I was astounded\u00a0to read the following passage as I sat in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake in Greenboro, Vermont, earlier today:<\/p>\n
“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<\/em>, was shaped.”<\/p>\n The passage\u00a0comes in the unfinished second volume of Victor Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work<\/em>, the only serious attempt at a biography of a man who had his personal papers destroyed<\/a> upon his death — which tells me I’m not likely to find much more written about it anywhere.<\/p>\n As readers of this blog know, I’ve come to\u00a0see\u00a0Process and Reality<\/em>\u00a0as probably the most important\u00a0single-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.<\/p>\n Lowe’s note indicates that P & R<\/em>\u00a0was in large measure written in the place that I’ve come to think of as one of my own geniorum loci<\/em> — the G (or at least the most obvious of the G’s) of Ecosophy-G<\/a>\u00a0or “pre-G<\/a>.”<\/p>\n So I’ve tried to determine what I can about this surprising discovery.\u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n If I find the actual cottage in which Whitehead wrote Process and Reality<\/em>, I will do my best\u00a0to share a photograph of it, or at least the view of the lake from it. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was astounded\u00a0to read the following passage as I sat in a cottage on the shore of Caspian Lake in Greenboro, Vermont, earlier today: “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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,4422],"tags":[350273,350271,350274,350272,350269,551,423],"class_list":["post-8836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-process-relational-thought","tag-alfred-north-whitehead","tag-genius-loci","tag-greensboro-vt","tag-place-and-philosophy","tag-process-and-reality","tag-vermont","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2iw","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8868,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/07\/06\/whitehead-in-greensboro\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":0},"title":"Whitehead in Greensboro","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 6, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This post follows up on my\u00a0previous note\u00a0about Alfred North Whitehead's time\u00a0spent in Greensboro, Vermont. It was updated on July 7, 2016, thanks to information obtained from the Mitchells' descendants. I have\u00a0found out where the Whiteheads stayed when he was writing his philosophical magnum opus,\u00a0Process and Reality. It was in a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"s-l1600","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2016\/07\/s-l1600-275x182.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10041,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/01\/28\/process-and-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":1},"title":"Process and Reality","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been trying to convince acclaimed northeast Vermont brewer Shaun Hill to add Whitehead's Process and Reality to his Philosophical Series\u00a0of ales, stouts, lambics, and porters, on the pretext that it was written down the road from the brewery. But also because Nietzsche, Foucault, Emerson, Thoreau, and Deleuze would appreciate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music & soundscape"","block_context":{"text":"Music & soundscape","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/music-soundscape\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2019\/01\/a3292134263_10-275x275.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13535,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2024\/03\/19\/musical-process-and-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":2},"title":"Musical process and reality","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 19, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"A lot has been written about music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: for instance, on Deleuze and music theory, on music after Deleuze, and on Deleuze's \"Thought-Music,\" and there've been some valiant efforts to put Deleuze to music, like this one, this one, and this one, and several related\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music & soundscape"","block_context":{"text":"Music & soundscape","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/music-soundscape\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/c3xK35N0XKg\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1262,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/05\/12\/between-whitehead-peirce\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":3},"title":"between Whitehead & Peirce","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The case has often been made -- by John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and others -- that Alfred North Whitehead's process metaphysics provides an account of the universe that is, or could be, foundational to an ecological worldview. This is because it is an account that is naturalist (or realist),\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7055,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/30\/lava-lampy-whitehead\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":4},"title":"Lava lampy Whitehead?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"While I find much to admire in Tim Morton's writings (and in him personally, as I've recently related), I'm sure he knows that his writing on what he calls \"lava lampy materialism\" leaves me unconvinced. (I've discussed that topic here, here, and elsewhere.) I haven't read his Realist Magic yet,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1288,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/06\/09\/peirce-whitehead-hartshorne-process-relational-ontology\/","url_meta":{"origin":8836,"position":5},"title":"Peirce-Whitehead-Hartshorne & process-relational ontology","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"The following are some working notes following up on my previous post on the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, specifically on Peirce\u2019s logical\/relational\/phenomenological categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness) and Whitehead\u2019s notion of prehension and the \u201cactual occasion.\u201d It\u2019s become clear to me since writing that post that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"triple-cone-p211-english.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/06\/triple-cone-p211-english.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8836"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8846,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8836\/revisions\/8846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}