Process philosophy in healthcare - Part 3
Not of this world
In the last post on process philosophy (link) I suggested that there were no ‘things’: no objects, no stable matter, no essential essences, and no temporally or spatially fixed identities in process philosophy.
In some ways this seems counterintuitive because how can there not be things like people, rocks, clouds, dreams, men and capitalism?
And this is a reasonable question, because don’t we live everyday in a world of things?
Well yes… if our starting point is already biased towards a thing-based mindset.
But if you approach the question of reality as a process thinker, things seem much more straightforward.
We all know the boundary between what’s me and not me is shifting all the time: bodies are in a constant state of interaction with the environment; cells are sloughing off; air and food comes in and out; I cast my mind back to an earlier time; and we are never still. Not a single atom in our make up ever stands still in space or time. Everything flows.
And that’s all process thinking.
So, on the one hand we all know that life is constantly a process, in motion. So why do we always seem to want to stop the clocks, hold the thing still and give it a name?
The answer for this may lie in our age-old desire for transcendence.
Transcendence is a belief in something ‘outside’; something ‘beyond’.
In its most benign sense transcendence just means there is something that is indivisibly ‘me’, and equally something that is ‘not me’. This idea of sovereign autonomy can easily be extended to all things, producing all sorts of binary states:
tree|not tree
male|female
mind|body
subject|object
true|false
nature|culture
order|chaos
right|wrong
human|non-human
sacred|profane
normal|abnormal
alive|dead
good|evil
visible|invisible
healthy|sick
agency|structure
inside|outside
still|moving
mad|sane
public|private
active|passive
self|other
space|time
The first answer to why we might impose a transcendental view on reality, then, is that it just makes life easier. It’s much simpler buying an apple at the supermarket than searching for some vitamin C in an immaterial assemblage of intersecting relations.
But knowing what we agree to call something is not the primary reason we defer to transcendentalism. The primary reason is that transcendentalism gives us a convenient why.
When we invent the idea of an indivisible self or entity — and, by extension, something that is not-me — we are creating the conditions in which we can give the ‘not me’ causal and explanatory power. We can explain events in our life and all kinds of happenings and even the existence of everything in the cosmos in deference to the other; the not-me that makes things real.
God(s), faiths, beliefs in Gaia, nature and mother earth, fate, chance or luck, natural scientific laws, and superstructural powers like capitalism, religion and language are all ‘not-mes’ that we have gifted with super-natural powers in an attempt to make sense of this messy, inexplicable existence.
“Comfort’s in heaven; and we are on the earth” - Shakespeare, King Richard III
But this is not new. For much of human history, from Parmenides and Aristotle to modern-day philosophers and scholars, faith leaders and scientists, we have used the idea of a transcendental realm as a way to explain present realities.
Plato suggested that everything in existence was an imperfect copy of a perfect ‘form’ that lay beyond this world.
Many faiths used the idea of the non-earthly realm as a way to explain creation and fate, maintain connections with gods and ancestors, give a reason for human existence, and — as was the case with the Early Christian church — construct a great chain of being that set ‘man’ apart from nature (Goldhill, 2024).
Scientists from the Renaissance onwards have done this too, by arguing that laws of nature exist ‘out there’, and that our job as rational human beings should be to uncover these laws governing everything within the cosmos.
Kantian idealism threw a spoiler into rational science by arguing that we can never actually know the reality of a thing in itself (noumena) because the world can only be accessed through our senses, so all experience is phenomenal.
Postmodernist theorists like Derrida and Foucault offered the first substantial critique of transcendentalism, arguing that there could be nothing outside of the text or beyond discourse.
In recent years, though, new materialist authors like Jane Bennett have found they cannot escape transcendental vitalism, and that there must be some ‘power’ (what Hans Driesch called entelechy and Henri Bergson’s élan vital) enchanting the world not only of humans but of all things.
Indeed, its an ongoing debate even whether process philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari, Alfred North Whitehead, and speculative realists like Graham Harman fully escape transcendentalism themselves.1
The rejection of transcendentalism remains, however, a cardinal principle of process philosophy which, instead, pursues the idea of immanence. I’ll talk more about this concept in an upcoming post, but our next topic has to be the second crucial error of substance philosophy — in the minds of process philosophers, at least — and that is its entirely abstract and thoroughly misleading construction of time and space.
But more on that next time.
Reference
Goldhill, S. (2024). Beyond Michel Foucault, Beyond Peter Brown: What Did Early Christianity Destroy?Arethusa 57(2), 193-225. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/are.2024.a934133.
Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the virtual real and the actual seems to offer a form of transcendence, as does Alfred North Whitehead’s central concept of God and beauty. Graham Harman’s reference to real objects/qualities and sensual objects/qualities also suggests an unreachable realm beyond the world of experience.