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​"The close study of nature - that's where he really had his grounding as an artist. He wasn't really interested in too much imaginative invention. He needed to work from the model. He brought a lot of subjective intensity to that, which you can feel in the intense colors, surging rhythms, the blade-like leaves, and these brilliant, contrasting colors."

- Dr. Scott Allan, Associate Curator, Getty Museum, video below
Everything is alive in some way. Everything carries within it some capacity for feeling its surroundings, even if in an unconscious way. Even ostensibly dead things, even inorganic matter, has its own kind of aliveness. Process philosophers call it pan-experientialism.

Might we learn to see the world this way? With his "intense colors, surging rhythms, blade-like leaves, and brilliant contrasts," Van Gogh paints irises in their vitality. His irises are pan-experientialism in visual form.

Of course, the colors eventually fade. Process philosophers know that the universe includes death and decay: perpetual perishing. Nothing lasts forever. However, some add in God's ongoing life the brilliance of the world is remembered in its aliveness, even as its forms pass away. Van Gogh paints irises as God sees them, too.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/17/22

An Analysis of the Painting
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​A conversation with Dr. Scott Allan, Associate Curator, Paintings Department, Getty Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker, Executive Director, Smarthistory, in front of Irises, 1889, Vincent van Gogh. Oil on canvas, 74.3 x 94.3 cm. Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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A Process Reflection


panexperientialism in visual form

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The whole of the Earth is filled with inner vitality. So process philosophers and theologians believe. Even inorganic realities - even rocks and air and water - are composed of occasions of experience, bursts of energy, that are pulsing with subjectivity. These bursts are not simply objects; they are also subjects. They feel or apprehend what influences them and respond to what they feel. Their response is not entirely determined by the influences; they has some degree of self-creativity. They create themselves in responding to what influences them. The response also carries with it a subjective aim for satisfying intensity. In painting irises, Van Gogh was subjectively intense; and the irises he painted were also subjectively intense. Both illustrated, in Whitehead's words,

The subjective aim, whereby there is origination of conceptual feeling, is at intensity of feeling in the immediate subject, and in the relevant future. (Process and Reality)

Are the irises really intense? Do the irises really feel? Whitehead suggests as much Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. For him, flowers and other plants are aggregate-expressions of pulsations of energy aiming at such intensity. Once they achieve some degree of intense feeling, their subjective immediacy perishes and they become objects in the divine life. Whereas their intensity fades in the world, it remains brilliant in the divine life. Van Gogh's Irises are what things look like in God, even after they have passed away on earth.

Panexperientialism is the view that there is something like subjective experience everywhere in the cosmos. Van Gogh's Irises are panexperientialism in visual form.

- Jay McDaniel, 12/17/22 
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Open Horizons