Frescoes in the dome of the Medici Prince's Chapel, Florence, Italy
Stillness and Swirling
Permanence and Flux in
Whitehead's Philosophy
Ideals fashion themselves round these two notions, permanence and flux. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 338). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 338). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Process philosophy and theology are often described as viewing everything as being in process. But this is a misunderstanding of Whitehead, the philosophical mentor behind the movement. His thought affirms not only the reality of change and becoming but also the enduring presence of permanence. Whitehead’s philosophy upholds a dynamic interplay between flux and stability. Certain features of reality, he insists, are indeed permanent: the past actual world, once completed, is unchanging and unchangeable; the realm of pure potentiality (eternal objects) resides in the mind of God; God’s primordial decision to order these potentialities is itself non-temporal; and the everlasting side of God's life is marked by a perpetual, empathic feeling of all sentient experience. Even more deeply, the very character of God as loving is changeless—a constant wellspring of care and compassion amid the world’s unfolding drama.
The healthy life is lived not by openness to change alone, but by openness to the stillness within the swirling—and the swirling within the stillness.
In what follows I will say more about this by appeal to two artistic sensibilities in the West: the classical (stillness) and the baroque (the swirling.)
Imagine two ways of seeing the world: the Classical and the Baroque.
The Classical emphasizes clarity, balance, proportion, and the calm beauty of ideal forms. It sees the world as something to be understood through reason, measured by harmony, and ordered by enduring principles. It sees the Permanence within the Flux.
The Baroque, by contrast, emphasizes movement, intensity, emotional depth, and sensory richness. It delights in excess—in elaborate ornamentation, dramatic contrasts, and overwhelming experiences that blur the boundaries between the sacred and the sensual, the real and the miraculous. It sees the world not as static and serene, but as dramatic, unfolding, and charged with passion and mystery.
One favors stillness; the other, swirl.
Both ways of seeing have wisdom.
We may find ourselves drawn to one more than the other depending on our temperament, cultural background, or the mood of the moment. Some may seek the clarity and control of the Classical; others, the freedom, fullness, and expressive intensity of the Baroque. But often, the richest lives—and the most resilient communities—are those that can hold both together: embracing order without rigidity, and feeling without chaos.
In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead the Classical and the Baroque are not rivals, but partners in a deeper synthesis—a way of thinking, and ultimately a way of living.
It is Classical in its interest in timeless patterns—what Whitehead calls eternal objects—that transcend the historical flux of the world but can enter into concrete reality through the process of ingression. These forms provide a sense of order, possibility, and measure, and are implicit in his vision of Harmony and Peace as ultimate ideals, especially as articulated in Adventures of Ideas. In the passage above, from Process and Reality, he speaks of our need to find intensity through, in his words, submission to permanence. Submission to ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty; wisdom, compassion, and creativity; that transcend the vicissitudes time and history, and that, as approximated in our lives, give life its vitality and meaning.
Yet Whitehead’s metaphysics is also profoundly Baroque. It is rooted in feeling, movement, and becoming—not in static being. His vision of reality centers on actual occasions of experience, each a dynamic concrescence of prehensions, decisions, and valuations. It is only within, not apart from, experience that we discover the ideals. They are the everlasting elements in the passage of fact.
Time as the Moving Image of Eternity
The discovery of such ideals is, for Whitehead, represented in the four symbolic images in the Medici chapel in Florence:
The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence—Michelangelo's masterpieces of statuary, Day and Night, Evening and Dawn—exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature.
The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature. of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’. (Process and Reality, page 338)
The universe, in his view, is not a fixed structure but a living process, a dramatic unfolding of novelty, intensity, and relationship. In this sense, Whitehead’s thought resonates with the emotional and kinetic energy of the Baroque, even as it retains a Classical appreciation for formal beauty and ideal possibility. The universe itself is included within, and part of, an inclusive consciousness - a cosmic Mind - which carries within its own constitution the timeless potentialities and the flux of the universe itself: a flux that constitutes the object content of the divine life. Even as events in the past actual world have perished in their immediacy, such that the past actual world is permanently what it is, they are felt (and thus remembered) in the consequent nature of God, such that they become everlasting in God's life. This give rise to the idea that there is a fluency in God as well as the world, and a permanence in God and the world. Whitehead puts it this way:
It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
Stillness and Swirling in Everyday Life
This synthesis of the Classical and the Baroque in Whitehead’s philosophy is not merely an academic or aesthetic insight; it quietly invites a way of living in the world—available to ordinary people as much as to philosophers and artists: a life that honors order, pattern, and beauty, yet remains open to surprise, feeling, and improvisation. It affirms that we can seek harmony and peace not by suppressing emotion or complexity, but by integrating them into a deeper wholeness. It means living with reverence for the eternal ideals—truth, goodness, beauty—while fully inhabiting the messy, moving rhythms of real life, with all its joys and ruptures.
Such a life recognizes that value is not found only in stillness or clarity, but in the ongoing process of becoming—of making meaning moment by moment through relational, embodied experience. It is a life of dynamic balance, where contemplation and passion are not opposed but braided together, where we are shaped both by what transcends us and by what pulses through us. To live in this way is to become, in Whitehead’s terms, a participant in the creative advance of the universe—not a passive observer of form, nor a victim of flux, but a co-creator of beauty in movement.
The Classical emphasizes clarity, balance, proportion, and the calm beauty of ideal forms. It sees the world as something to be understood through reason, measured by harmony, and ordered by enduring principles. It sees the Permanence within the Flux.
The Baroque, by contrast, emphasizes movement, intensity, emotional depth, and sensory richness. It delights in excess—in elaborate ornamentation, dramatic contrasts, and overwhelming experiences that blur the boundaries between the sacred and the sensual, the real and the miraculous. It sees the world not as static and serene, but as dramatic, unfolding, and charged with passion and mystery.
One favors stillness; the other, swirl.
Both ways of seeing have wisdom.
We may find ourselves drawn to one more than the other depending on our temperament, cultural background, or the mood of the moment. Some may seek the clarity and control of the Classical; others, the freedom, fullness, and expressive intensity of the Baroque. But often, the richest lives—and the most resilient communities—are those that can hold both together: embracing order without rigidity, and feeling without chaos.
In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead the Classical and the Baroque are not rivals, but partners in a deeper synthesis—a way of thinking, and ultimately a way of living.
It is Classical in its interest in timeless patterns—what Whitehead calls eternal objects—that transcend the historical flux of the world but can enter into concrete reality through the process of ingression. These forms provide a sense of order, possibility, and measure, and are implicit in his vision of Harmony and Peace as ultimate ideals, especially as articulated in Adventures of Ideas. In the passage above, from Process and Reality, he speaks of our need to find intensity through, in his words, submission to permanence. Submission to ideals such as truth, goodness, and beauty; wisdom, compassion, and creativity; that transcend the vicissitudes time and history, and that, as approximated in our lives, give life its vitality and meaning.
Yet Whitehead’s metaphysics is also profoundly Baroque. It is rooted in feeling, movement, and becoming—not in static being. His vision of reality centers on actual occasions of experience, each a dynamic concrescence of prehensions, decisions, and valuations. It is only within, not apart from, experience that we discover the ideals. They are the everlasting elements in the passage of fact.
Time as the Moving Image of Eternity
The discovery of such ideals is, for Whitehead, represented in the four symbolic images in the Medici chapel in Florence:
The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence—Michelangelo's masterpieces of statuary, Day and Night, Evening and Dawn—exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature.
The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, forever showing the essences in the nature. of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’. (Process and Reality, page 338)
The universe, in his view, is not a fixed structure but a living process, a dramatic unfolding of novelty, intensity, and relationship. In this sense, Whitehead’s thought resonates with the emotional and kinetic energy of the Baroque, even as it retains a Classical appreciation for formal beauty and ideal possibility. The universe itself is included within, and part of, an inclusive consciousness - a cosmic Mind - which carries within its own constitution the timeless potentialities and the flux of the universe itself: a flux that constitutes the object content of the divine life. Even as events in the past actual world have perished in their immediacy, such that the past actual world is permanently what it is, they are felt (and thus remembered) in the consequent nature of God, such that they become everlasting in God's life. This give rise to the idea that there is a fluency in God as well as the world, and a permanence in God and the world. Whitehead puts it this way:
It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
Stillness and Swirling in Everyday Life
This synthesis of the Classical and the Baroque in Whitehead’s philosophy is not merely an academic or aesthetic insight; it quietly invites a way of living in the world—available to ordinary people as much as to philosophers and artists: a life that honors order, pattern, and beauty, yet remains open to surprise, feeling, and improvisation. It affirms that we can seek harmony and peace not by suppressing emotion or complexity, but by integrating them into a deeper wholeness. It means living with reverence for the eternal ideals—truth, goodness, beauty—while fully inhabiting the messy, moving rhythms of real life, with all its joys and ruptures.
Such a life recognizes that value is not found only in stillness or clarity, but in the ongoing process of becoming—of making meaning moment by moment through relational, embodied experience. It is a life of dynamic balance, where contemplation and passion are not opposed but braided together, where we are shaped both by what transcends us and by what pulses through us. To live in this way is to become, in Whitehead’s terms, a participant in the creative advance of the universe—not a passive observer of form, nor a victim of flux, but a co-creator of beauty in movement.
The Swirling
More on the Baroque Movement
In Our Time
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the culture of the Baroque. What do the music of Bach, the Colonnades of St Peter’s, the paintings of Caravaggio and the rebuilding of Prague have in common? The answer is the Baroque – a term used to describe a vast array of painting, music, architecture and sculpture from the 17th and 18th centuries.Baroque derives from the word for a misshapen pearl and denotes an art of effusion, drama, grandeur and powerful emotion. Strongly religious it became the aesthetic of choice of absolute monarchs. But the more we examine the Baroque, the more subtle and mysterious it becomes. It is impossible to discuss 17th century Europe without it, yet it is increasingly hard to say what it is. It was coined as a term of abuse, denounced by thinkers of the rational Enlightenment and by Protestant cultures which read into Baroque the excess, decadence and corruption they saw in the Catholic Church. With Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge; Nigel Aston, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester and Helen Hills, Professor of Art History at the University of York