The Immortality of the Nightingale
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and John Keats (1795-1821) were both haunted by the intuition of another order, a world of Value, that lies beyond the perpetual perishing of the world. Keats presents this world in Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale. A friend writes: "From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings?" [1] The grecian urn and the nightingale were among those images. They were revelations of an everlasting world of Value experienced through beauty.
A sense of this world of Value, for Keats, was not at all pain-free.
"More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our need for art." [2]
Whitehead, too, had a powerful sense of Beauty, telling us in Adventures of Ideas that it is the very telos of the universe. For Whitehead Beauty includes, as Keats would well understand, tragic beauty. Beauty is beautiful, but not always happy.
Where does beauty dwell? Despite the fact that Whitehead is considered a "process" philosopher; for Whitehead as for Keats, there much more to reality than process or becoming. True, for Whitehead, process is quite real. Process includes what he calls the "perpetual perishing" of the actual world. But he doesn't think perishing is the whole story. Whitehead puts the point in Process and Reality: "But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story."
The implication is that the whole story of the universe includes a timeless realm of value. Keats depicts it in his image of the nightingale in Ode to a Nightingale. The nightingale and its song represent a realm of value that presents itself in the world of action but that partakes of something eternal.
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown."
The nightingale is, to use TS Eliot's phrase, the "objective correlate" of immortality. It both embodies and points to something more than process.
Whitehead says much the same in his essay on Immortality in his talk at Harvard in 1941. The world of Value is, in his words, "timeless and immortal." And yet it is discovered within, not apart from, the world of facts and actions. In his words: "Value refers to fact and fact refers to Value."
In what sense, if any, does the world of Value transcend the world of fact and perishing? Perhaps the immortality of the nightingale is simple the sameness of her song in different periods of time. Or perhaps it is but a projection of the poetic imagination, unreal apart from the imagining.
But there is another option. In Process and Reality Whitehead speaks of a cosmic mind, enveloping the universe, in whose experience all values are remembered, cherished and retained. The immortality of the nightingale would be its presence in the life of God; and the poetic imagination - the poet's empathy for the nightingale - would be one way of participating in this life.
On this view the nightingale is in the world and in God. It would have, as it were, two homes. Whitehead suggests that we humans have two homes, too. We live our lives in both worlds: a world of Activity and a world of Value. They intersect but are not precisely the same. We hear the world of value, among many other places, in the singing of the nightingale. We can be at home in the world, but it is not the whole story.
- Jay McDaniel, 11/12/2022
[1] The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats
[2] The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats
A sense of this world of Value, for Keats, was not at all pain-free.
"More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our need for art." [2]
Whitehead, too, had a powerful sense of Beauty, telling us in Adventures of Ideas that it is the very telos of the universe. For Whitehead Beauty includes, as Keats would well understand, tragic beauty. Beauty is beautiful, but not always happy.
Where does beauty dwell? Despite the fact that Whitehead is considered a "process" philosopher; for Whitehead as for Keats, there much more to reality than process or becoming. True, for Whitehead, process is quite real. Process includes what he calls the "perpetual perishing" of the actual world. But he doesn't think perishing is the whole story. Whitehead puts the point in Process and Reality: "But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story."
The implication is that the whole story of the universe includes a timeless realm of value. Keats depicts it in his image of the nightingale in Ode to a Nightingale. The nightingale and its song represent a realm of value that presents itself in the world of action but that partakes of something eternal.
"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I heard this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown."
The nightingale is, to use TS Eliot's phrase, the "objective correlate" of immortality. It both embodies and points to something more than process.
Whitehead says much the same in his essay on Immortality in his talk at Harvard in 1941. The world of Value is, in his words, "timeless and immortal." And yet it is discovered within, not apart from, the world of facts and actions. In his words: "Value refers to fact and fact refers to Value."
In what sense, if any, does the world of Value transcend the world of fact and perishing? Perhaps the immortality of the nightingale is simple the sameness of her song in different periods of time. Or perhaps it is but a projection of the poetic imagination, unreal apart from the imagining.
But there is another option. In Process and Reality Whitehead speaks of a cosmic mind, enveloping the universe, in whose experience all values are remembered, cherished and retained. The immortality of the nightingale would be its presence in the life of God; and the poetic imagination - the poet's empathy for the nightingale - would be one way of participating in this life.
On this view the nightingale is in the world and in God. It would have, as it were, two homes. Whitehead suggests that we humans have two homes, too. We live our lives in both worlds: a world of Activity and a world of Value. They intersect but are not precisely the same. We hear the world of value, among many other places, in the singing of the nightingale. We can be at home in the world, but it is not the whole story.
- Jay McDaniel, 11/12/2022
[1] The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats
[2] The Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats