Seeking the Harmony of Harmonies

Earlier today I joined my friends John Vervaeke and Andrew Davis for one of John’s Silk Road seminars. John is currently in Prague, where he is walking the Neoplatonic leg of his philosophical pilgrimage, while Andrew and I joined from Northern California (Santa Rosa and San Francisco, respectively). The conversation ranged across relational ontology, Whitehead’s dipolar God, the meaning crisis, and the individual and collective effort to “see God again for the first time.” I’ll share the livestream below, but a better quality video will be uploaded to John’s YouTube in time. What follows is my attempt to gather up the threads of the conversation and weave in some of what I was scribbling in my notes as we spoke. Note that I used Claude Fable to compose an initial draft based closely on the transcript of my remarks in the live conversation. I then edited the transcript by including some thoughts I was unable to share in the dialogue.

Whitehead famously quipped that the European philosophical tradition can be safely characterized as of a series of footnotes to Plato. Modern philosophy might better be characterized, or at least specified, as a series of footnotes to Descartes. Ancient philosophy was oriented by the relation between God (or intelligible reality) and the apparent World. Its axis was vertical, its primary medium was eternity, and its aspiration was to be at home in the cosmos. The philosopher’s task was to attune the order of the soul to the order of the heavens. Modern philosophy is oriented instead by the relation between subject and object. Its axis is horizontal, its primary medium is history, and its dominant mood is alienation—the feeling of being alone in a universe of mere objects, a thinking thing marooned amid extended stuff.

John opened our conversation by describing this same shift taxonomically: before modernity, the perennial questions of the one and the many, appearance and reality, and the source of normativity were handled in terms of a vertical dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. When that dichotomy became untenable, modernity didn’t dispense with the questions—it couldn’t—it simply rotated the dichotomies ninety degrees: subject and object, fact and value, inner and outer, freedom and nature. Whitehead called this the “bifurcation of nature.” Kant gave it its most rigorous form in the dichotomy between the noumenal freedom of the self and the phenomenal necessity of nature. This fissure functions as a wound in the modern soul that my whole philosophical project has been an attempt to heal.

The crucial move here is to notice the difference between a distinction and a dissociation. Distinctions are healthy and necessary; thinking is impossible without them. The trouble begins when a pragmatic conceptual distinction hardens into an ontological division, when we start saying that reality itself is cut along the seam of our concepts. As John reminded us, most of modernity’s defining dichotomies have already been undermined from within (eg, Quine on analytic and synthetic, Putnam on fact and value, John’s own work on relevance realization and transjectivity, etc.). The question is what becomes available in our experience once we are no longer bound by that grammar. What John found with his students is that when the dichotomies dissolve, the language of sacredness begins to well up on its own.

John made a distinction in the conversation that I want to endorse wholeheartedly: he is not a propositional perennialist but a process perennialist. The claim is not that the world’s wisdom traditions are all saying the same thing—that claim has been pretty thoroughly undermined by careful comparative work—but that there are universal processes, cognitive and metacognitive and transformative, in terms of which the traditions can genuinely speak to and complexify one another.

Count me in! I’ve always been drawn to the perennial philosophy at the level of mystical experience as some kind of ineffable core, and yet it’s clearly not the case that you can find neat propositional alignments between the traditions. The way we respond in language to these deep experiences creates culture, and cultural diversity is itself an expression of that ineffable core—because that core, to risk giving it a name out of the process tradition, is Creativity. It is unnameable, and yet it produces all names. As long as we maintain a sense of the intimacy between the unnameable and the named, we don’t start sucking on the named like a pacifier, or fighting over the named as though it were the be-all and end-all. The nameless is the source of the named, and none of us possesses the nameless creativity at the base of all that we find of value.

John frames his Philosophical Silk Road as a pilgrimage, and he grounds this in the oldest meaning of theoria. Behind our word “theory” stands the theoros, the sacred diplomat who traveled from city to city to witness the festivals and rites of other peoples. Theory, at its origin, is a movement between places—and, I would add, between faces. Knowing itself is a kind of collaborative movement.

This transforms what both ancients and moderns thought it meant to know. To know anything is not just to theorize it as an observer from the outside. To know something or someone, you have to be known by it/them, in turn. That means knowing is risky. You have to travel not as a tourist but in a way that leaves you vulnerable to being transformed by the places you visit. The philosophical theorist may not be at home anywhere in particular, because they are trying to be at home in the whole world—and yet, as John rightly insisted, this radical pluralism requires groundedness in a tradition, a secure attachment (he means this in the technical psychological sense) from which one can reach out and be transformed by others. Secure attachment doesn’t diminish autonomy but is rather precisely what affords complex exploration. Here I think of Raimon Panikkar, who showed that one can be fully committed to more than one tradition at once. For me, it is Christianity and Buddhism. I can’t live as a Christian without Buddhism, and I can’t live as a Buddhist without Christianity. Spiritual life doesn’t work for me any other way than as both/and.

Much of our conversation circled around the exhausted standoff between standard theism and standard atheism. What struck me long ago is that both positions share the same premise: that God is an individualized substance, an independently existing super-subject possessing all the best properties. The fundamentalist affirms this God; the new atheist rejects him, and orients their lives largely around that rejection; but neither questions the basic picture of ultimacy.

Aristotle could be satisfied with God as thought thinking itself—an unmoved mover untouched by the world. That was enough for Aristotle, but it is not enough for us, because we have become too psychological for that. We are no longer satisfied with a God who doesn’t need the world, doesn’t change, isn’t involved. And when that God became unbelievable, modernity offered two responses: a retreat into religious fundamentalism, on the one hand, and what I’d call an arrested development into fundamentalist atheism, on the other—arrested because while it is a development, a purifying fire we genuinely need to pass through, it is also very easy to get stuck in the adolescence of a kind of reactionary disbelief. We see this when a person orients their whole identity around not believing in a specific God and treating anyone who does as an idiot to be defeated in public debate (Walter Veit’s recent celebration of New Atheist obnoxiousness is a good example of what I mean).

Nor can the postmodern turn get us out, because it remains locked into critique and a multiculturalism that leaves you without any home. It’s really hyper-modernity more than post-modernity: the endless relativization makes you even more alienated than the moderns already were. Critique is necessary but not sufficient. The task now is to move from critique to reconstruction—to reconnect with the ancient traditions and remember that there is a way to be at home in the cosmos, because there is a relational grammar to reality that allows our terrestrial minds and the celestial order to sync up, while also affirming everything modernity has learned about evolution, history, and the depths of the psyche.

I ventured a proposition in the conversation—and in Whitehead’s spirit I offer it as a proposal to be entertained rather than a claim to be defended by the logician’s alternative as simply true or false—that Whitehead’s account of the consequent nature of God may be the most important theological invention of the twentieth century.

In both the Platonic picture (God as orderer of a pregiven chaos) and the classical Christian picture (God as creator from nothing by fiat), God is the creator. Whitehead adds the notion of God as the relator. Not the unmoved mover, not the big moral boss of the universe who decides what is good rather than being, in some sense, subject to the good like the rest of us—but a God who is consequent to the world-process, not impassive but suffering-with, involved in the world such that either God is also a creature (of Creativity), or all of us, God included, are co-creators of one another.

There have been hints of this throughout the history of spirituality. The Gospels hint rather loudly that God is not impassive. Buddhism discovered it phenomenologically in the figure of the bodhisattva, for whom emptiness is not merely the absence of self-being but that which calls forth compassion—emptiness discovered to be love. The Buddha left a doctrine; Christ left a deed that speaks as loud as any doctrine, a deed in which God is said to have died into the world and thereby to have transformed the God–world relationship itself. Whitehead, thinking in the aftermath of all this, articulates the consequent nature of God in an idiom that can be understood in light of evolution, quantum and relativistic physics, and modern psychology and sociology.

The new picture taking shape, then, is that God is not a substance already individuated. God is a process of individuation, and that process includes the world. It includes all of us as psychological processes caught up in individuation alongside God. We have God’s help in this—for Whitehead, “the initial aim,” the lure toward truth, beauty, and goodness, a cosmic Eros pregnant in each moment—but God also needs our help, because this love is not yet satisfied. There is strife, suffering, perpetual perishing. Eternity, on this account, is not the opposite of time but the fullness of time. Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as Blake said, because, alone with itself, it remains incomplete.

And this reconfigures what the old practices mean. When you pray within this understanding, you are not petitioning an already finished God; you are participating in the God-making process. That puts enormous responsibility on us. We’re grownups now. Theology becomes a kind of collective self-parenting: finding dialogue partners with whom to think and feel God helps us stop needing a parent outside the process and start taking responsibility for our own response to the existential condition we find ourselves in as birthing, breathing, dying bodies—which is precisely what the fundamentalist theist and the fundamentalist atheist, each blaming someone or something else, decline to do.

John pressed us here with the challenge: aren’t you giving up perfection? Isn’t sacredness the apprehension of that which is perfect—complete, finished, impassible?

Andrew answered with Hartshorne’s neoclassical theism: rather than collapsing the contraries (active/passive, mutable/immutable, being/becoming) into a monopolar God who is the great antithesis of everything worldly, a dipolar God exemplifies the perfections on both sides in what Hartshorne called dynamic perfection. My answer runs alongside his: we are not giving up transcendence or perfection. We are trying to integrate a sense of incompletion—which means open-endedness—with perfection, and to say that perfection is itself a process. It is a higher perfection to imagine that beauty, truth, and goodness are alive—dynamic, growing—than to imagine them finished. God is a living organism rather than an architect or engineer who designs a machine from outside according to a supposedly perfect model.

I wish I’d had a chance to mention Jung’s Answer to Job. Jung saw, in his own depth psychological and archetypal idiom, that Yahweh’s perfection lacked completeness—that the raw, ambivalent omnipotence confronting Job had to undergo its own transformation, and that the movement from Yahweh to Yeshua—from the elemental whirlwind, the burning bush, and the decreed Law to the incarnational embrace, the burning heart, and the decision to Love—is the story of a God who becomes complete only by entering into relationship with, and suffering alongside, human and all living beings. The Life Divine chooses completion through relationship over a perfection sealed off from the world. Even God doesn’t yet know the capital-T Truth, because Truth is in the making, and God is in the making. You can’t step into the same God twice!

This, I want to suggest, is what a second axial age would mean. The first axial turn discovered eternity and, often, fled into it, leaving the senses and the sensible world behind as a fallen realm. The second axial turn would be a renewal of the senses and a deeper incarnation: an integration of eternity and history, of emanation and evolution, of spirit and embodiment. Not just the Neoplatonic reach upward for the light, and not just the evolutionary climb up from the mud, but some third thing (in Whitehead’s terms, Creativity, which is dipolar in just this sense) that reaches for the light while growing its roots deeper into the darkness at the same time. Which is also why the consequent nature is so significant: it corrects Plotinus’ equation of matter with privation and evil. In Whitehead, the One and matter turn out to be, at the limit, indistinguishable.

Is this non-duality? I think a process-relational ontology is fairly described as a form of non-duality, so long as we understand dipolarity, or dipolar unity, as its proper expression. The problem with Oneness understood in a substantial way is that there is no room left for relationship. Dipolarity helps us remember that what is non-dual is a relationship: a relational reality in which there is no need for a seam between two halves that never existed separately from one another. There is a kind of otherness at the core of selfhood and a kind of familiarity in the other, and these poles allow reality to be an inexhaustible birthing process—which is also a dying process, Ouroboric—reality as a process of lovemaking between poles that have never been and could never be apart.

John raised his important critique of our culture’s overinvestment in propositional knowing—the non-propositional forms of knowing (perspectival, participatory, procedural) carry most of the heavy lifting of meaning, and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is only weakly correlated, if at all, with propositional possession. I agree, and I wanted to add that Whitehead has his own theory of propositions that turns out to be an ally rather than an obstacle here. He says famously that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true, and that the logician’s simple alternative—true or false—completely misses the function of propositions in the universe. For Whitehead, a proposition is not primarily a sentence or a logical statement; it is a mode of feeling in which potentiality and actuality meet and form a hybrid entity. Propositions are propagating through the world at least all the way down to the level of single cells, if not also already being prefigured in the vibratory reiteration (or “physical purposiveness” in Whitehead’s terms) of electromagnetic energy. We should really call it his theory of proposals.

This is also why truth cannot be adequately characterized in terms of a series of yes-or-no questions. There is always a missing context; something is always missed in that kind of binary operation.

Someone asked: when traditions are brought into dialogue on the Silk Road, what criteria allow us to judge that one framing of reality is deeper or more adequate than another? John warned, rightly, that anyone who offers you a rule book or an algorithm for this question is lying to you or to themselves. Andrew added the standard philosophical criteria—consistency, coherence, adequacy, applicability—plus a transformative one: can you name the difference between who you were and who you are now?

My own answer, coming out of Whitehead, is a simple criterion: is there an intensification in the harmony of your experience as a result of taking this teaching, this practice, this encounter seriously? Harmony here does not mean the absence of dissonance. Intensifying harmony means becoming able to hold what were initially felt as conflicts in a contrast that raises the quality, enhances the texture and beauty, of experience. This is an aesthetic criterion, but it is immediately in contact with epistemic and moral values: truth is a harmonization between our conception of the world and the world; goodness is the ongoing transmutation of conflict into contrast. It is not “moral” in the thin sense of sorting things into good and bad—justice is not just following the law. There is a higher harmony of harmonies aimed at that exceeds anything that could be laid out as a series of propositions or statutes.

And notice here that if you don’t have diversity in your practice of intensifying harmony, it gets boring very fast. A flat, repeating chord. You want melodies that are surprising enough to hold and deepen your interest. That means inviting others to come play with you in an unpredictable call and response. That is how you enhance harmony, and I think it’s how intercultural dialogue of any kind—religious, scientific, or otherwise—actually works. Seek harmony. Seek higher harmony.

Another questioner’s concern—how do you hold deep fidelity to a tradition together with genuine openness?—touches something personal for me. It has become quite apparent to me that when someone’s religious belief is insecure, they feel very strongly that everyone else around them must believe as they do. They can’t sustain the belief unless it is never met with resistance. That is a very propositional way of holding belief, and much less the sort of faith that reflects an openness to mystery.

I don’t feel threatened by learning about other traditions or being in dialogue with people who walk a different path, because my relationship with Christ is rooted in transformational experience that is continually renewed—it is transformational, not informational. It is not a set of propositions that I need to be true and must defend from those who challenge them. I’m interested in propositional knowing as we all are, but it doesn’t come close to touching the core of what I would call my faith. That connection to what I call the Christ being remains mysterious to me, and it is secure precisely in its mystery. It isn’t something that could be threatened by a deep encounter with the Buddha as a spiritual being, or with Islam, or with any indigenous practice. I can sit in a Shipibo ayahuasca ceremony and feel renewed in my Christian faith in that very ritual, at the same time that I feel the generativity and wisdom flowing out of the Shipibo tradition. I don’t see why these should be in conflict. It doesn’t make sense to me that they would be.

The final audience question asked how individuation might look if we stopped treating the psyche as something belonging to an individual. Andrew invoked Whitehead’s most famous mantra—the many become one and are increased by one: you emerge out of your relations into individuation, not the other way around—and Panikkar’s lovely coinage of interdividuality: our independence arises out of a more fundamental interdependence (or even intra-dependence, to risk being a bit pedantic!).

As John added, meaning is not private property. People joke, when they’re driving in circles looking for a spot downtown, that they need to call on the parking angel. What they forget is that if you take that seriously, you’re also calling on a parking demon to kill off everyone else’s parking angels—there are only so many spaces. The “create your own reality” mentality that treats meaning as a private possession leads directly into these absurdities. Meaning is mutually created, mutually curated, mutually corrected.

But genuine collective individuation is a huge challenge, and I think it’s because alongside the meaning crisis we are living through a trust crisis. We don’t trust each other. Breaking out of individual psychology into a process of true collective individuation requires a great deal of trust in others—and so the individual work and the collective work have to happen at the same time. I think of it this way: psychological individuation means you’re not in such a rush to blame everybody else for your problems; collective individuation would mean we’re not causing each other as many problems, because we’re each dealing with our own shit. The two have to meet somewhere in the middle.

There has never been a better or more important time to talk about the nature of reality—and not just to talk about it, but to instigate in one another a deeper appreciation for all those facets of the real that we couldn’t see without one another. On the view we were exploring together, it’s not merely that we each have our own perspective on a ready-made world. Perspective on perspective on perspective, all the way down and all the way up, is what there is. So whenever we engage intentionally in the practice of sharing perspectives—overlapping, poking, sometimes needing to pop one another’s bubbles to let a wider reality rush in, all, we might hope, in the context of friendship—we are not just doing what human beings ought to do. We are doing what the world itself is doing: a sharing of perspectives, a seeking of deeper intimacy. Sometimes the pokes hurt, and we recoil from intimacy and get traumatized. But even the fact that there is trauma signals that there is healing to be sought.

This is what I take the Silk Road to be for, and why I’m grateful to John for building the road as he walks it.