course focuses on the roots as developed in Whitehead's Process and Reality. As you take the course it is helpful, but not necessary, to have a copy of Whitehead's Process and Reality alongside you, making sure that you read the selected pages. It is best to read the text very slowly, without rushing. Do not worry if there are phrases you do not understand. If you watch and reflect upon these videos, you will have a good understanding of many ideas in Process and Reality.
Lesson One
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, pages xi-xii
Key Theme: There are four sources for wisdom: Science, Art, Religion, and Ethics.
This lesson focuses on the first two pages of the preface to Process and Reality. With help from highlighted texts, it presents Whitehead's aims in writing the book; explains that Whitehead spoke of his philosophy as a philosophy of organism; and talks about four kinds of experience Whitehead wanted to unify: scientific, aesthetic, moral, and religious. At the end Dr. McDaniel explains that, for Whitehead, the wisdom of the perspective he develops will lie in the overall scheme, and that this scheme is gradually developed throughout the book.
Lesson Two
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii
Key Theme: Thinking and feeling and decision-making form a whole.
Following a brief review of the previous lesson, this lesson turns to a list of nine fallacies which Whitehead lists in the preface found on page xiii of the Preface. These are fallacies which Whitehead seeks to avoid. This lesson focuses on three of them: (1) the fallacy of distrusting speculative philosophy, (2) the fallacy of trusting that language is an adequate expression of ideas, and (3) the fallacy of thinking that the human mind can be divided into mutually external compartments or faculties.
Lesson Three
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: Reality does not conform to subject-predicate grammar.
Lesson three continues in explication of nine ideas repudiated or rejected by Whitehead as he begins to develop his philosophy. After a short review of the previous lesson, Dr. McDaniel discusses one of the most important "fallacies" Whitehead sought to avoid. It is that of thinking that the world in which we live, and our experience of it, can be understood on the analogy of the subject-predicate mode of grammatical expression. In so doing the lesson introduces an idea that is central to the process tradition: namely that "entities" emerge out of their relations with other "entities" and that there are no entities existing in isolation. The emphasis on relationality is one reason that Whitehead called his philosophy a philosophy of organism.
Lesson Four
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: In philosophy no form of experience should be excluded.
Lesson Four presents Whitehead's idea that the starting point for philosophical thought is experience and explains that, for Whitehead, all kinds of experience must be taken into account: experience anxious and carefree, experience happy and grieving, experience emotional and experience intellectual, experience normal and abnormal, experience asleep and experience awake. This lesson also introduces the idea that Whitehead was a radical empiricist, rejecting the sensationalist doctrine of perception in the interests of recognizing the potential wisdom of many forms of experience.
Lesson Five
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: There are no vacuous actualities; nature is alive.
With help from visual images from the French artist and post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), this lesson introduces Whitehead's idea that the whole of the universe is "alive" in varying degrees and ways, and that there are no vacuous actualities. A vacuous actuality is an actuality which lacks any interiority or agency; it is a mere thing. Whitehead's philosophy is known for its proposal that all genuine actualities in our universe prehend their actual worlds from their own perspective, and that the objects we see in our world are either genuine actualities in their own right or nexus (aggregates) of such actualities. Mountains, for example, are aggregate expressions of actualities with prehensive vitality. One well-known process philosopher, David Ray Griffin, speaks of this as panexperientialism. In this website we sometimes call it panprehensionality. Whitehead's notion of prehension is dealt with in a subsequent lesson.
Lesson Six
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiv
Key Theme: We all have worldviews, but no one has the final word.
Lesson Six introduces four impressions that dominate Whitehead's thinking as he writes Process and Reality: (1) The age of criticism has done it's work, and it is time for construction, (2) the true method of philosophical construction is to frame a set of ideas, drawing from many forms of experience, and see if they help interpret and illuminate experience, (3) all forms of thought are influenced by a philosophical scheme of one sort or another, acknowledged or not, and (4) when it comes to sounding the depths of things, all schemes are finite and fallible. "The merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
Lesson Seven
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 7
Key Theme: Creativity is the ultimate reality of the universe
Lesson Seven explores four key themes, based on a very important paragraph in the first chapter of Part One of Process and Reality. The ideas are that (1) the ultimate reality is Creativity, which is ultimate by virtue of its actualizations; (2) God is the primordial self-actualization of creativity, but not the ultimate reality itself, (3) the emphasis on Creativity resembles Asian -- Chinese and Indian -- ways of thinking; and (4) when it comes to thinking about ultimates, some process thinkers (but not Whitehead himself) speak of different kinds of ultimates around which different cultural and religious traditions may be centered.
Lesson Eight
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 22
Key Idea: The actual entity is a process of prehending the actual world.
Lesson Eight begins the process of explicating the eight key "categories of existence" as adumbrated in Whitehead's Process and Reality. Among Whiteheadians there are two complementary ways of understanding an actual entity. One way begins with submicroscopic matter and works "up" to human experience. It presents actual entities as very tiny energy-events with the depths of matter. The other way begins with a single moment of human experience and works "down" to submicroscopic matter. It presents actual entities as activities, or processes, amid which, in the moment at hand, a human being feels the presence of the actual world. This lesson begins in the second way. It embodies what philosophers might call a phenomenological approach to Whitehead's idea of an actual entity. In the tradition of Whiteheadian scholarship there are many approaches: phenomenological, speculative, and post-structural.
Phenomenological approaches begin with lived human experience; speculative approaches begin with speculations about the universe; post-structural approaches begin more general sensibilities concerning multiplicity, difference, interconnectedness, and flow. In these lessons we often begin phenomenologically, but feel free to turn in the other two directions. And so it is with most Whiteheadian thinkers.
Lesson Nine
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 21
Key Idea: The many become one and are increased by one.
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.
Lesson Ten
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 18
Key Theme: Everything - even God -- is an act of experiencing.
Lesson Ten focuses on a unique paragraph in Process and Reality, where Whitehead proposes an answer to the question: What is everything made of? Whereas some traditions in the world might way that everything is made of something like matter and whereas some might say that everything is made of consciousness; Whitehead proposes a more Buddhist or Chinese response. Everything is made of events or, to be more specific, drops of experience, complex and interdependent. Here we find a vivid instance of Whitehead's event-cosmology. In traditional Chinese thinking philosophers speak of the totality of all that exists as wan wu (萬物) sometimes translated as the Ten Thousand Things. In a Whiteheadian context the Ten Thousand Things are Ten Thousand Events. There is nothing more real than events, and they are themselves drops of experience. At any given moment we ourselves are events composed of our own experience, yet related to everything else in the universe. God is an event, too. And so is a puff of energy in outer space. The universe is a vast unfolding network of inter-being or, perhaps better, inter-events.
Lesson Eleven
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 39
Key Idea: There are two kinds of reality: actuality and potentiality.
In Whitehead's philosophy something is "real" if it can be experienced as an object of one sort or another and thus, as an object, make a difference in experience. Lesson Eleven introduces the idea that some objects of experience are possibilities rather than actualities. They are real but not actual, because they do not feel or prehend their surroundings and do not make decisions. The most abstract of these objects are what Whitehead calls eternal objects. They are pure potentials which may be actualized in some universe or cosmic epoch, even if not our own. These objects are similar to Plato's Forms, and Whitehead was indeed influenced by Plato. The lesson concludes with remarks concerning the creative and performing arts and the natural sciences, suggesting that they are ways of exploring and presenting potentialities.
Lesson Twelve
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 23
Key Idea: Propositions are not simply statements of belief; they are lures for feeling.
Lesson Twelve discusses Whitehead's idea of a proposition -- or lure for feeling -- showing how propositions are means by which novelty enters the world. By way of illustration, this segment plays some of the music of the jazz musician, John Coltrane, and presents propositions in light of the innovative spirit of jazz. Whitehead proposes that, at every moment of our lives, we are improvising responses to given situations, adding our own voice to the very history of the universe. Other creatures are doing this, too. We live in an improvisational universe, in which indeterminacy is as real, and as important, as determinacy. Thus, for Whitehead, the future is always open, and the future is never entirely pre-determined by the past or the present. This is the case even for God, who knows what is possible in the future, but not what is actual until it becomes actual.
Lesson Thirteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 51.
Key Idea: Prehensions are the means by which entities are present in others.
Lesson Thirteen introduces two of the most important ideas in Whitehead's philosophy: prehensions and subjective forms. . Every actual entity, every moment of experience, consists of acts of experiencing or prehending many realities which "become one" in the act of experiencing them. The realities can be other actual entities or pure potentialities, or combinations of them. Prehensions may be conscious or unconscious; in human life most are unconscious. Consciousness is but the tip of the experiential iceberg. Prehensions are the most fundamental element in actual entities, the means by which the universe is held together and things are present in one another. Lesson Thirteen takes a conversation between a mother and her daughter as a way of illustration prehension and their complementary notion: subjective forms.
Lesson Fourteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 34.
Key Idea: Reality is thoroughly social. Molecules and atoms, planets and stars are societies, too. There are no self-contained facts.
Lesson Fourteen introduces the ideas of nexus and society to readers. Most of the macroscopic objects that we perceive around us are not single actual entities, but rather aggregates of actual entities unified by their prehensions of one another (nexus) and perhaps also by a common characteristic which they inherit from predecessors in the the nexus, thus giving them more specific definition (society). There are many kinds of societies. A human being is a society too. She is a personally-ordered society who consists of many moments of experience (many actual entities) in succession, each inheriting from the predecessors with special intimacy. There is no single person who underlies the change; there are many subjects in succession. The idea is very Buddhist: "No thinker thinks twice and no experiencer experiences twice." Lesson Fourteen ends by offering the idea that perhaps the universe as a whole is gathered into an ongoing Life, too. This is what Whitehead means by the consequent nature of God.
Lesson Fifteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 81.
Key Idea: The body plays an essential role in human life: the withness of the body.
Lesson Fifteen introduces three ideas that are important to Whitehead in Process and Reality: the withness of the body, experience in the mode of causal efficacy, and experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. Experience in the mode of causal efficacy is visceral experience. It occurs when we feel affected or influenced by bodily states and by realities outside our bodies in direct, energetic ways. It is an important part of bodily experience and serves a perpetual reminder that, in our daily lives, we are with our bodies and our bodies are with us. Whitehead calls it the withness of the body. This does not mean that our minds are precisely identifical with our bodies; we can have attitudes toward our bodies which are healthy or unhealthy, and these attitudes occur in our minds. But our bodies are marvelously intricate and complex systems of energy which nourish us, give us a sense of direction, offer us wisdom, and connect us with the world. And ultimately, says Whitehead, the whole world is like a body to us. Even God -- if God exists-- is embodied. The universe is God's body.
Lesson Sixteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 43
Key Idea: Decision is the very meaning of actuality
Lesson Sixteen focuses on Whitehead's idea that the very meaning of actuality lies in the notion of decision. In Whitehead's philosophy a decision is not a "conscious" decision, but rather a subjectivity activity -- conscious or unconscious -- in which some possibilities for responding to a given situation are excluded or cut off, while others are then actualizes. A woman climbing a mountain, movement by moment, is making conscious decisions which constitute her very actualityi in the moment at hand. And so, thinks Whitehead, are the energy-events within the very depths of atoms. Understood in this way, decision is one of the primary expressions of the ultimate reality of the universe: creativity. Decisions may be wise or unwise, productive or destructive, violent or graceful -- whatever their nature, they are the very reason why things unfolds as they do. From Whitehead's perspective the universe is not simply an unfolding of abstract ideas. The world is not the outcome of mathematical formulas. It is the outcome of decisions.
Lesson Seventeen
Key Text: Process and Reality, pages 48-51.
Key Idea: Every moment of human experience is a concrescence of the universe.
Lesson Seventeen offers the most systematic summary of Whitehead's idea of experience available in this series of videos. The diagrams were created by a student at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA. There is a danger in diagrams, insofar as they can lead people into overly-static and linear ways of looking at the world. Whitehead's philosophy is more holistic and dynamic. This means that, when we think of experience, we need to hold onto diagrams with a relaxed grasp, fully aware that experience is always more than images. Nevertheless, the diagrams may help viewers more fully understand Whitehead's concept of experience. In the narrative the experiencing subject is imagined as a human being, but it is important to remember that, in Whitehead's philosophy, there is subjectivity everywhere: in the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Even in the depths of atoms, and even in the depths of God, there is something akin to what is depicted in the diagrams: prehending, subjective form, and decision. However, in God, as Whitehead understands God, there is no perishing of immediacy. God is the inclusive and everlasting act of concrescence who shares in all finite moments such as those depicted above. (See Lesson Nineteen.)
Lesson Eighteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 229
Key Idea: The beauty of life is felt in contrast; the aim of life is to weave them.
Lesson Eighteen introduces an idea which is extremely important to Whitehead, and which he lists as among the eight categories of existence he seeks to illuminate in Process and Reality. This is the idea of contrasts. For some in the English-speaking world, the word contrast can suggest conflict; but for Whitehead it suggested complementarity. The yin-yang diagram in traditional Chinese thinking offers a helpful image of contrasts. Whitehead was interested in how we can experience objects in the world through contrasts, and also in how we try to weave our own emotions -- our subjective forms -- into contrasts. He believed that all experiencing subjects, anywhere in the universe, are seeking contrasts or, to use another word important to him, beauty. They - we -- seek harmony and intensity, neither to the exclusion of the other. In the very seeking there is a zest or vitality which, for Whitehead, is part of life's meaning. Even the adventure of the universe as One -- even God -- is enriched by and forever seeking a harmony of contrasts.
Lesson Nineteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, pages 342-351
Relevant Idea: God is a non-coercive guide and a fellow sufferer who understands.
Lesson Nineteen presents Whitehead's understanding of God. This is an aspect of Whitehead's cosmology which which many religiously-minded people find especially important: whether Jewish or Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Taoist or Buddhist. In Whitehead's philosophy God has two aspects: a non-coercive but guiding aspect which is home to all the potentialities which the universe can actualize, and which is within each experiencing subject as its own innermost lure toward full aliveness; and a receptive side which shares in the experiences of all living beings, anywhere and everywhere, and is affected by all that is felt. God is, as it were, the deep Mind and the deep Listening. Whitehead thought it more rational to believe in God, thus understood, than not to believe in God; and he believed that this way of thinking about God is consonant with the view of the universe we gain from post-mechanistic science. In a later book, Adventures of Ideas, he speaks of the guiding side of God as an Eros by which the universe is lured into adventure, moment by moment, epoch by epoch; and the receptive side as a Harmony of Harmonies within which, in certain moments, the restlessness of adventure drops away and people feel deep peace.
Lesson Twenty
Relevant Text: Process and Reality as a Whole
Key Idea: Why Whitehead? So many reasons.
Lesson Twenty brings the series to a close by articulating various reasons why people in different parts of the world are attracted to Whitehead's philosophy. To the many reasons identified in the video, one very important reason should be added. Many scholars in the academic world believe that Whitehead's philosophy can advance knowledge in specific disciplines: chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, biology, philosophy, economics, business, culture studies. The work of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, can introduce readers to developments in these and many other areas. It is the best single, online resource for finding resources and keeping abreast of developments within the disciplines.
At the same time, Whitehead's philosophy offers a way of moving beyond the disciplinary fragmentation that has separated academic disciplines from one another and from forms of practice, in real world, which might help guide the world toward sustainable communities. When it comes to practicing process thought, some Whiteheadian thinkers turn toward particular questions of public policy: economics,agriculture, manufacturing, education, governance. In this website, John Cobb's Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet and Foundations for a New Civilization offers an intimation of the policy-oriented directions. There is also much work being done today using Whitehead's thought encourage cross-cultural dialogue, including inter-religious dialogue. Why Whitehead? So many reasons.
This does not mean that Whitehead's philosophy has all the answers. For Whiteheadians the world needs many points of view, including many which offer critiques of Whitehead's own thinking. Whitehead hoped that his own ideas would be tested, applied, revised and, where necessary, replaced. And he did not want his philosophy to be turned into a dogma. Recall the point he makes in the preface: "How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly." (xiv) Process philosophy is more -- much more -- than Whitehead. It is an ongoing tradition, inspired by Whitehead's ideas, but moving beyond his thinking, too, fully cognizant that there are no final answers, only lures for feeling.
Process Thought is an Attitude and Outlook on Life,
International in Scope, Influenced by the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
This video introduces process thought and explains the purpose of the series. Dr. Jay McDaniel (the narrator) introduces himself and presents process thought as an attitude toward life emphasizing creativity, interconnectedness, and respect for life. He gives you a sense of who and where process thinkers are, and he introduces a diagram -- the Tree Diagram -- which compares process thought to a growing tree.
The roots are Whitehead's philosophy; the trunk consists of twenty key ideas that flow from his philosophy; and the brances consist of application. The twenty key ideas can be found in English and Chinese on the JJB website: Twenty Key Ideas. JJB also introduces many applications of process thinking on a wide variety of topics: ecology, education, culture, spirituality, science, art, music, and food culture, for example.
For example, if you are interested in practical applications to ecology, see John Cobb's Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet. Or if you are interested in spirituality, see Replanting Yourself in Beauty or Trust in Beauty.
However, this course focuses on the roots as developed in Whitehead's Process and Reality. As you take the course it is helpful, but not necessary, to have a copy of Whitehead's Process and Reality alongside you, making sure that you read the selected pages. It is best to read the text very slowly, without rushing. Do not worry if there are phrases you do not understand. If you watch and reflect upon these videos, you will have a good understanding of many ideas in Process and Reality.
Lesson One
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, pages xi-xii
Key Theme: There are four sources for wisdom: Science, Art, Religion, and Ethics.
This lesson focuses on the first two pages of the preface to Process and Reality. With help from highlighted texts, it presents Whitehead's aims in writing the book; explains that Whitehead spoke of his philosophy as a philosophy of organism; and talks about four kinds of experience Whitehead wanted to unify: scientific, aesthetic, moral, and religious. At the end Dr. McDaniel explains that, for Whitehead, the wisdom of the perspective he develops will lie in the overall scheme, and that this scheme is gradually developed throughout the book.
Lesson Two
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii
Key Theme: Thinking and feeling and decision-making form a whole.
Following a brief review of the previous lesson, this lesson turns to a list of nine fallacies which Whitehead lists in the preface found on page xiii of the Preface. These are fallacies which Whitehead seeks to avoid. This lesson focuses on three of them: (1) the fallacy of distrusting speculative philosophy, (2) the fallacy of trusting that language is an adequate expression of ideas, and (3) the fallacy of thinking that the human mind can be divided into mutually external compartments or faculties.
Lesson Three
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: Reality does not conform to subject-predicate grammar.
Lesson three continues in explication of nine ideas repudiated or rejected by Whitehead as he begins to develop his philosophy. After a short review of the previous lesson, Dr. McDaniel discusses one of the most important "fallacies" Whitehead sought to avoid. It is that of thinking that the world in which we live, and our experience of it, can be understood on the analogy of the subject-predicate mode of grammatical expression. In so doing the lesson introduces an idea that is central to the process tradition: namely that "entities" emerge out of their relations with other "entities" and that there are no entities existing in isolation. The emphasis on relationality is one reason that Whitehead called his philosophy a philosophy of organism.
Lesson Four
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: In philosophy no form of experience should be excluded.
Lesson Four presents Whitehead's idea that the starting point for philosophical thought is experience and explains that, for Whitehead, all kinds of experience must be taken into account: experience anxious and carefree, experience happy and grieving, experience emotional and experience intellectual, experience normal and abnormal, experience asleep and experience awake. This lesson also introduces the idea that Whitehead was a radical empiricist, rejecting the sensationalist doctrine of perception in the interests of recognizing the potential wisdom of many forms of experience.
Lesson Five
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiii (cont.)
Key Theme: There are no vacuous actualities; nature is alive.
With help from visual images from the French artist and post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), this lesson introduces Whitehead's idea that the whole of the universe is "alive" in varying degrees and ways, and that there are no vacuous actualities. A vacuous actuality is an actuality which lacks any interiority or agency; it is a mere thing. Whitehead's philosophy is known for its proposal that all genuine actualities in our universe prehend their actual worlds from their own perspective, and that the objects we see in our world are either genuine actualities in their own right or nexus (aggregates) of such actualities. Mountains, for example, are aggregate expressions of actualities with prehensive vitality. One well-known process philosopher, David Ray Griffin, speaks of this as panexperientialism. In this website we sometimes call it panprehensionality. Whitehead's notion of prehension is dealt with in a subsequent lesson.
Lesson Six
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, Preface, page xiv
Key Theme: We all have worldviews, but no one has the final word.
Lesson Six introduces four impressions that dominate Whitehead's thinking as he writes Process and Reality: (1) The age of criticism has done it's work, and it is time for construction, (2) the true method of philosophical construction is to frame a set of ideas, drawing from many forms of experience, and see if they help interpret and illuminate experience, (3) all forms of thought are influenced by a philosophical scheme of one sort or another, acknowledged or not, and (4) when it comes to sounding the depths of things, all schemes are finite and fallible. "The merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly."
Lesson Seven
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 7
Key Theme: Creativity is the ultimate reality of the universe
Lesson Seven explores four key themes, based on a very important paragraph in the first chapter of Part One of Process and Reality. The ideas are that (1) the ultimate reality is Creativity, which is ultimate by virtue of its actualizations; (2) God is the primordial self-actualization of creativity, but not the ultimate reality itself, (3) the emphasis on Creativity resembles Asian -- Chinese and Indian -- ways of thinking; and (4) when it comes to thinking about ultimates, some process thinkers (but not Whitehead himself) speak of different kinds of ultimates around which different cultural and religious traditions may be centered.
Lesson Eight
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 22
Key Idea: The actual entity is a process of prehending the actual world.
Lesson Eight begins the process of explicating the eight key "categories of existence" as adumbrated in Whitehead's Process and Reality. Among Whiteheadians there are two complementary ways of understanding an actual entity. One way begins with submicroscopic matter and works "up" to human experience. It presents actual entities as very tiny energy-events with the depths of matter. The other way begins with a single moment of human experience and works "down" to submicroscopic matter. It presents actual entities as activities, or processes, amid which, in the moment at hand, a human being feels the presence of the actual world. This lesson begins in the second way. It embodies what philosophers might call a phenomenological approach to Whitehead's idea of an actual entity. In the tradition of Whiteheadian scholarship there are many approaches: phenomenological, speculative, and post-structural.
Phenomenological approaches begin with lived human experience; speculative approaches begin with speculations about the universe; post-structural approaches begin more general sensibilities concerning multiplicity, difference, interconnectedness, and flow. In these lessons we often begin phenomenologically, but feel free to turn in the other two directions. And so it is with most Whiteheadian thinkers.
Lesson Nine
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 21
Key Idea: The many become one and are increased by one.
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.
Lesson Ten
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 18
Key Theme: Everything - even God -- is an act of experiencing.
Lesson Ten focuses on a unique paragraph in Process and Reality, where Whitehead proposes an answer to the question: What is everything made of? Whereas some traditions in the world might way that everything is made of something like matter and whereas some might say that everything is made of consciousness; Whitehead proposes a more Buddhist or Chinese response. Everything is made of events or, to be more specific, drops of experience, complex and interdependent. Here we find a vivid instance of Whitehead's event-cosmology. In traditional Chinese thinking philosophers speak of the totality of all that exists as wan wu (萬物) sometimes translated as the Ten Thousand Things. In a Whiteheadian context the Ten Thousand Things are Ten Thousand Events. There is nothing more real than events, and they are themselves drops of experience. At any given moment we ourselves are events composed of our own experience, yet related to everything else in the universe. God is an event, too. And so is a puff of energy in outer space. The universe is a vast unfolding network of inter-being or, perhaps better, inter-events.
Lesson Eleven
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 39
Key Idea: There are two kinds of reality: actuality and potentiality.
In Whitehead's philosophy something is "real" if it can be experienced as an object of one sort or another and thus, as an object, make a difference in experience. Lesson Eleven introduces the idea that some objects of experience are possibilities rather than actualities. They are real but not actual, because they do not feel or prehend their surroundings and do not make decisions. The most abstract of these objects are what Whitehead calls eternal objects. They are pure potentials which may be actualized in some universe or cosmic epoch, even if not our own. These objects are similar to Plato's Forms, and Whitehead was indeed influenced by Plato. The lesson concludes with remarks concerning the creative and performing arts and the natural sciences, suggesting that they are ways of exploring and presenting potentialities.
Lesson Twelve
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 23
Key Idea: Propositions are not simply statements of belief; they are lures for feeling.
Lesson Twelve discusses Whitehead's idea of a proposition -- or lure for feeling -- showing how propositions are means by which novelty enters the world. By way of illustration, this segment plays some of the music of the jazz musician, John Coltrane, and presents propositions in light of the innovative spirit of jazz. Whitehead proposes that, at every moment of our lives, we are improvising responses to given situations, adding our own voice to the very history of the universe. Other creatures are doing this, too. We live in an improvisational universe, in which indeterminacy is as real, and as important, as determinacy. Thus, for Whitehead, the future is always open, and the future is never entirely pre-determined by the past or the present. This is the case even for God, who knows what is possible in the future, but not what is actual until it becomes actual.
Lesson Thirteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 51.
Key Idea: Prehensions are the means by which entities are present in others.
Lesson Thirteen introduces two of the most important ideas in Whitehead's philosophy: prehensions and subjective forms. . Every actual entity, every moment of experience, consists of acts of experiencing or prehending many realities which "become one" in the act of experiencing them. The realities can be other actual entities or pure potentialities, or combinations of them. Prehensions may be conscious or unconscious; in human life most are unconscious. Consciousness is but the tip of the experiential iceberg. Prehensions are the most fundamental element in actual entities, the means by which the universe is held together and things are present in one another. Lesson Thirteen takes a conversation between a mother and her daughter as a way of illustration prehension and their complementary notion: subjective forms.
Lesson Fourteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 34.
Key Idea: Reality is thoroughly social. Molecules and atoms, planets and stars are societies, too. There are no self-contained facts.
Lesson Fourteen introduces the ideas of nexus and society to readers. Most of the macroscopic objects that we perceive around us are not single actual entities, but rather aggregates of actual entities unified by their prehensions of one another (nexus) and perhaps also by a common characteristic which they inherit from predecessors in the the nexus, thus giving them more specific definition (society). There are many kinds of societies. A human being is a society too. She is a personally-ordered society who consists of many moments of experience (many actual entities) in succession, each inheriting from the predecessors with special intimacy. There is no single person who underlies the change; there are many subjects in succession. The idea is very Buddhist: "No thinker thinks twice and no experiencer experiences twice." Lesson Fourteen ends by offering the idea that perhaps the universe as a whole is gathered into an ongoing Life, too. This is what Whitehead means by the consequent nature of God.
Lesson Fifteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 81.
Key Idea: The body plays an essential role in human life: the withness of the body.
Lesson Fifteen introduces three ideas that are important to Whitehead in Process and Reality: the withness of the body, experience in the mode of causal efficacy, and experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. Experience in the mode of causal efficacy is visceral experience. It occurs when we feel affected or influenced by bodily states and by realities outside our bodies in direct, energetic ways. It is an important part of bodily experience and serves a perpetual reminder that, in our daily lives, we are with our bodies and our bodies are with us. Whitehead calls it the withness of the body. This does not mean that our minds are precisely identifical with our bodies; we can have attitudes toward our bodies which are healthy or unhealthy, and these attitudes occur in our minds. But our bodies are marvelously intricate and complex systems of energy which nourish us, give us a sense of direction, offer us wisdom, and connect us with the world. And ultimately, says Whitehead, the whole world is like a body to us. Even God -- if God exists-- is embodied. The universe is God's body.
Lesson Sixteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 43
Key Idea: Decision is the very meaning of actuality
Lesson Sixteen focuses on Whitehead's idea that the very meaning of actuality lies in the notion of decision. In Whitehead's philosophy a decision is not a "conscious" decision, but rather a subjectivity activity -- conscious or unconscious -- in which some possibilities for responding to a given situation are excluded or cut off, while others are then actualizes. A woman climbing a mountain, movement by moment, is making conscious decisions which constitute her very actualityi in the moment at hand. And so, thinks Whitehead, are the energy-events within the very depths of atoms. Understood in this way, decision is one of the primary expressions of the ultimate reality of the universe: creativity. Decisions may be wise or unwise, productive or destructive, violent or graceful -- whatever their nature, they are the very reason why things unfolds as they do. From Whitehead's perspective the universe is not simply an unfolding of abstract ideas. The world is not the outcome of mathematical formulas. It is the outcome of decisions.
Lesson Seventeen
Key Text: Process and Reality, pages 48-51.
Key Idea: Every moment of human experience is a concrescence of the universe.
Lesson Seventeen offers the most systematic summary of Whitehead's idea of experience available in this series of videos. The diagrams were created by a student at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, USA. There is a danger in diagrams, insofar as they can lead people into overly-static and linear ways of looking at the world. Whitehead's philosophy is more holistic and dynamic. This means that, when we think of experience, we need to hold onto diagrams with a relaxed grasp, fully aware that experience is always more than images. Nevertheless, the diagrams may help viewers more fully understand Whitehead's concept of experience. In the narrative the experiencing subject is imagined as a human being, but it is important to remember that, in Whitehead's philosophy, there is subjectivity everywhere: in the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Even in the depths of atoms, and even in the depths of God, there is something akin to what is depicted in the diagrams: prehending, subjective form, and decision. However, in God, as Whitehead understands God, there is no perishing of immediacy. God is the inclusive and everlasting act of concrescence who shares in all finite moments such as those depicted above. (See Lesson Nineteen.)
Lesson Eighteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, page 229
Key Idea: The beauty of life is felt in contrast; the aim of life is to weave them.
Lesson Eighteen introduces an idea which is extremely important to Whitehead, and which he lists as among the eight categories of existence he seeks to illuminate in Process and Reality. This is the idea of contrasts. For some in the English-speaking world, the word contrast can suggest conflict; but for Whitehead it suggested complementarity. The yin-yang diagram in traditional Chinese thinking offers a helpful image of contrasts. Whitehead was interested in how we can experience objects in the world through contrasts, and also in how we try to weave our own emotions -- our subjective forms -- into contrasts. He believed that all experiencing subjects, anywhere in the universe, are seeking contrasts or, to use another word important to him, beauty. They - we -- seek harmony and intensity, neither to the exclusion of the other. In the very seeking there is a zest or vitality which, for Whitehead, is part of life's meaning. Even the adventure of the universe as One -- even God -- is enriched by and forever seeking a harmony of contrasts.
Lesson Nineteen
Relevant Text: Process and Reality, pages 342-351
Relevant Idea: God is a non-coercive guide and a fellow sufferer who understands.
Lesson Nineteen presents Whitehead's understanding of God. This is an aspect of Whitehead's cosmology which which many religiously-minded people find especially important: whether Jewish or Muslim or Christian, Hindu or Taoist or Buddhist. In Whitehead's philosophy God has two aspects: a non-coercive but guiding aspect which is home to all the potentialities which the universe can actualize, and which is within each experiencing subject as its own innermost lure toward full aliveness; and a receptive side which shares in the experiences of all living beings, anywhere and everywhere, and is affected by all that is felt. God is, as it were, the deep Mind and the deep Listening. Whitehead thought it more rational to believe in God, thus understood, than not to believe in God; and he believed that this way of thinking about God is consonant with the view of the universe we gain from post-mechanistic science. In a later book, Adventures of Ideas, he speaks of the guiding side of God as an Eros by which the universe is lured into adventure, moment by moment, epoch by epoch; and the receptive side as a Harmony of Harmonies within which, in certain moments, the restlessness of adventure drops away and people feel deep peace.
Lesson Twenty
Relevant Text: Process and Reality as a Whole
Key Idea: Why Whitehead? So many reasons.
Lesson Twenty brings the series to a close by articulating various reasons why people in different parts of the world are attracted to Whitehead's philosophy. To the many reasons identified in the video, one very important reason should be added. Many scholars in the academic world believe that Whitehead's philosophy can advance knowledge in specific disciplines: chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, biology, philosophy, economics, business, culture studies. The work of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, can introduce readers to developments in these and many other areas. It is the best single, online resource for finding resources and keeping abreast of developments within the disciplines.
At the same time, Whitehead's philosophy offers a way of moving beyond the disciplinary fragmentation that has separated academic disciplines from one another and from forms of practice, in real world, which might help guide the world toward sustainable communities. When it comes to practicing process thought, some Whiteheadian thinkers turn toward particular questions of public policy: economics,agriculture, manufacturing, education, governance. In this website, John Cobb's Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet and Foundations for a New Civilization offers an intimation of the policy-oriented directions. There is also much work being done today using Whitehead's thought encourage cross-cultural dialogue, including inter-religious dialogue. Why Whitehead? So many reasons.
This does not mean that Whitehead's philosophy has all the answers. For Whiteheadians the world needs many points of view, including many which offer critiques of Whitehead's own thinking. Whitehead hoped that his own ideas would be tested, applied, revised and, where necessary, replaced. And he did not want his philosophy to be turned into a dogma. Recall the point he makes in the preface: "How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly." (xiv) Process philosophy is more -- much more -- than Whitehead. It is an ongoing tradition, inspired by Whitehead's ideas, but moving beyond his thinking, too, fully cognizant that there are no final answers, only lures for feeling.
