Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

_
Thinking in a Whiteheadian Mode

The Whitehead Research Project as
 An Intellectual Opportunity For Scholars

http://whiteheadresearch.org/

by Jay McDaniel

Readers from different parts of the world have written JJB asking about process thinkers and who they are.  Some have also asked about the scholarship of new generations of process thinkers who are doing research in colleges and universities.  Process thinkers is a general name for people influenced by the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who might otherwise call themselves process philosophers, process educators, process theologians, process artists, or, in China, constructive postmodernists.  I offer a very general to introduction process thinkers and then turn to some among the new generation of process scholars.  If you are interested in being in dialog with these scholars, they would welcome your response.  Click on the website above, fish around, and you'll find their e-mail addresses. 

Where are process thinkers?  They are in all parts of the world, with growing numbers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  That's the reason this website exists.  "Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism" is a cyber cafe for people interested in exploring and developing process thought in multiple directions. 

What do process thinkers believe?  Everyone will answer this differently, but in JJB I have tried to identify twenty key ideas which many process thinkers share.  Take a look and see what you think.  GO

Are they all philosophers?  No, process thinkers include educators, artists, homemakers, physicists, store clerks, mechanics, musicians, and farmers.

_Even if they are not all philosophers, are they all experts in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead?  No.  Even among scholars many of them do not study Whitehead's philosophy in detail, because their interests and aims are turned in other directions.  They use Whitehead's ideas and develop them in their own ways.  Whitehead's philosophy is a springboard for creative reflection, not a sieve through which all ideas must be sifted.

Then what do they have in common?  They are committed to the creation of communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually satisfying with no one left behind.  They are curious about life and the world.  They are interested in truthful accounts of the world but refuse to pretend that any proclamation of truth is final.  They take delight in diverse cultures, diverse forms of life, in the inexhaustible mystery of life.  They like multiplicity and novelty.  They enjoy thinking in a Whiteheadian mode.

Let's imagine a woman who thinks in a Whiteheadian mode.  Let's say that she is a physicist.  Her thinking is dialogical, open to surprise, creative, and exploratory.  She sees physics as an active and creative way of interpreting the world, but also as a way of listening to the voices of the world with particular attention to their mathematical properties.  She sees mathematics as one of nature's languages.  She sees science as rooted in wonder and she finds wisdom in feeling as well as analyzing, in imagining as well as observing, in empathizing as well as intellectualizing.  She is an organic intellectual.

She finds great value in science, but she is also interested in insights gained from other kinds of experience: religious, aesthetic, moral, humorous, and tragic.  She trusts that these insights are complementary not contradictory.  She wants to see how these insights might fit together. 

She has a metaphysical side as well.  She is receptive to the many infinities of life: infinities of heart and mind, of cosmology and biology, of novelty and divinity.  And yet, like Whitehead, she seeks to avoid the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: that of confusing abstractions with the immediacy of a single moment of experience. 

_Indeed, in the spirit of Whitehead, she takes experience itself as a key to understanding the very nature of the universe.  For her the universe itself is an ongoing history of moments, of which our own momentary experiences and the energy-events within the depths of an atom are instances.  Buddhists say that the universe is a network of inter-being; she adds that it is a network of inter-subjectivity.

Given this relationality, she believes that our task as humans is to undertake what one Whiteheadian scholar, Brian Henning, calls "the adventure of living together."  She sees phyics as one way of participating in the adventure and compassion as another.  Her sense of compassion does not end with human beings.  She believes that all living beings deserve respect.  She speaks of her ethical perspective as life-sensitive not human-centered.  Deep down she believes that there is a spirit at work in the universe, in the galaxies no less than our small planet, that is on the side of life.  Sometimes she speaks of this spirit in personal terms as a Thou and sometimes in transpersonal terms as a spirit of connection.   She thinks in a Whiteheadian mode.

Given this global community of process thinkers, let's turn back to the university and community of intellectuals.  Fortunately there are many scholars in the world today who are thinking in the Whiteheadian mode.  One of them is Steven Meyer from Washington University in the United States, and I borrow the phrase "thinking in the Whiteheadian mode" from him.  He like others are concerned that Whitehead is not studied enough in departments of philosophy, but he is not unduly concerned.  He puts the point this way: "In arguing for the general significance of Whitehead’s work for philosophy, one has two options. Either one can fervently hope that Whitehead will shortly receive the broad recognition he so richly deserves, traces of which one perceives as beginning even now—or one can demonstrate that he has already been so recognized, that there is already a line of remarkable thinkers working in the Whiteheadian mode, although for various reasons this key fact has largely remained invisible."  Meyer is himself one of those remarkable thinkers who, in his words, "works in the Whiteheadian mode."   And there are others, such as those involved in the Whitehead Research Project.   I was fortunate to attend a conference of a group of "next generation" process thinkers from the United States and Europe and I will tell you about their interests shortly.  But first a word about the Whitehead Research Project.

The aim of the Whitehead Research Project is to encourage young scholars toward a "creative advance into the future along multiple lines of thought." It is directed by one of the leading Whiteheadian thinkers in the world today: Roland Faber, and a quick look at his webpage will give you a sense of his creativity: <http://faber.whiteheadresearch.org/>.  He is Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, and Executive Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies. 

Faber is a remarkable teacher and gifted scholar, and if you are a young scholar (or an old one) you have much to learn from him.  His fields of research and publication include theology, poststructuralism, interreligious dialogue, especially Christianity and Buddhism, comparative philosophy of religion, western Renaissance philosophy, mysticism, physics, and psychology.  

Faber's vision of a new and academic future for thinking in a Whiteheadian mode is well described in his own words below.

Whiteheadian thought strives for the novel future, already immanent in the present, as it seeks out new adventures, new ideas, and new applications of existing thought in foreign spheres. Since the birth of Alfred North Whitehead 150 years ago, the influence of his thought has spread across continents and across academic disciplines. Whitehead himself traversed the fields of mathematics, philosophy of science and metaphysics, while also making substantive contributions in the areas of education, women's emancipation, philosophy of history, and physics. The reverberations of his influence are felt today in a wide spectrum of disciplines extending from quantum mechanics to theology and including such fields as biology, political theory, economics, psychology, education, and myriad philosophies. The next generation of Whitehead scholars is working on the edge of thinking in these various fields, continuing to produce innovation and novelty within the academy and society. They convey Whiteheadian thought into the future not through rote repetition of his ideas, with a focus upon the past, but rather by seeking out and encouraging the imaginative disruptions that result in a creative advance into the future along multiple lines of thought.'

If Faber is right, we do well to learn about some of these multiple lines of thought.  In what follows I share the visions of some among the next generations.

Brian Henning (Gonzaga University) received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Fordham University. His scholarship and teaching focus on the interconnections among ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics. His first systematic exploration of these interconnections was developed in his award winning book, The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality, and Nature in a Processive Cosmos. He teaches courses on environmental philosophy, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. He is currently working on several edited works and a monograph on the ethics of global climate change. Dr. Henning spends much of his professional service advancing the work of the British born mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). He is the Associate Director of the Society for the Study of Process Philosophies, Director of Research and Publication with the Whitehead Research Project, Executive Editor of the Critical Edition of Whitehead, and co-editor of Contemporary Whitehead Studies, a special series with Rodopi's Value Inquiry Book Series.

Henning's philosophical interests focus on the intersection of metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. The core of this project is the systematic development of a Whiteheadian moral philosophy that understands as our primary moral obligation the affirmation and production of beauty. According to his understanding, then, a properly Whiteheadian ethics is not anthropocentric, nor is it biocentric or ecocentric; it is kalocentric, beauty-centered. In his 2005 book, The Ethics of Creativity, he presents the general contours of this approach. His present work aims to test the applicability and adequacy of this moral philosophy.

Ecological crises such as runaway species extinction and anthropegenic climate change will increasingly define our age. Given this, a question emerges: What role, if any, does environmental ethics, much less a Whiteheadian philosophy of organism, have to play in understanding and responding to these grave threats? For some (but not Henning!) the answer to this question is clear: an idealistic and theoretically top-heavy Whiteheadian approach can play no productive role in responding to the ecological crisis.  If environmental ethics is to be relevant, so they say, it needs to abandon its fetish for grand theory construction and instead make what might be called the “policy turn.” Led by the so-called “environmental pragmatists,” this approach suggests that our ecological challenges are practical, not theoretical. If it is to be relevant, they argue, environmental philosophy must abandon its complex axiological castles in the sky and instead pursue “sustainability.”

Despite its obvious importance, Henning argues that the “sustainability paradigm” is ultimately inadequate because it is axiologically reductive (in that it limits all value to humans), it is methodologically reductive (in that it reduces ethics to a form of resource management), and it is morally reductive (in that it is empty of any particular moral content). Yet my goal is not to argue that we should abandon the concept of “sustainability,” but that it must be redefined and then set within a larger, more adequate moral framework.

Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts to address the environmental challenges that we face will fall short unless and until we also set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What is needed, he says,, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize the intrinsic beauty and value of every form of existence. What is needed, he proposes, is a moral philosophy grounded in Whitehead's philosophy of organism. As Whitehead writes in Function of Reason ,the “art of life” is not mere survival, merely “to be alive”. Yes, as organisms we have the urge “to live,” but the function of reason and the art of life is not just to live, but to “live well,” and to “live better” (8). Despite its noble intentions, he fears that the “sustainability paradigm” is not an adventurous bid for “living better,” but a “dodge to live”. It reduces morality to mere survival. In a very real sense, the “fate of our species” depends on whether humanity can successfully “shake itself free” of the siren song of unnecessary consumption and perpetual growth and enter upon the “adventure of living better”. The first step in this adventure is not the abandonment of ideals, but the fallible formulation and dogged pursuit of ideals worthy of life.

__Brianne Donaldson is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in Process Studies at Claremont Lincoln University.  Her interest is in re-thinking relations with so-called "animal" through the lens of process thought, poststructuralism and Jainism.

Donaldson looks behind the numerous veils that hide the sanctioned, poor treatment of so-called "animal" bodies in a globalized context. Utilizing process thought, critical animals studies, poststructural philosophy and Jainism, she seeks a new approach to so-called "animal" bodies beyond ethics. Her scholarship is three-fold: 1) to move beyond the fixed identity of species to new understandings of animal bodies as creative agents shaping planetary possibilities; 2) to focus on valuations and calculations made in the moment of encounter--afresh each time--rather than relying on ethical prescriptions that reproduce fixed identities like "human" or "animal"; 3) to develop coalitional strategies to re-value bodies by making their contribution public and their loss publicly grievable. In this way, she seeks to upend the strongholds of philosophy, theology and science that exclude "animal" bodies from being political bodies, either through moral/rationals arguments, humanocentric discourses of dominion, and naturalized hierarchies. 

She is especially interested in showing how process metaphysics and poststructural ethics together challenge contemporary ideas of what the "animal" is by offering new social ontologies that demonstrate shared vulnerability, and new ethical outlooks that seek to enlarge our collaboration, creativity and consideration in each moment. Donaldson suggests that we can create new artistic frames for interacting, sharing and co-creating with other bodies by considering them in their own singularity--and in our own unpredicatable encounters [singularities re/considering singularities time and again]--rather than relying on discourses about the "animal."

She is on the steering committee of the think tank Interreligious Voices for Animal Compassion, an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics, supports the work of her former employer Vegan Outreach, and writes and lectures on animality in numerous contexts--from neuroscience to religious ritual. She has been responsible for implementing the Process Plate: Putting Our Metaphysics Where Our Mouth Is at Claremont Lincoln University, an initiative to make Process conference food creative, as local as possible, and animal-free.  

Dennis Soelch (Universität Düsseldorf) studied Philosophy, English and American Literature, English Linguistics and Educational Sciences. He is a research and teaching fellow at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf, where he is currently working on his dissertation on the genealogy of process philosophy. His areas of research include metaphysics and the history of metaphysics, philosophy of culture and philosophical methodology. He has published several papers on Alfred North Whitehead, William James and Friedrich Nietzsche. Since 2010 he has been executive vice president and chief executive officer of the German Whitehead Association.

Like many European and American philosophers, Dennis Soelch is interested in the discourse theory of the German philosopher, Juergen Habermas (*1924).  Habermas is especially interested in how democratic and secular societies can organise themselves so that people engage in a creative exchange of ideas in civil ways, collectively arriving at decisions affecting the whole of society. These people may disagree with each other, even vehemently, but they discuss their way into some kind resolution. They do not bear arms against each other. They engage in rational discussion, and Habermas's main work consists in defining the conditions under which a rational discourse is possible so as to produce a consensus acceptable for every participant of the discourse. Part of Habermas's genius, and much of his attractivity, consists in the insight that even those who contradict or oppose socially accepted norms are already part of the very discourse.

Early in his career Habermas presumed that the language of religion -- particularly of religions relying on revelation -- needs to be excluded from such discussions.  He believed that there cannot be space for religiously minded people who turn to the Bible or the Qur'an or Torah for guidance. Or the Tao te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita for that matter. Their premises simply cannot be shared by every other participant and do thus not meet the conditions of a transparent discourse. But then, most prominently in a talk given 2001 and published under the title "An Awareness of What is Missing", Habermas seems to have changed his mind, thinking that democratic societies do need to include religious people as religious people. 

Soelch, following the late Habermas, thinks that a genuinely democratic society needs to include the perspectives of people who are motivated by religious experience, and if it cannot do so, it is not properly democratic. It is authoritarian and dogmatically secular. This leads Soelch to turn to Alfred N. Whitehead and William James as philosophers who offer philosophies of religious experience which can help in the development of democratic societies. The value of Whitehead's thought, says Soelch, is that it recognizes at the very outset that there may be wisdom in various kinds of experience, such as scientific, aesthetic, moral and religious experience.  Indeed, Whitehead's speculative philosophy -- as enunciated in Process and Reality -- is an impressive presentation of a "philosophy of organism" which aims at taking into account every experiential source.  We can well imagine people in a democratic society appealing to each or several of the different types of experience, and respecting the appeals of others.  Of course, says Soelch, there will be limitations. Some perspectives, for example those of religious fundamentalists who are bent upon rejecting all other points of view, or scientific fundamentalists who do the same, will not be at home in such a society. At this point, however, we have already abandoned an epistemological position that judges on religious or moral experience from the point of view of a scientific idea of rationality: Rather, we find ourselves on pragmatic ground, developing a type of rationality from a democratic starting point, if by 'democratic' we understand the prima facie willingness to include various forms of experience. This does not free us from the responsibility of testing all points of view -- all beliefs --  with and against the others: Religious beliefs blatantly contradicting intersubjectively accepted and highly warranted scientific findings will in the long run have to be abandoned unless they are supported by further evidence, but so will scientific beliefs opposing shared moral convictions.

Participants in such a society must agree to listen to, and learn from, other points of view. But the consensus seeking process can be enriched by a Whiteheadian perspective which begins with a recognition that different kinds of experience deserve respect, including religious experience. The participants in such discussions would be rational in a deeper and wider sense: rationally inclusive of the many kinds of experience which, in conversation with others, yield wisdom.

Jeremy is a PhD student at Claremont Graduate University in the Philosophy of Religion and Theology program. He is interested in interreligious dialouge, particularly Jewish-Christian relations, and in using process philosophy and theology as a means of entry into such dialogue. His other interests include post-structuralist thought, subjectivity and multiplicity, and eco-theology.

Jeremy Fackenthal’s project deals with maintaining tragic moments of experience without necessarily allowing them to be subsumed into a harmony or into a transcendent concept.  He uses Whitehead and Walter Benjamin, who was a tangential member of the Frankfurt School, to critique a notion of societal teleology by arguing that both Whitehead and Benjamin include notions of time that allow for disparate and tragic moments of the past to be remembered and invoked in the present in order to create the dislocations necessary for transformation of oppressive conditions within reality.  He critiques societal teleology because any telos within social progress runs the risk of creating a stasis or deceiving us into thinking that a certain instantiation of political power in the present is the final goal.  Jeremy argues for maintaining the tragic past not such that the goal is endow tragedy with positive meaning, but to view tragic moments as a guard against continuing oppressive structures within society and as a warning against allowing teleological movements in society to somehow move past those tragic moments. 

Jeremy approaches the problem of maintaining tragedy from the perspective of post-Holocaust philosophy and theology, and he wants to ensure that we do not simply say that those deplorable moments of the past are saved or transformed in some way, because to do so would not do justice to the victims of such horrific past events.  By remembering tragedy, instead of redeeming tragedy in the traditional sense, we can keep the tragic alive as a warning for the present and future without saying that we have either solved the problems of the past or effaced harmful moments of the past.

Sheri Kling is a PhD student in Process Studies at Claremont Lincoln University and she earned her Master of Arts of Theological Studies at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago with an emphasis in Religion and Science. While in Chicago, Sheri studied process theology with Anna Case-Winters and began her research into resonances between process thought and Jungian psychology. Her masters thesis focused on these resonances, especially in the area of Christology.

At the broadest level, Sheri is interested in constructing a theological framework using process thought within which a Jungian-based spiritual practice of dream work and examination of synchronicities can be integrated to help facilitate spiritual transformation and a revitalized relationship to embodied life, and so her work also includes an ecological thread.  She is currently exploring how dream work is a means to allow individuals to discern God's guidance so that one can better align with this guidance. Sheri believes that Whiteheadian thought allows for this through the way Whitehead understands modes of perception (including non-sensory perception) and symbolism, and because of the resonances between Whitehead's ideas of God's primordial nature and eternal objects and Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes. As well, Jung's understanding of Christ as archetypal Self (a pattern of wholeness in the psyche) and the journey of individuation aligns well with the way in which Cobb and Griffin talk about Christ as Logos/imago dei and Creative Transformation.  In practice, Sheri's work will be able to be utilized in church congregations through the creation of "journey groups" that employ the practice of dream work and examination of synchronicities as a means of dialogue with God through the unconscious.

J.R. Hustwit (Methodist University) is Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy. He received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University. His area of specialization is philosophical theology. His academic interests include East and South Asian Religions, Inter-religious Dialogue, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Religion, and Process Philosophy.

J.R. Hustwit is interested in the dialectical relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics--the cyclical route by which raw first person experience is projected into a tentative description of reality. Particularly, Hustwit focuses on experiences in which a self is conscious, but unable to conceptualize experience. These experiences are typically in the blurry edges of consciousness--psychosis, inspiration, and poetic reverie. Today's presentation focuses on the phenomenon of inspiration.

The historical flow of philosophy depends on the occasional infusion of novel insights that are otherwise obscured from consciousness. These "dark materials" preserve philosophy from becoming a parade of crambe repetita (reheated cabbage). Hustwit points out that mining these dark materials is a task of the imagination. As important as imagination is in the whole of Whitehead's work, he gives it a fairly anemic treatment in his technical apparatus of Process and Reality. Hustwit suggests taking cues from Coleridge's notion of imagination. Imagination, for Coleridge is more than the power to aggregate units of experience, but also the power to dissolve trhe contents of experience into novel forms and to dampen the subject-object distinction so as to widen the iradiation of consciousness and reveal previosuly-obscured possibilities.

This of course, would entail that the possibilities maintained in the primordial nature of God would be added to by creaturely acts of imagination, so that the primodial nature would need to acept deposits as well as withdrawals. Novelty would be put in the hands of creatures as well as God, and conscious imagination is given the power to alter its own structure. Thus, imagiunation accounts for not only passively received inspiration, but also actively pursued inspiration, as found in the use of pharamacology, meditation, koans, etc.

These, then, are some of the ideas being explored by a new generation of Whitehead scholars.  I may be adding to the list as time unfolds, so stay tuned and, if you wish, joint the international process community in your own way, whether as a scholar, an activist, an artist, a priest, or a homemaker.