immanence

“Work on ‘The Concept of Organism’ began with the summer of 1927, which the Whiteheads spent in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake, in Greensboro, Vermont. It was there that Whitehead’s metaphysical system was created and his magnum opus, later named Process and Reality, was shaped.”

The passage comes in the unfinished second volume of Victor Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, the only serious attempt at a biography of a man who had his personal papers destroyed upon his death — which tells me I’m not likely to find much more written about it anywhere.

As readers of this blog know, I’ve come to see Process and Reality as probably the most important single-volume effort to reshape the metaphysics of western culture in a direction more amenable to appreciating the living, dynamic, and relational character of the universe we live in.

Lowe’s note indicates that P & R was in large measure written in the place that I’ve come to think of as one of my own geniorum loci — the G (or at least the most obvious of the G’s) of Ecosophy-G or “pre-G.”

So I’ve tried to determine what I can about this surprising discovery. It turns out that Whitehead’s Harvard colleague William Ernest Hocking summered in Greensboro at the time, alongside Hocking’s friends the Days (whom I count among my in-laws), the Mitchells, and others.

If I find the actual cottage in which Whitehead wrote Process and Reality, I will do my best to share a photograph of it, or at least the view of the lake from it. Stay tuned.