Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World by Krista E. Hughes

Author:Krista E. Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271084626
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press

Loving Sentience

Intimate hauntings can transform our sentir and our consciousness because the universe is a continuum of relatedness that embraces and is embraced by us. According to Alfred N. Whitehead, we can “feel” unconsciously and consciously that which is particular within the universe because the universe contains a dynamically binding quality known for its process of sentiri or sentire.24 This means that the universe has a character of solidarity that is immanent to each entity. As Brian Greene has observed, physical reality is nonlocal, composed of vibrating and electrodynamic particle-types that as Einstein would argue “spook” at a distance.25 In response, we can bring into consciousness what we feel intimately because vast ecologies are bound by original links of particles. These particles, even when pulled apart in opposite directions, Catherine Keller explains, will “remain immediately responsive to one another—no matter what the distance. They remain ‘entangled.’”26 Like actualizations of a dark cloud of enmeshment, both objects—the one over there and the one over here—show “care” for each other, a randomness that for Keller “can be linked across space . . . instantly at any distance.”27

So how would cosmic particles quicken a loving sense of common home? In a similar manner to how dark matter and dark energy pull together, all visible matter can expand the horizons of spatial orbits. Cardenal describes it poetically as a cosmic lover who acts as “the principle of union for all beings,” for Eros passes “through all things,” causing the union of all “cosmic forces.”28

The Eros of the Universe,29 or the divine incarnation of the primordial aim, or that which initially entices us to advance creatively, embraces the whole for the purposes of elongating geometries transfigured by “care” for one another. The capacity to “feel” that for Whitehead is the result of pure potentialities (also known as eternal objects) materializing as events (clusters of interconnections) emerges out of a continuum or “the universe as solidarity.”30 This organic universe in which we dwell and that inhabits us, as with seashells, is shaped by the “felt” or absorbed subatomic stratum by which an entity actualizes itself. Because the universe embraces it, each entity subsequently includes the universe by reason of its attitude toward every element in the universe.31 This is what Whitehead calls “the principle of relativity.”32 With each “feeling,” particles transition from indetermination to determination. And while difference is being constituted at each novel determination, the universe entangles itself in concrete reality through this process. This entanglement enables creative advance.33 Without this organic process of love, there would be only a monist and static universe.34

Perhaps this organic model of dwelling according to a continuum can be the product of the imaginative birth of what Sean Miller calls “the domestication of a wilderness-like space” produced by the very colonizing systems of exploration and conquest that we seek to challenge.35 Here also the cosmos can resemble “a space of flows” or current systems of easy spread of information through networks, not too unlike the global integration of financial markets, segmented articulation of production, and proliferation of international trade.

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