Ten years ago, I wrote about Alfred North Whitehead’s time spent at Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vermont. It was there that, according to his biographer Victor Lowe, “Whitehead’s metaphysical system was created and his magnum opus, later named Process and Reality, was shaped.” In a follow-up note, I noted the exact place where he stayed and some other details of his retreat at the northeast Vermont lake. (At the time, I happened to be at Caspian Lake writing what became Shadowing the Anthropocene, OA here.)
Ten years later, with the help of AI (and with apologies to my anti-AI friends and colleagues), I can say a bit more about that. Citing Whitehead’s “lost papers” along with a few other things that weren’t yet available a decade ago, Google’s AI surmises — that’s the most precise term I can come up with for its “thinking” — that “the landscape of Caspian Lake deeply mirrored and reinforced the metaphysical concepts he was formulating.”
It offers the following indications of that influence of the northeast Vermont landscape on Whitehead’s thinking:
The Rejection of Materialism: In the 1920s, Whitehead was actively fighting “scientific materialism” — the idea that the universe is made of static, dead matter. Writing on the shores of a vibrant, changing lake ecosystem allowed him to visualize reality not as a collection of fixed objects, but as a “structure of evolving processes.” [1, 2]
The Concept of “Concrescence”: Whitehead’s philosophy states that the fundamental building blocks of reality are not things, but “events” or “actual occasions” that fluidly merge their past experiences into a new moment of creativity. The shifting light, weather, and water of the Vermont wilderness served as a perfect macroscopic example of this cosmic flux. [1, 2, 3]
Interconnectedness (“Everything is Everywhere”): In Process and Reality, Whitehead famously argued against the “bifurcation of nature,” meaning you cannot separate the human mind from the natural world. At Caspian Lake, he practiced this immersion. His metaphysics insisted that a red sunset is just as real a part of nature as the light waves physics uses to explain it — a philosophy born from directly experiencing the environment around him. [1, 2]
I share this not only because I’m in Greensboro on the cusp of the centenary of Whitehead’s productive writing retreat, but also because I’m thinking a lot about AI (as I prepare a course on “AI and the Future of the Humanities”), and because it suggests the kind of thinking I don’t believe AI is really capable of: speculative, inferential “surmising” or conjecturing.
I have not verified the details of what the bot is working from in the sources it cites — they include videos of Matthew David Segall (which I don’t have time right now to watch in full), the aforementioned “lost papers” (though I’m not seeing Vermont mentioned in what’s available online), a few other more standard sources on Whitehead, and my own pieces from ten years ago. His published letters to his son, North, don’t say much about the landscape surrounding him during his Greensboro months.
I’m tempted to conclude that Google AI is “thinking” hypothetically, bridging the gaps between its “knowledge” of, on the one hand, Whitehead’s Process and Reality and, on the other, of this wooded northern Vermont lake community, to make connections that just might be there, but also might not. (I should add that I wasn’t looking for this. I had only typed in “when did Whitehead start writing Process and Reality at Caspian Lake” and this whole thread of the lakeside environment’s influence opened up for me on the Google AI-mode enabled browser I’m working on.) Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, AI’s “thinking” here reminds me of some of my students’ writing, at least when they are trying, but not too hard and not too creatively, to make a case for something that’s plausible but not proven.
All of that gets into the challenging topic of “what is called thinking,” as Heidegger put it, but that’s another topic for another day, one for which I’m finding Hannah Arendt’s later writings helpful.
Caspian Lake’s influence aside (and today that influence is a bit more sullied by city folks with their fireworks and drunken singing), I hope local brewmaster Shaun Hill will finish reading Process and Reality so that he can finally release a concoction, perhaps a double IPA, named after it for his Philosophical Series, which only includes drinks named after books he’s actually read. The founder of award winning Hill Farmstead Brewery is no lightweight (he’s a one-time philosophy major): the series includes The Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of Morals, Madness and Civilization, Being and Time, and Difference and Repetition, the latter two being among the densest volumes of 20th century philosophy. But he’s admitted to me that he’s struggled getting through Whitehead’s most challenging tome.
Next summer is the centenary of Whitehead’s arrival here and of the writing of nine-and-a-half of its chapters. 2028 is the centenary of the conclusion of Whitehead’s Gifford Lectures that were based on his Caspian Lake writings, and 2029 is the centenary of the final published result. So Shaun still has a little time. If it’s not enough, I will have failed at one of my life’s tasks (turning being into becoming).
