Depths As Yet Unspoken

Whiteheadian Excursions in Mysticism, Multiplicity, and Divinity

Roland Faber, Andrew M. Davis

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781725252608
  9781725252615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725252622
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Whitehead's thought continues to attract attention in mathematics and metaphysics, but few have recognized with Roland Faber, the deeply mystical dimensions of his philosophy. "If you like to phrase it so," Whitehead states, "philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken." Where, however, do these unspoken depths speak in Whitehead, and what are their associated themes in his philosophy? For the first time, Depths As Yet Unspoken gathers together Faber's most compelling writings on Whitehead's mutually immanent themes of mysticism, multiplicity, and divinity. In dialogue with a diversity of voices, from process philosophers and theologians, to mystical and poststructuralist thinkers, Faber creatively articulates Whitehead's "theopoetic" process cosmogony in its relevance to metaphysics, cosmology, everyday experience, religious pluralism, and interreligious violence, spirituality, and longstanding concerns of the theological tradition, including creation, the Trinity, revelation, religious experience, and divine mystery. Although Whitehead's mystical inclinations may not be obvious at first, they in fact constitute the apophatic backdrop to his entire philosophical corpus. Through Faber's work, Whitehead's philosophy is revealed to be nothing short of a remarkable endeavor to speak to the unfathomable depth of things.

Chapter One

The Mystical Whitehead

Philosophy and Mysticism

It is one of Joseph Bracken’s persistent insights that, if one engages with Whitehead’s text, one cannot avoid finding a voice that is not only irreducible to mathematical and metaphysical rationalism, but is, in its critical accompanying of theological and religious matters, of a quite mystical nature.36 By implication, at least, this means: Whitehead was a mystical thinker, if not, although in a somehow hidden way, himself a mystic.37

Bracken’s contention seems to be far from Whitehead’s reception in general,38 even if it is of a theological nature, however.39 Where does the “mystical” Whitehead really show himself? Maybe it is just a projection into Whitehead’s text, originating with certain religious agendas? As the word “mystic” enshrines the image of a closed mouth, the significance of a hidden nature, and silence, Whitehead’s mystical inclination might not be obvious at first. But maybe, this “silence” will precisely reveal the mystical character of his thought. Indeed, with Bracken, I would claim that Whitehead’s thought is not really silent on mysticism, but leaves us with hints of a mystical significance hidden behind the closed mouth of the text, of a meaning that actually and deeply shapes Whitehead’s thought.40

The reason for Whitehead’s (general) “silence” on mysticism will be found in a peculiar ambivalence within the term “mysticism” and its use as a way of relating to the world through experience.41 In principle, as Whitehead tries to avoid the implication of any term hinting toward something that is beyond the “articulation” (language, thought, or propositions) of experience or any “appearance” within experience per se, he accuses the use of “the mystical” of simply pointing at a reality that in any experience remains unarticulated and inconceivable beyond experience,42 and even more, that as hidden reality (beyond experience) is claimed to be the true or real or ultimate one.43 “The shadows pass—says mystical Religion,” thereby giving in to the “temptation to abandon the immediate experience of this world as a lost cause” (AI, 33–34). Based on such “mystical intuitions” (ibid., 37) “metaphysical assumptions” become “dogmatically affirmed” and free themselves “from criticism by dogmatically handing over the remainder of experience to an animal faith or a religious mysticism, incapable of rationalization” (ibid., 118).

This is the theme of Whitehead’s “rationalism”44: to not abandon this world, the invaluable importance of which lies in the fact that, in Whitehead’s analysis, it is its experience and its process of becoming as that of experiences that create the values by which creative process exists in the first place.45 Hence, Whitehead’s apodictic formulation which reformulates “the mystical” in his thought: “that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (PR, 167). Since all creative togetherness is that of experience (creative concrescence), Whitehead’s deflection of a reality beyond the creative process of experience receives its most profound formulation in terms of a matrix of relationality that cannot be broken, or only by the fantasies of mystical irrationality. On the contrary, ultimate reality necessarily exhibits only such relationality and such relationality is (the philosophically sought) rationality.46 Hence, “what does not so communicate is unknowable, and the unknowable is unknown” (PR, 4).

If mysticism addresses a reality beyond the relationality of experience and, hence, beyond the possibility of rational articulation—Whitehead objects.47 Whatever such a reality is called, assuming it as “an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Editor’s Introduction: Sparks before a Theopoetic Wildfire
• Prologue: Whitehead’s Universe: Past and Future
• Chapter 1: The Mystical Whitehead
• Chapter 2: A New Mystagogy of Becoming
• Chapter 3: God’s Absence of Listening
• Chapter 4: The Touch of Reality
• Chapter 5: Bodies of the Void
• Chapter 6: Polypoetics
• Chapter 7: Divine Para-doxy
• Chapter 8: Tracing the Spirit
• Chapter 9: Theopoetic Creativity
• Chapter 10: Trinity as Event
• Chapter 11: The Process of Revelation
• Chapter 12: God in the Making
• Epilogue: (Nothing but) Mystery
• Bibliography