VIII. Imagination and Partnership with God to Create a World

In his poem “Negation” Stevens wrote: “Hi! The creator too is blind, / Struggling toward his harmonious whole …”¹ This could have been the epigraph for Alfred North Whitehead’s book, Adventures of Ideas, and indeed his entire life’s work.

The human mind experiences reciprocity between the act of contributing to the reality of the world and the act of grasping notions about the world that do not yet fit our language. Apprehension comes to us slowly, and the purpose of philosophy is to nurture this kind of growth in our minds.³ Good philosophy remembers its own history, delving into the easily forgotten starting points of thought in the imaginative life of the human mind. In one sense, the history of ideas that have emerged from the human mind is a history of mistakes. We no longer accept Jove as an explanation for thunder, and we have very good reasons to think that our current meteorological explanation of thunder is superior, assuming it is thunder we wish to understand. But if we want to understand the reality of the human mind and imagination, then the history of mistakes is not merely a museum of human foibles: it is a clue to the patterns of forces to which the mind responds.

The myth of Jove might not be the best way to understand thunder, but it is an important part of understanding minds of the sort that drift toward the divine when trying to explain reality. Memory links the imaginative stages of the mind’s evolution. Without memory, our gains are accompanied by losses that leave us with a very partial view of mind and reality, threatening a return to the barbarism Vico predicted. Imagination is not a ladder to be kicked away after we have ascended to the height of philosophical abstraction and the world of the intelligible universal. Religion is the most powerful arena in which the imaginative universal and the intelligible universal are held in one mind and, collectively, in a tradition that views the world through the lens of the analogia entis. But the move from temporal fact to eternal greatness, from the finite to the infinite, from the imaginative universal to the intelligible universal, requires its own kind of discernment and attentiveness to avoid spinning into nonsense. Metaphysical clarity is required to resist sophistry in our movement from one to the other and back again.

We are tempted to call our working intellectual systems complete. But wisdom leads us toward honesty about gaps in our understanding. This honesty is essential if we wish to deepen our understanding of the world. The omissions in our systems of thought are important. They can be filled in through experimentation, exploration, and imagination. But we obscure their importance if we resist surprise and uncertainty and attempt to preserve the illusion of completeness in our understanding of the whole. Claims to certainty close off possibility. This is not always a bad thing: when we have to act definitively in the moment, bracketing epistemological concerns can be pragmatic, allowing us to treat diseases, build cities, and fly to the moon.

These gossamer links require the imagination, if not as a final destination then at least as a tether to aspects of reality that lie outside our current knowledge or even farther, to realms in which we do not yet know that we do not know. Newton did not know that he did not know quantum mechanics. Heraclitus did not know that he did not know about the analogia entis. Persuasion, not force, is how civilization is built, but accepting this requires humility. If we use our partial knowledge to silence other voices, we denigrate our own minds and imaginations, and our intellectual and imaginative lives become a repetition of familiar maxims, formulas, and false absolutes. Wielding a narrow knowledge to silence others is a philosophic habit that can lead to power of a certain sort, but it is devastating and world-shrinking. We should resist it, even though at points in history resisting it has led to death. Philosophy has its martyrs who died for the sake of imagination. Socrates was one. Bruno was another.

Whitehead was concerned about the effects of an unimaginative truncation of the mind’s activity. He worried this might blind us to parts of reality. Unlinking imaginative reach from critical thought denigrates both. It thins our view of reality. It makes us timid and narrows our scope of inquiry to trivialities, while relegating the remainder of experience to religion and mysticism, construed as inferior to the certainties of desiccated scholarship: “The world will again sink into the boredom of a drab detail of rational thought, unless we retain in the sky some reflection of the light from the sun of Hellenism.”⁵ The extent to which the mind determines the brightness of this light and the conditions necessary for a mind to experience such light are open questions.

Nor will a retreat into probabilities allow us to escape imaginative modes of thought. Our probabilities rest on assumptions that only our philosophical imaginations can provide. At the very least, we must assume the stability of statistical form. After David Hume, inference from probability to concrete facts in the natural world is anything but obviously valid. And because we only have direct access to the surface of one planet, our reach toward nature is severely restricted. We embrace the metaphor of natural laws in faith as we try to hone our observations and explanations of the natural world. It is an excellent faith to hold, because this is the only way we can study the natural world. But we must take care not to lose other kinds of knowledge, including the kinds of philosophical knowledge that form the foundation for the science. Even worse is to lose such insight and then to make a virtue of the loss by insisting that what remains is the only legitimate form of knowledge. A failure to be curious about other ways of knowing is a failure to be curious about reality. Fortunately, such imaginatively limited views of knowledge and insight have always crumbled, even if they periodically attempt to reemerge. Science and philosophy provide each other with imaginative resources. There is a reciprocity between the reach of scientific method and the metaphorical presumptions upon which such advance is founded. This reciprocity is needed to avoid the collapse of both reason and imagination. This is the only way we can throw the dart beyond the bounds of the world, to use Lucretius’s metaphor. Truly creative discovery in the world requires “the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact.”⁶

As things and ideas emerge in reality, they struggle for existence beyond themselves.

The living body—with a brain that is continuous with the body, which in turn is continuous with the world—is the organ for all experience in the world. This is not incidental. We navigate a complex and interactive reality, and we tell each other about what we find as we stretch past familiar outposts and boundaries. Religion, literature, science, and philosophy all attempt to discover ways to express meanings that have not yet been expressed.⁷ Our regulative appraisal of these expressions leads us to retain certain ideas and to emphasize certain ways of expressing the truth we find in experience. Truth refers to the conformation of appearance to reality, whether we are referring to the truth of our senses, which is the culmination of appearance for many animals, or the truth of a proposition.

Propositions are truth-relations that have a peculiar place in Whitehead’s thought: “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a tautology, for the emerging of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is its interest and its importance.

Whitehead believed the cosmos is moving toward an end, with a strange teleology aimed at bringing about beauty. I am not sure that his definition of beauty—perfection of harmony defined in terms of perfection of subjective form in detail, and final synthesis and strength—adds much to the value of his insight. But there is a compelling and intriguing resonance between his convictions about the telos of the universe and those of Aquinas, for whom a thing is good insofar as it is and for whom beauty, truth, and goodness are intimately related. For Whitehead, the goodness of truth is inseparable from its beauty.⁹

When meaning and fact are attached to each other, the attachment occurs in consciousness. This is especially true for art, in which the artist’s consciousness aims for truthful beauty by adapting appearance to reality. Art is essentially artificial, but it is most fully itself when it approaches nature while still remaining art: “Art is the education of nature. Thus, in its broadest sense, art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfections of harmony.”¹⁰ Whitehead combines Aristotle’s idea that art imitates life, and Oscar Wilde’s converse belief that life imitates art. The reciprocity between the idea that art educates nature, and the idea that it is perfected by approaching nature, feels similar to Stevens’s idea that poetry adds to the res. But where Stevens’s artifacts constitute a supreme fiction, for Whitehead there is a notion of harmony, beauty, and direction to the universe that provide some measure for the value of what is made. The imagination certainly makes fictions, but there is a reality to which the fiction may or may not conform. For Whitehead, this conformation bears upon its value in the life of the mind and soul, in a way that it cannot in the supreme fiction of Stevens’s world.

When we create a poem, a story, or a system of metaphysics, we are aware that we are consciously creating something. But as we observe ourselves making something, we are also aware that our consciousness grows through a non-conscious, or a partially conscious, or an other-than-conscious operation that is imagination—the power of genuine discovery through play. When we pay attention to our own imaginative work, we gain knowledge about ourselves, and we gain insight into the ways reality might be changed through our perception of it. Our fallible perception can introduce refractive error, but insofar as it is reality bumping up against us, our lenses might also be improved and our vision made truer. In a created world, it is possible to believe the creator intends for us to grasp reality in an ever-deeper way, even if the word intend is a placeholder for we know not what, a placeholder for something we can reach only by analogy.

One mark of civilization is the growing capacity of philosophical imagination to accommodate ever-larger and more general ideas, including ideas related to quality, importance, and fact—that a thing is, what a thing is, and what the value of a thing is. Whitehead’s understanding of process expresses the idea of importance in its most general form. Morality, logic, religion, and art are species of importance.¹¹ Process is not restricted to any single category of expression—morality, logic, religion, art—but is formed by the whole force of what we call reality, within which importance is manifested. Because the contours of importance are shaped by reality, philosophy must rise out of the perceptions and assumptions of ordinary life, where social relations emerge. Civilization is a kind of instrument for perceiving reality, within which wisdom reveals itself through the artifacts imaginative creatures make. Critical thought must begin with what actually shows up in the world if our philosophy is to remain tethered to reality.

Our lived experience begins with that part of the world we call our bodies. We feel with our bodies. History is a record of what we feel as our relationships with reality change. We must maintain openness to possibility to grow in our knowledge of reality as relations shift in the networks of the world, language, body, mind, and soul. Otherwise, we retreat to the safe havens of what we think we already know or else we distill away the mystery and strangeness of things into calculable abstractions that reside in an ever-diminishing space we call intellect. Philosophy is diminished when it timidly limits itself to relationships it can manage while rejecting the growing edge of our intimacy with new aspects of reality, which often feel vague in the beginning. Condescension toward the instability of new, as-yet dimly perceived ideas about reality is closer to cowardice than intellectual integrity.

As we acquire language to tell others about the discoveries our imaginations make within ordinary experience, we develop a collective intelligence, which we can analyze to improve our understanding of the world. Anything that exists is knowable, but the whole will always be greater than our own finite knowledge. The infinity of the whole, though comprehensible in each of its parts, is forever beyond the totality of our knowledge. Thomas conceived of God in a similar way—profoundly comprehensible in one sense but incomprehensible in another sense, because of our finitude. Such humility is central to Whitehead’s posture toward the philosophical imagination. We are, by our very natures, creatures who are on the way. At the edge of imagination’s reach, we delve into a past that is recollected, a present that appears fleeting, and a future that has yet to be made. This is essential to the nature of creatures such as ourselves, swimming in a vast reality that existed before us, and always falling short as we try to express what we discover about it.

When we do try to say something about the world, disclosing the contents of our minds, the contents become manageable. Saying things allows us to connect otherwise fragmentary inklings. But sometimes the connections we make through language may not exist in reality. This is why we must question so-called proofs in philosophy. We make intellectual abstractions and use them to construct philosophical proofs. Our only test for the truth of our proof is either the self-evident nature of our abstractions or else a return to unabstracted reality. But we never return to some primal version of reality, because expressing and analyzing the contents of our minds changes the way we see the world. Philosophy wants to disclose reality, but it must do so with a language that can distort reality. The biggest failures of philosophy are failures of language, but because of the kind of creatures we are, this is our only way into reality.¹²

In philosophy and poetry, our language is always outrun by our intuitive and imaginative encounters with reality. We know more than we can say, and to say more of what we know, we must learn to use language in new ways. If we believe there is order at the foundation of reality, which is an act of faith, it is reasonable to believe that sharing what we discover through imagination can lead to truer perceptions of reality. Saying what we discover helps us to see, as much as seeing helps us to say things. But along the way, we will encounter apparent inconsistencies. We can either dismiss these inconsistencies, to maintain the integrity of our intellectual systems, or we can tarry with inconsistency, hoping to discover a deeper consistency. Our philosophical imaginations cannot grow if we always exclude inconsistencies. Whitehead conceives of process as the mechanism for avoiding such exclusions.¹³

Inconsistency can be logical or aesthetic. Logic focuses on abstraction. Logical inconsistencies occur among abstracted things in a set of ideas we are analyzing for pattern and fit. Aesthetics stays closer to the concrete. The distance between the abstract and the concrete constitutes the difference between logic as a function of the understanding and aesthetics as a function of the understanding. Both are needed by a finite mind that tries to grasp the infinite, disclosing what is closed to us. Disclosure is the central act of the soul wandering the cosmos. This is why our philosophical style is not an esoteric activity reserved for experts but rather is at the heart of living and thinking about the reality in which we work, love, and make civilization.

We can talk abstractly about reality apart from our perception of it—reality is everything that is real, and everything that is something is real. But if we are going to talk about reality as we perceive it, we must talk about modes of reality and the relationships among modes of reality. We only have access to the world as it discloses itself to us in experience, through our peculiar modes of knowing. But we can grow in our ability to experience and to know. Philosophical imagination can go beyond questions about modes of knowing and speculate on modes of reality to which we might aspire, once we catch a glimpse of them. Three pairs of opposites allow us to establish principles of division in experience: clarity and vagueness, order and disorder, and good and bad. Each of these is related to form as it shows up in the world. Form requires limitation, finitude. It has a boundary, beyond which extends everything that is not the form. Our minds have a peculiar and wonderful ability to extend imaginatively beyond the limitations of form to the idea of infinity. We can perceive the relation of a particular form to the remainder of reality, known and unknown, knowable and unknowable. Our capacity both to perceive form and to grasp infinity leads to our sense of importance in the universe.¹⁴

Our discovery of order is always incomplete because it is linked to the limits of possibility determined by our bodily existence. Dissatisfaction with incompleteness is part of what motivates our intellectual and imaginative adventures. Our grasp of the whole is limited by our own finitude, and our comprehension of even the most familiar aspect of our universe is always partial. But process, in Whitehead’s sense, provides a rhythm of discovery in which we discern, however vaguely, the contours of individual things and facts. These always remain part of an infinite interconnected universe beyond us, and things that appear to us as discrete facts can never be abstracted from process without losing their meaning. Individual things have their meaning only in relation to process. Our contribution to creation lies in this: process has no meaning apart from the perspectives on the universe brought into being by all individual things. Time allows the movement of meaning, hope, fear, and energy. Space allows the consummation of an individual existing thing. Together, time and space allow the realities of transition and achievement that are aspects of process. Finally, the divine enables the universe to take on importance, value, and ideals it would not have otherwise. We struggle to grasp what has come before, what shall come in the future, and what the meaning of reality is. Philosophical imagination begins in wonder and reaches for new horizons, but completeness will always elude us, goading us onward.

Onward toward what? Toward the discovery of reality conceived as valuable and meaningful. Discovery requires that reality be viewed in this way, because apart from meaning and value, no goal is worth pursuing. Dead, meaningless nature cannot aim for anything, because it cannot value anything.¹⁵ Modernity combined the mechanics of Newtonian physics, in which the world yields no reasons, with Hume’s interpretation of data, which offers no meaningful causal relationships among events in the world. From this came a philosophy incapable of making the world intelligible beyond matters-of-fact that occur in an instant, excluding other modes of understanding oriented toward intuition, insight, and meaning. This interrupts philosophical speculation before it even begins, and it undercuts our attempts to discover interconnections in the cosmos, even when asking the most basic questions of science.

Because of the way science has developed, it is incapable of acknowledging aims or creativity in nature and instead discovers mere rules of succession. Descartes’s separation of the mind and body in his philosophy is at the root of this unfortunate history. The separation of the body from the mind requires that we also set aside the world of emotion, all of which is either derived from or modified by the body. This separation had a devastating effect on the way we value mental experience, including the ways we feel for meaning in a living philosophical act. We must overcome this if philosophy is going to aim at grasping the transcendent aspect of reality that is the condition for our experience of value, meaning, and direction. Even when philosophy has done its best work, we still experience the incompleteness of our grasp, and we see the true proportions of a reality that is always beyond us. Philosophy is akin to mysticism in its reach for insight into the as-yet unknown. It is also akin to poetry in its search for a language to express our discoveries in this immense and strange universe.

Einstein led scientists to move from theories in which the universe is made up of particles to theories in which everything is made of fields. From there, many scientists moved on to the idea that everything, in so far as it has a form, is information that precedes the manifestation of the thing in matter. This development in scientific thinking suggests ways we might reframe our experience of the universe, as well as our experience of our own minds as they experience the universe. If information precedes material expression, we can entertain the astonishing possibility that the first time a bird sang, it was not merely atoms gone crazy for a moment but was actually a bird singing—a new thing in the world. Among the things in the universe, we have unique access to the way that our minds work with different kinds of information, and in our own experience intelligence is the ground of true information. We also know that imagination brings forth new things in the mind, bound only by the strictures of possibility. Whether we are talking about birds, ideas, or stories, we must return to questions about the foundation and meaning of information in our universe. Discoveries in science compel us to rethink our relationship to this unfolding reality and the peculiar place of the mind in this world.

In his Gifford lectures, published as the book Process and Reality, Whitehead used the lens of speculative philosophy to focus on relationships within human experience. From the start he acknowledged the incompleteness of his own theory, because we lack the insight and language necessary for any set of complete metaphysical first principles. Metaphysical principles, whatever their value, can appear to have an artificial and deceptive stability. But for Whitehead, all metaphysical principles, including his own, are little more than “metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.”¹⁶

Any growth in our understanding, including our scientific understanding of the world, requires imagination. The inductive method introduced by Francis Bacon and embraced by empiricists would lead nowhere apart from imagination. This work of the mind—constructing ideas that move back and forth between experience and imagination, seeing the world under the influence of imagination in an effort to understand reality—has room for disagreement, and even inconsistency, among possibly true ideas. But it also trusts in the value of returning to experience and critique and understanding advances only if the play of imagination is free of contradiction. As imaginative constructions unfold, their success depends on their relationship to human interest. They must be logical and coherent, which is simply an expression of faith in order. Logic and coherence are the internal conditions of language and rational life, but the premises from which rational thought proceeds depend upon imaginative insights that transcend the familiar, the obvious, and the accepted.

Imagination is formed in the atmosphere of a rational life, and as it enlarges the mind’s awareness of forces at work in reality, it expands the language available to rational thought. Ficino’s magical practices—with his poetic and musical incantations and his use of magical images—were aimed at conditioning the imagination to receive celestial influences. Likewise, if any creative metaphysics is going to understand the complex operations of language in the development of philosophy, it must consider the forces that create a language and the civilization in which a language lives. Reality will always be larger than the language available to philosophy. This means that imaginative leaps will always be required for progress. The elasticity of the imagination allows our minds to create schemas of reality and to adapt to reality as our schemas grow. Imagination is the mind’s potential for deepening reason in ways that reason cannot guess, thereby intensifying sense. The imagination expands through experimentation and philosophical analysis but also through love, feeling, prayer, and storytelling, among many other human acts that are meaningful. The growth of rational thought begins with particular topics, generalizes from them, and then imaginatively schematizes the generalization, comparing the result of this imaginative work to ongoing direct experience. These specialized schemas have a reciprocal relationship with the common sense that emerges within civilizations. Each modifies or provides conditions for the other, and each provides a kind of restraint on the other. Imagination tethered to humanity’s common sense, and disciplined by the requirements of logical coherence, creates the pattern of a cosmos from disjointed facts. This is the nature of meaningful philosophical activity, and it is a process of genuine discovery, though our accounts are always asymptotic and incomplete.¹⁷

A thing is more than its form. Forms participate in things, giving them—things, facts—their definition, their definitiveness. Things and facts are creatures, but they do not exhaust the creativity that allows them to emerge. This creativity is a force that moves from disjunction to conjunction, leading ultimately to the whole that we call the universe. Whitehead’s concept of process is just this—the becoming of actual entities in the movement of this ultimate principle of creativity. The unity of a thing is a felt reality, a mode of experience that cannot be dismissed without diminishing our mind’s ability to discover what is real. Relevant and illuminating feeling can come in the surprising forms of jokes, horror, disgust, or indignation. In the course of moving from the incoherence of distinct disjunctive facts to the coherence of conjunction in a universe, the way we tell others about our experience leads to and shapes further insights into the truth of the cosmos.

Advances in knowledge have led some to propose a view of the universe that resonates with Plato’s idea of eternal forms that determine the nature of temporal things in the world. Einstein, for example, said, “Certain it is that a conviction akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world, lies behind all scientific work of a higher order … This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in experience, represents my conception of God.”¹⁸ Change in the world, the growth of experience, and the mind’s grasp of order and intelligibility in the universe are all emergent. Whitehead conceived of temporal things as arising through their participation in eternal things, with the actual mingling with and emerging from the potential through the mediation of the divine.¹⁹ Plato, Einstein, and Whitehead each had an intuition of a larger order that grounds and frames the world as it shows up in our experience. The most important clue we have about the nature of this ground and frame is the existence of our own minds, which are capable of discovering the intelligibility of reality. We create patterns of possible order, and we test these as lenses on reality, revising them in the course of lived experience. This is how imagination itself grows: insofar as there is a discoverable reality fitting to creatures such as ourselves, this process allows us to see where we have not been able to see before.

The process requires a kind of faith that everything real can find its place in our imaginative schema. Both science and philosophy require this faith to make something of imaginative play that can leap between the Heraclitian idea that all is movement and the Parmenidean idea that all change is illusion. Both ideas, as well as the movement between them, require a foundational principle that provides the limit for acts of the imagination—the principle of non-contradiction. Aesthetic measures such as simplicity and elegance can guide the mind but not with the same sense of necessity as the principle of non-contradiction. It is the basis for all science and philosophy, but it does not necessarily lead us to choose between Heraclitus or Parmenides. Instead, the principle leads us to pursue a view of reality in which each of these contradictory accounts of reality discloses some part of what is true, without breaking on the rock of non-contradiction. Discovery of this sort requires patience, persistence, and even courage, all of which are aspects not of logical compulsion but of virtue. If science and philosophy require this faith, they must also embrace a kind of hope in the possibilities for achieving genuine insight, with a basis for hope that is similar to religion’s basis for hope.

The central ontological principle that directs our attention to reality is the conviction that apart from actual entities there is only non-entity, which is to say, nothing; “The rest is silence.”²⁰ Creativity transcends any actuality, and it accounts for its internal constitution. Beyond this, there is only the actuality itself and the experience of the actuality. The reality of the thing unfolds and reveals itself in time. The actualities we experience in the world are temporal, are not eternal. Insofar as they are both actual and temporal, they had to emerge from a potential. Because a thing has definite form that is different from the forms it might have had, the emergence of an actuality omits other potentialities.

Whitehead distinguished temporal actualities from eternal objects and from God. An eternal object is something that can be conceived without reference to anything in the temporal world that is actual.²¹ The primordial nature of God is defined by the fullness of God’s conception of eternal objects. The mind of God—speaking analogically, as we must—answers the fundamental requirement that everything must be somewhere, including eternal objects in the general potentiality of the universe. The primordial mind of God provides a place for eternal objects, which Plato intuited in his concept of the world of ideas. The mind of God avoids the incoherent assumption that some explanatory fact can come into the actual world out of non-reality. Actual entities in the actual world are formed from other actual entities. The eternal objects—even if we conceive of them as imaginative placeholders, which apparently Whitehead did not—make it possible for an actual entity to form from other things in the universe. We must approach the idea of eternal objects by beginning with our experience of actual entities. But we cannot give a separate name to every actual entity—every individual tree, every individual animal.²² Instead, our minds conceive of universals, which are present in things, and which are describable by concepts. These universal concepts can be given names. Underlying both universals and potential things is an extreme, complex continuum that is unified relationally. The continuum is potentiality for division. The division occurs with actual entities. This division, or atomization, of the continuum brings things into time, temporalizes them.

Trouble comes when our post-Cartesian philosophical frames dogmatically truncate the reach of imagination. When we encounter a stone, common sense experiences a definite color and a definite shape perceived as quietly enduring. The stone, so perceived, along with its various relationships of position, dominates our imaginations. The position, shape, and color sometimes change, and the changes are explained by causes, such as the actual entity of a sledgehammer hitting the stone. But if our imaginations go only as far as the quietly enduring stone, with its temporary identity, we get stuck in scientific materialism. This is based upon a mistake—the idea that the substance conceived in this way is the ultimate actual entity. We make the same mistake about the stone that we made about the atom. There is a pragmatic usefulness in the idea of an enduring substance with stable qualities, but if we mistake this for the fundamental nature of things, we will fail to discover the truth of the cosmos. Unfortunately, this mistake has been reified in our language and our logic, and this has led to profound errors in our metaphysics that can only be overcome by reimagining our fundamental assumptions about reality.²³

Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and Kant devised their cosmological theories without recognizing the pervasiveness of this mistake. Plato came much closer to intuiting the truth of reality in the Timaeus, as long as it is read as allegory. The world is created as order comes into it: forms enter potentiality and lead to the togetherness that is an actual thing, though not all enduring objects form bodies, as anyone with a mind knows. In the Timaeus, the Demiurge gives way to the universal good. Schelling echoed the Timaeus when he described God and humanity as evolving out of their common depths, with light and night coinciding, as in the philosophy of Bruno, for whom night was the primal womb of light. Whitehead did not believe in pure chaos, because such a thing is rendered impossible by the immanence of God. But when contrasts between form and chaos are patterned, they can yield depth, resisting the shallowness of experience. Some measure of chaos and vagueness can make harmony more beautiful, so neither should be equated with evil.

Imagination, properly formed, allows us to see patterns where we might otherwise remain blind. David Hume gave one account of how sense perception limits imagination’s power. Bare sensation does resist the characteristic nimbleness of imagination. But Whitehead thought Hume exaggerated this weakness and even provided evidence to the contrary when he described imagination’s ability to fill in gaps in graduated scales of shades. He also believed imagination found a more hospitable freedom among eternal objects.²⁴ The individuality that eternal objects lend to what would otherwise be fragments of mere data is the core of his concept of process.

Reality exists in some way apart from our minds, but there can be no knowledge without a knower. Knowledge of ourselves as knowers affects our awareness of what is real. Part of Descartes’s monumental discovery was his insight into the importance for philosophy of the thinking substance’s consciousness of enjoying the experience of consciousness. Beyond our experience of actualities in consciousness, we discover that we can imagine them to be otherwise. This contingency of fact bore in upon Descartes and became the foundation of his method of doubt. It also became his portal for discovery, because our experience of a thing, along with our capacity to imagine it otherwise, reveals a fullness of perception that involves more than mere seeing. It extends to feeling, where we discover the power of the free imagination: we are capable of imaginatively grasping novel concepts that have some kind of reality but that are not yet instantiated anywhere in our experience of the universe.²⁵ This concept of the imagination keeps our minds from being trapped in the illusion of already-complete accounts of what is real. It allows us to stretch into the realm of possibility where we can find patterns that become our new lenses for seeing things we did not see before. We see back in time when we look up at light from faraway stars. We discover ever-smaller worlds within worlds when we look down through our microscopes. We become aware of emotional and spiritual realities when we look within ourselves.

Whitehead’s most radical formulation of his idea that we participate in the process of creation is his subjectivist principle: the universe consists only of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experience of subjects. Apart from the experience of the subject, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.”²⁶ If we say that we see a tree, the tree to which we are referring is an interpretation of a tree image. This is the crux of human encounter with reality. It is overwhelming. We cannot take in the whole of reality as it exists or potentially exists. But imagination is the nimblest aspect of our minds, enabling us to travel over the worlds of potentiality and to compared these possibilities with the onslaught of blind experience that dawns as we slowly emerge from mental slumber. The universe is organized in this way, and importance is expressed by what appears to us in this process of organization. When the universe is organized as an object of reason, it is still revisable since reason grows as we exercise judgment about the things we enjoy through the power of imagination.

We make our world, and apart from the world made by our minds, there is nothing for us. But we make our world from reality conceived as a whole, which we approach asymptotically. The interface between ourselves and blind experience is imagination. The world is made in our judgment of what imagination serves up to us as potential. All potential is the potential for form, and form is an eternal object. The value of imaginative metaphysical speculation is a value that derives from our attempts to feel for the contours of what is real. This value goes beyond the truth or falsity of any particular theory. Feeling lures us to develop theories about the world, and theory lures us back to feeling. In an intellectual culture that dismisses the importance of this aspect of human experience, the point cannot be overemphasized—the development of good theories about the world requires that we care about what shows up first as feeling. Theories that exclude what is revealed through feeling will eliminate vast swathes of reality, while despising as unserious the deeper ways of seeing the world: “The existence of imaginative literature should have warned logicians that their narrow doctrine is absurd. It is difficult to believe that all logicians as they read Hamlet’s speech, To be, or not to be, commence by judging whether the initial proposition be true or false and keep up the task of judgment throughout the whole thirty-five lines. Surely, at some point in the reading, judgment is eclipsed by aesthetic delight. The speech, for the theater audience is “…a mere lure for feeling.”²⁷ This is how we say things about the world as a whole. The philosophical imagination erupts in propositions about the world that are meant to do work in our minds. It erupts in a kind of poem.

Propositions are strange entities. They are a hybrid between pure potentiality and actuality. The discipline of logic brings clarity to propositions and to the relations among propositions. But logicians can lose their sense of one of the most important functions of propositions: propositions are a source of feeling. They are a source of feeling not at some high intellectual level, nor at the level of belief, but at the physical level of feeling, part of which resides below consciousness. In their role as originators of feeling, propositions are not tethered to data. This means that propositions may or may not conform to the world, and they may be true, or they may be false. If a proposition that conforms to the world is admitted into feeling, then feeling conforms to fact. But if a proposition that does not conform to the world is brought into feeling, we synthesize something that may or may not bring about order and that may or may not be good. Either way, it is still a novelty, a new form in the actual world.

This is why so much is lost when the function of propositions is construed purely in terms of logic: when propositions do not conform to the world, logic judges them as mistaken, useless, and even harmful. But this completely misses the valuable function of these novel propositions the imagination uses to test patterns, theories, and stories in the world. Error is unavoidable if we want to make novel discoveries in and about the world.²⁸ We must be willing to play without worrying too much over truth and falsity, at least at the start. Play is crucial for discovery. Imagination is the growing edge of our field of play, in which our desires for truth, beauty, and love lead the mind to create science, philosophy, poetry, and proposals to our beloved, whether we are wooing a lover or wooing a nation through diplomacy. Through imagination we are lured toward a person, an equation, a tree, or a metaphysical feeling. Propositions make the content of these experiences explicit, without regard for the truth or falsity of the propositions nor regard for whether or not the propositions conform to the reality of the world. Judgment is a qualitatively different act by which we decide whether or not to admit these propositions into intellectual belief.

Consciousness awakens when we feel the difference between mere facts in the world and our theories or stories about the world. Insofar as our imagination leads the first march into a theory or story about the world, imagination is necessary for the ongoing development of consciousness. Through acts of the imagination we grow our consciousness of feelings such as horror, relief, and purpose. Feelings entertain propositions, and propositions are in turn lures for feeling. As we become acquainted with this process, we gain a sense of something more, which we are only beginning to feel and which does not easily fit into our language—the deepest lure for feeling that comes from our dawning sense of the nature of God, whether or not we call it God.²⁹

Propositions, standing as they do between eternal objects and actual occasions, are always more than what is expressed verbally. Movement between eternal objects and actual occasions occurs within propositions. Our language is inadequate to express this movement without remainder. But our intuitive awareness of this movement motivates our notion of flux—the Heraclitian idea that all things flow. We weave our metaphysical systems around the nidus of this flux. Accounting for flux is one of the central purposes of metaphysics. Religious propositions are among the best for expressing our sense of permanence amid change because they bring together the metaphysics of substance and the metaphysics of flux. The contrast between the metaphysical views of permanence and change reveals the contingency of the actual temporal entities that appear in the movement of the flux. The sense of permanence amid change provides the consolation of being created, of being actual, and of being related to eternal objects but not the consolation of stasis at the core of Parmenides’s idea of the One. Flux is necessary for creativity because it allows everything that is to have other possibilities, which is both thrilling and terrifying. When feelings emerge, they do so through struggle. Their contingency marks not only what they are but also what they might have been. Every actual entity, though it is a thing with form and felt unity, is also felt as a process, on the way, in passage. An actual entity flows, but it is not all flux, because it is a thing with form related to an eternal object. Propositions express this relationship, but there is always a remainder open to exploration, discovery, and refined expression, moving ever closer to the mark but always falling short.

Propositions reside between eternal objects and actual entities. They provide the imaginative possibilities that allow us as knowers to relate to everything we know and everything we might one day know. To know well and to express what we know is not only to bridge eternal objects and actual entities but also to bridge current experience to the memory of prior experience in consciousness—an insight Plato glimpsed in his doctrine of reminiscence. Our present consciousness illuminates our past experience.

We feel real things in consciousness, and there is a kind of imaginative freedom around the felt thing. Perceptive feelings and imaginative feelings are the two kinds of propositional feelings. We can explore the surroundings of consciousness, but they are not transparently accessible—consciousness is not pure light. The boundaries of consciousness move and are variably blurry, and the light of consciousness waxes and wanes. Clarity of consciousness necessarily correspond to the complexity of complete experience. We can explore the penumbra of consciousness to gain insight and understanding, but the work is always accompanied by uncertainty. We must be willing to suspend judgment rather than prematurely assigning truth or falsity to the patterns we discover. The leading edge of apprehension is an active conscious imagination, the content of which may or may not be true. Imagination takes us to new places in the actual world, but that is not the end of the work.

Our theories are stories into which we gather all that we experience in consciousness. The stories are never static: elements that seem stable can escape into the flux, and within the flux we find things with abiding stability. The skill we use to preserve order in the middle of change must not stifle the imagination’s expansion, which introduces change into order as it reaches for novelty. Imagination is how we lean into the less well-lit penumbra of our conscious experience of reality: “Life refuses to be embalmed alive.”³⁰ Imagination’s reach is enlivening. It is also be terrifying when novelty threatens the apparent stability of familiar things. But if we want to grow in our discovery of the truth of the cosmos, we cannot escape the various ways permanence and flux manifest in the opposing realities of freedom and necessity, good and evil, and all other forms of the many in the one.

Whitehead’s list of contrasts culminates in the contrast between God and the world. Theistic philosophy does not favor political powers, moralistic motives, or distant and abstract deities such as the unmoved mover. These are all more like forces than persons. Theistic philosophy is motivated by operations of love in the world. Love illuminates purpose in the moment. It transcends discrete data and reveals interconnectedness and movement toward an end, holding reality together as a cosmos filled with meaning. God exemplifies the discovery that comes to us through the labor of metaphysics, the lure for feeling, and desire’s eternal urge. The world is realized in the unity of God’s nature and the transformation of God’s wisdom into the actual created world. Love defines the central metaphor that clarifies the nature of God’s transformation and growth—infinite patience with the tumultuous world and attentive concern that desires all good things to be nurtured, and none to be lost: “He does not create the world, he saves it: or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”³¹

If God is the poet of the world, we should not be surprised if this throws a philosophically interesting light on the poetic excursions of our own imaginations into the as-yet dim hints and clues of the dawning world. However tentative our first glimpse, we make a world to discover the truth of the world. This is the poetic apriori.

¹ Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America, New York (1997), 82.

²  Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, Free Press, New York (1967), 4.

³  Whitehead, Adventures, 24.

⁴  Whitehead, Adventures, 72.

⁵  Whitehead, Adventures, 118.

⁶ Whitehead, Adventures, 177.

⁷  Whitehead, Adventures, 227.

⁸ class=04Text> Whitehead, Adventures, 244.

⁹ Whitehead, Adventures, 267.

¹⁰  Whitehead, Adventures, 271.

¹¹  Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Free Press, New York (1966), 11.

¹² Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 48.

¹³ Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 54.

¹⁴ Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 78.

¹⁵  Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 135.

¹⁶ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press, New York (1978), 4.

¹⁷ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 17.

¹⁸  Albert Einstein, “Scientific Truth,” in The World as I See It, John Lane, London (1935), 131.

¹⁹  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 40

²⁰ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 43.

²¹  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 44.

²²  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 52.

²³  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 79.

²⁴  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 114.

²⁵ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 161.

²⁶class=00Text>  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 167.

²⁷ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 185.

²⁸ Whitehead, Process and Reality, 186.

²⁹  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 189.

³⁰  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 339.

³¹  Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346.