Wabi-Sabi in a Whiteheadian cosmology
In an instant, an explosion occurs. Light radiates, energy emanates, and matter aggregates. Accelerating through time and space, the death of a star penetrates itself into birth. The ugliness of decay thriving alongside the beauty of expansion. In destruction there is creativity; and in creativity there is destruction. This is the perplexity that a supernova embodies. Its paradoxical reality resides within the depths of our own being, as we evolve and devolve with the powers of creativity, destruction, ugliness, and beauty.
In Alfred North Whitehead’s cosmology, creativity is an essential facet of his process philosophy. Sheri Kling, in her article Whitehead’s Metaphysics as a Cosmological Framework for Transpersonal Psychology writes, “[Whitehead] grounds our hope in a participatory cosmos of creativity and freedom where the living immediacy of each moment’s arising is pregnant with possibilities for purpose, value, and positive change (Kling, 2019).” The creativity and freedom that imbues Whitehead’s cosmos is beauty; and this beauty guides the path of cosmic creativity through an intensification of experience. His philosophy considers the “infinite fullness of experience” to be “supreme over thought” and thus provides us with a worldview that is deeply embedded in relationships, events, and feelings. While it seems to be that the concepts of destruction and ugliness play a subtle role in Whitehead’s philosophy, I believe these ideas should be given more weight alongside creativity and beauty. Furthermore, since Whitehead’s process philosophy is more of an aesthetic approach towards understanding the nature of reality, I will explore the ideas of destruction and ugliness through the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, and add it into Whitehead’s cosmology as an extra ingredient.
Up until the 14th century, the words “wabi” and “sabi” had quite different meanings. “Sabi” originally meant, “chill,” “lean,” or “withered;” while “wabi” meant the “misery of living alone in nature, away from society, and suggested a discouraged, dispirited, cheerless emotional state (Koren, 1994).” Through the subtle diffusion of sublime richness, “wabi” now refers to: a way of life, a spiritual path, the inward, the subjective, a philosophical construct, and spatial events. “Sabi” refers to: material objects, art and literature, the outward, the objective, an aesthetic ideal, and temporal events. When Japanese people say, “wabi” they also mean “sabi,” and vice versa (Koren, 1994). The polarizing unity that these two words evoke are similar to Whitehead’s dipolar events that unify objective and subjective, body and mind into an integrated worldview. As Kling says, “Unlike the bifurcation of the mental and the physical in Cartesian dualism, Whitehead’s dipolar aspects are like the opposite poles of a battery or magnet; they are necessarily together (Kling, 2019).” Similarly, since wabi-sabi is an aesthetic philosophy, it enables one to perceive spiritual depth in material reality, and in turn allows for the unfiltered raw experience of “infinite fullness.”
In his book Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren describes how the wabi-sabi way of life nurtured the Japanese mind: “this kind of life fostered an appreciation of the minor details of everyday life and insights into the beauty of the inconspicuous and overlooked aspects of nature (Koren, 1994).” Thus, creativity and beauty, in the world of wabi-sabi, is not something which evokes a sense of symmetry, perfection, and an everlasting ideal. Rather, it is a cosmos in which askewness, imperfection, and incompleteness are the foundations of creativity and beauty. Wabi-sabi aligns with Whitehead’s philosophy to the extent that it embraces a universe that is in a constant, never-ending state of becoming. However, it also glorifies the role of devolution: “wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding [...] like homeopathic medicine, the essence of wabi-sabi is apportioned in small doses. As the dose decreases, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become (Koren, 1994).” Although wabi-sabi, like Whiteheadian cosmology, relies on a reality that is relational, concrescent, and creative, it also holds the pole for a universe in which the many become one and are decreased by one. Ultimately, the metaphysical basis for wabi-sabi is that “things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness (Koren, 1994).” Koren elucidates on this idea further:
“While the universe destructs it also constructs. New things emerge out of nothingness. But we can’t really determine by cursory observation whether something is in the evolving or devolving mode. If we didn’t know differently we might mistake the newborn baby boy - small, wrinkled, bent, a little grotesque looking - for the very old man on the brink of death. In representations of wabi-sabi, arbitrarily perhaps, the devolving dynamic generally tends to manifest itself in things a little darker, more obscure, and quiet. Things evolving tend to be a little lighter and brighter, a bit clearer, and slightly more eye-arresting. And nothingness itself - instead of being empty space, as in the West - is alive with possibility. In metaphysical terms, wabi-sabi suggests that the universe is in constant motion toward or away from potential (Koren, 1994).”
Wabi-sabi then, puts into question an aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy: God. If God is the foundation for the living immediacy that is needed for entities to become (Kling, 2019), then do the processes of deconstruction, destruction, and devolution imply that there is no living immediacy? I am inclined to disagree; these processes are in fact, also embedded in the living immediacy and its “infinite fullness of experience;” except rather than moving towards, its moving away from purpose, value, and positive change. To some extent, this dialectic between creativity in the form of becoming, and destruction in the form of devolution is synthesizing into a universe that is not only living the answers and questions, but is living the paradoxes as well. A Whiteheadian recipe, with a dash of wabi-sabi, is slowly cooking up a Paradoxical Paradigm.
Although it may seem that wabi-sabi is projecting a hopeless sense of darkness into the world, I believe the ideas of devolution and destruction are grounded in real wisdom. These ideas take root in our world, in many different forms; and maybe the best place to explore them is within our economic system. In an interview, David Harvey, a Marxist economist, elaborates on capitalism and its two axes of space and time:
“For instance, the interest rate is about discounting into the future. And borrowing is about foreclosing on the future. Debt is a claim on future production. So the future is foreclosed on, because we’ve got to pay our debts. Ask any student who owes $200,000: their future is foreclosed, because they’ve got to pay off that debt. This foreclosure of the future is a terribly important part of what Capital is about. The space stuff comes in because as you start to expand, there’s always the possibility that if you can’t expand in a given space, you take your capital and go into another space [...] The expansion of the system is about getting what I call “spatial fixes.” You’ve got a problem: you’ve got excess capital. What are you going to do with it? Well, you have a spatial fix, which means you go out and build something somewhere else in the world. If you have an “unsettled” continent like North America in the nineteenth century, then there’s vast amounts of place you can expand into. But now North America has been pretty much covered. The spatial reorganization is not simply about expansion. It’s also about reconstruction (Denvir & Harvey, 2018).”
If the future is foreclosed on, then Whitehead’s notion of objectivity no longer only pertains to the past, it also applies to the future. The conceptual possibilities for actualization are limited, since the objective world is fixated on “stubborn facts.” Thus, in regards to the time dimension of capitalism, the idea of becoming is a mere illusion to many. While the problem of debt is deeply embedded in capitalism, a wabi-sabi worldview provides a devolutionary approach towards dealing with such matters: “Wabi-sabi means treading lightly on the planet and knowing how to appreciate whatever is encountered, no matter how trifling, whenever it is encountered. “Material poverty, spiritual richness” are wabi-sabi bywords. In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success - wealth, status, power, and luxury - and enjoy the unencumbered life (Koren, 1994).” Herein lies the wisdom of wabi-sabi: coming to terms with what one considers ugly, and seeing beauty in it.
On the other hand, the space dimension of capitalism deals with an overload of creativity. Since generating capital is inextricably tied to creating more products and services, space itself becomes overwhelmed by creation. In a capitalistic world, “the many become one and are increased by one” is an idea that influences the creation of wealth at the expense of space. Therefore, destruction becomes critical; not of space but of creativity itself. The creativity within a wabi-sabi worldview is one that thrives on simplicity: “The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry (Koren, 1994).” Thus, the destruction of capital and certain ideas relating to products and services, creates space and ultimately, freedom.
Whitehead’s philosophy provides a truly integrated approach towards understanding the nature of reality. In fact, his prioritization of experience as a fundamental ground is as real as reality gets. Especially since, “it is not just that the full richness of human experience must always be taken into consideration within a metaphysical system’s explanation of the structure of reality, but that human experience is a lens through which we may view and learn about the entire universe (Kling, 2019).” As controversial as it may sound, violence, darkness, and destruction are inevitable facets of human experience; and although process philosophy provides us with a potential for evolution and transformation towards the good, wabi-sabi adds a layer of acceptance into this cosmology. It teaches that, “nothing that exists is without imperfections. When we look really closely at things we see the flaws. The sharp edge of a razor blade, when magnified, reveals microscopic pits, chips, and variegations. Every craftsman knows the limits of perfection: the imperfections glare back. And as things begin to break down and approach the primordial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular (Koren, 1994).”
Through human experience and nature’s reflections, we come to understand that creativity cannot occur without destruction; and when something is destroyed, something is created as well. Adding the quintessential wabi-sabi aesthetic to the Whiteheadian cosmology will only further aid in our process towards integration; towards and away from a paradoxical paradigm.
References
Denvir, D., & Harvey, D. (2018, July 12). Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters. Retrieved from
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/karl-marx-capital-david-harvey
Kling, S. D. (2019). Whitehead’s metaphysics as a cosmological framework for transpersonal
psychology. The Humanistic Psychologist, 47, 181–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/hum0000124
Koren, L. (1994). Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets, & Philosophers. Point Reyes: CA: Imperfect Publishing.
