The Poetic and the Sacred in the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

(This week’s article is by guest writer Dwayne Schulz. For a brief bio, see below.)

What can A. N. Whitehead, 19th Century upper class Englishman, teach us about Spiritual Naturalism?

In many ways Whitehead was a product of his time. Although liberal minded (he and his wife Evelyn were active supporters of the suffragette movement, fought to establish the first Women’s College at Cambridge and supported the young Labor Party) he held typical 19th Century ideas about progress, civilization and race.

Aspects of his philosophy come across as old fashioned to the modernist and postmodern alike. He speaks of Platonic Ideals, and of Beauty, Truth and Harmony ‘luring’ civilization upwards and onwards. He speaks of God, albeit not as overlord or totalising ground but as companion and lure towards perfection.

A clue to Whitehead’s relevance and importance to the themes of this article comes from the fact that he probably coined the word “creativity”.  Although there is one use of it in 1875, the intellectual historian Paul Oskar Kristeller in his 1983 paper “Creativity and Tradition” concluded that it did not gain wide currency until Whitehead’s 1927 work Religion in the Making.

For Whitehead creativity was the “Category of the Ultimate,” the highest principle characterising cosmic evolution, physical change and human agency. All of these are examples of what he called the “creative advance”; the coming into being of “entities diverse from any entity in the ‘many’ which they unify”.

Whitehead famously sums this process up in a line from his magnum opus Process & Reality, “The many become one, and are increased by one” by which he means that every moment synthesizes something novel from a plurality of pre-existing elements. For Whitehead this process is the essence of existence. Every moment is the novel combination of multiple influences. This new moment then becomes a factor with others in the creation of yet another moment. On and on it goes from one to many to one and back again, like a pulsing rhythm, a pullulation, a heart beat.

Perhaps Whitman puts it better when he says:

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world,

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance
…. Always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity …. always distinction
…. Always a breed of life

Let me elaborate. For Whitehead the biggest fallacy of Western science and philosophy since the Greeks has been the idea of substance. This is Aristotle’s notion of the world as composed of isolated and unchanging stuffs that persist through time but assume various inessential properties along the way, like a person who retains the same identity whilst changing clothes, or a lump of wax changing shape.

Substance could be the water of Greek philosopher Thale, or the atom of Democritus, or Aquinas’s notion of God as the fundamental element of which all earthly things are expressions. All these conceptions turn on the idea of an enduring substance and its temporary qualities. It is the idea of the noun and the adjective, of essence and form.

We learn this way of thinking as children. Peek-a-boo teaches us that mother is there … then she’s not … then she is again. Mother persists but her changes in position don’t. It is common sense.

But Whitehead was writing in the wake of the most profound scientific challenges to common sense in thousands of years: Einstein’s theories of relativity and Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger’s theory of quantum mechanics.

Whitehead took part in these developments. He met Einstein in 1921 and published one of the first expository books on relativity in 1922. His PhD had been on Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism and he had written books on the new kind of mathematics these theories employed.

Whitehead’s main philosophical lesson from all these scientific developments was that the world’s fundamental constituents were irredeemably temporal and changeful in character, not enduring substances but microscopic events he called “actual occasions.” These make up events, events turning into other events, events influencing or causing other events, networks of events feeding into and giving birth to others, an “ether of events” evolving, transforming, metamorphosing, a world of process not things. It is the idea of verbs and adverbs.

So in his perspective there are not electrons but electron events, waveforms of electric charge pulsing through space; not stones but stone events tracing out relatively stable paths of physical cause and effect through spacetime; not unchanging personal identities but evolving and coalescing lines of personal development and history rising and falling, intensifying, dissipating. There are not trees but treeings, not green grass but events of greenly grassing.

So how does Whitehead’s “creative advance”, his idea of the continual flow of novel occasions into and out of existence, cast light on poetry and the sacred?

In Whitehead’s philosophy, events are not just passively influenced by previous events, but actively interpret them. There is a kind of agency involved, a degree of freedom, unpredictability and dare I say ‘choice’. There is always a scope of options however small. All things then are what Whitehead called ‘creatures’; both created and creative processes.  

Whitehead is inviting us to see the similarities between ourselves as sentient, deliberative animals and other processes in nature, whether an electron sensing an electromagnetic field or a dolphin using echolocation to find schools of fish. This is why he called his philosophy the ‘philosophy of organism’. Every phase of a process feels a multiplicity of earlier occasions synthesising them into its own novel way of being. Feeling and creating are co-extensive and ubiquitous.

It is easy to see why the early 19th Century Romantics, and especially the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley had a big influence on Whitehead. Romantics like William Blake were reacting against the horrors of industrial capitalism. They also objected to the accompanying world-view of the universe as a giant mechanism expressed in Newton’s image of a clockwork universe.

It has been said that the above poets counterposed to the mechanical view, the idea of “enchanted nature”. Enchanted nature is not only deeply relational, but is filled with personality, value and meaning. As Whitehead says, the poetry of the Romantics bears witness to the fact that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values”. Here is an example from Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc”:

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves

There is something almost animistic about Shelley here. He sees nature resonating with human-like emotions and energies. The secret springs “bring tribute”, the woods and wind “contend” and the vast river “raves”.

There are also resonances here with what Mary Jane Rubenstein in her book Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters has called ‘pluralistic pantheism’. This is the idea of divinity as multiple and distributive; i.e. dispersed throughout nature and indistinguishable from certain processes and things within it. The sacred is at most an aspect of events rather than derived from some ur-substance located over, behind or within them.

But what is it, one may ask, for something to be divine or sacred? Isn’t this manner of speaking old hat? One can hear the atheists and nihilists sniggering. 

I think Whitehead’s philosophy of events helps us to see that divinity is not some standalone objective fact, but is always a question of how we respond to, interpret and orient ourselves towards the events that surround and influence us.  It is a way of thinking and experiencing, and thus partly a matter of entrainment, education, practice, and cultivation. Like poetry or meditation, the sacred can only be appreciated if one has been trained to be receptive to it and the circumstances are conducive. We might call this kind of divinity ‘secular divinity’ or perhaps ‘sacred naturalism’. 

It is hard to give a simple definition of  ‘the’ sacred (I use the definite article warily) and perhaps even more difficult to justify talk of it in the context of modernity (one often feels a sense of embarrassment even bringing it up in conversation) but I would say that to experience divinity is to feel a profound reverence for existence as it is, to be aware in certain moments of its intense and unique beauty, perhaps tinged by sadness at the finitude of it all.  

Sylvia Plath’s poem Black Rook in Rainy Weather illustrates the idea of sacred nature quite beautifully I think. She writes of seeing what she calls minor light leaping incandescent from “the most obtuse objects now and then” of “spasmodic tricks of radiance” lifting her soul.

I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. 

Even though Plath is non-religious in the traditional sense, it would not be too far from the truth to describe the above poem as a secular elicitation of religious feeling.

Whitehead’s process ontology can help attune one’s senses to religious feeling, can help sensitize us to what Plath calls those “spasmodic tricks of radiance”, by alerting us to the creativity, interconnectedness, ever-living novelty and freshness of the world around us. Deeply contemplating and observing the flow of nature’s creatures, their particular rhythmic signatures and vibrations, their subtle shifts in texture and tonality, and their inter-connectedness, can induce feelings of joy, inner calm and cosmic synergy equal in force and profundity, I would maintain, to the ecstatic experiences of traditional religion.

I would like to finish with some thoughts on the issue of suffering. We cannot reason or anaesthetise suffering away. In a way it should be at the centre of all our concerns. As much as a poetic or sacred naturalism alerts us to the beauty of the goings on around us, it should always be informed by the fact of our own finitude in the face of nature’s vastness and indifference. The cosmos was not designed with the welfare of chattering primates in mind. The cosmos will go on its merry way regardless of whether we are here or not. As mortal, sensitive products of evolution prone to accident and stupidity, delusion and paranoia, disease and death, we try to make good on our biologically inherited objectives: to survive, prosper and perhaps reproduce in a world where struggle, trauma and failure always threaten. Our inherited will to live and multiply may be an existential absurdity in some ultimate sense, but so long as we continue living and are afforded certain means, then seeking beauty, and yes a kind of divinity in the midst of degradation and suffering, offers “a brief respite” and perhaps a truly meaningful purpose in life.

Whitehead’s process philosophy can help us to feel the divine nature of things because it emphasizes their fleeting, transient nature as well as their implication in each other and ourselves. We value things because we feel them to be in some sense part of us but also temporary, vulnerable, finite – as are our children, our relationships, our communities, our urban and natural environments, our identities and achievements. Cultivating a poetic or sacral sensibility to these things allows us to appreciate and savor them more deeply for a while longer against the backdrop of our own fleeting and bittersweet existence.

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