Japan: Day Two

Finishing my presentation, preparing to take questions, with the conference scarf on display as a visual aid


The rhythm of a conference is the same everywhere you go, but at international conferences, even more so. Plenary sessions feature lengthy presentations by the most distinguished invited scholars, printed in full in the conference proceedings so that attendees can follow along. Sessions last two and a half hours, or three forty-five minute talks. Today parallel sessions start, with three rooms on the same schedule, each presenting three papers in each session.


A few of the Chinese scholars at my presentation, impressed by the conference scarf


The thinking process of a conference is always the same, too. As you listen to the presentations and make notes -- and make no mistake, I derived unusual benefit from yesterday's six papers -- you tend at the same time to be strategizing about your activities during the next break: where you can grab a drink or a bite, where the nearest restrooms are located, whether you will make it to the optional activities after the day's sessions or whether you are too tired or hungry to contemplate another room with chairs and speakers.


The presenters and audience at my parallel session, one of the most congenial of the week


Chances to break free and be a tourist are few but precious. Last night after being horrified by the price of food at my hotel's restaurants, I walked back to the main road and ducked into the first little restaurant I saw on the first alley I walked down. It was dark by the time we got out of the day's work, and the beautiful gardens and grounds that I glimpsed as I hurried by that morning on my way to the conference were already obscured by darkness.


University students at lacrosse practice as evening falls


Today my paper is scheduled to be presented at the last of the day's three sessions, an unenviable position. But once it is done, the celebration of the evening begins. The mother of one of my dear students is taking me to dinner tonight, and I look forward to my first guided experience into Tokyo proper.

Japan: Day 1

I wrote a few blog essays during early mornings and other spare moments over the last week, while I was in Japan.  I'll post those accompanied by contemporaneous photos over the next few days, followed by a catch-up post if need be.



View from my hotel window

And so, just like that, I'm on the other side of the world. Well, not "just like that"; it's fully two days later, however you slice it, and there were two planes, a bis, and a 10-hour sleep in between. 


Sophia University welcomes the Eco-Sophia Symposium

I've never suffered much from the classic symptoms of jet lag, as I've heard them reported. Although I didn't sleep on the 14-hour transpacific flight, and thus was awake almost 24 hours during my trio -- and this for a person who hasn't stayed up all night since she was a teenager -- and couldn’t quite figure out why I was hungry last night at 8:30 Japan time after eating three meals in the preceding 12 hours, I slept soundly, woke refreshed, and enjoyed the hotel's continental breakfast.

 
The conference opening plenary, with the start of my conference scarf

In other words, I feel like it's Monday morning and I'm ready to get to work at the conference, although I missed a weekend day somewhere in there. We'll see how I'm holding up at dinnertime after a full day of speeches and sessions.

 
Kids from private school cross the street

Last night I was recalling some of the other international travel I've done over the last few years. The walks I took in Salzburg, the sites we visited in Seoul, the tiny hotel room on the canal in Aarhus. Compared to some of those trips, this one is logistically simple and stress-free. My well-appointed hotel is a short stroll from the conference site, which is an urban university campus. Student walk from class to class checking their cellphones, carrying their satchels, earbuds on, wearing their athletic gear. Just like home. Only the impeccably attired campus security and work crews, along with the unsettlingly ubiquitous medical masks, stand out. Otherwise it's like university life everywhere: hanging out at the student center, taking a morning jog, grabbing a drink at the vending machine, watching the celebratory centennial banners dance on every light post.

Process and progress

Emmett asks:

I wonder if you've worked at reading "Process and Reality" for its own sake, as a book that has its own, extra-theological purpose?

Did you feel it necessary to understand process philosophy as a whole, or did you abstract from it what was immediately relevant to theology?

The book to which he's referring is Alfred North Whitehead's magnum opus, a massive and famously dense systematic metaphysics. It's by far the least readable of Whitehead's works, which are for the most part quite accessible. In most of his books, Whitehead tended to write essays and chapters in response to particular problems, linking them together gradually to make a limited number of theoretical points, but staying connected to the examples and situations that prompted the exploration.

But in PR, as Whitehead scholars call it, almost nothing is connected to reality as we know it. The prose is dense with jargon -- actual occasion, prehension, nexus, eternal object, consequent nature. There are no examples. Every so often Whitehead will give a short discourse on other philosophers treated related ideas, but mostly it's chapter after chapter of philosophical heavy lifting comparable to Kant for sheer opacity.

Emmett, PR isn't for reading. It's for reference. Ideas that Whitehead tries out in Science And The Modern World or Adventures Of Ideas get constructed robustly in PR, defined and polished and placed in the matrix of all the other ideas. But the only way to find out why those ideas got created at all is to be introduced to them in the less speculative, more grounded works.

I tend to read the first and last chapters of PR straight through. The rest I work like a jigsaw puzzle, moving the pieces around and ignoring the ones that aren't part of the picture I'm currently working on. Or maybe like a textbook, studying the word lists and doing the exercises to try to get the one point that matters right at the moment.

In answer to your other question, I think it's a mistake to try to extract from PR only the theological content (which is concentrated in the last chapter and mentioned briefly in a few other places in the text). Understanding process philosophy as a whole is important, although I don't claim to have mastered it; nevertheless, I continue to try because I don't want to sin against Whitehead by failing to understand him as he presents himself, rather than as I might want to make him useful for my projects.

There are many -- perhaps most -- who are better at reading and using PR. But since you're asking me, I'd say you need a guide, for sure. I was first led through PR by my mentor Will Power, at the University of Georgia; then more systematically by the late Langdon Gilkey, at the University of Virginia. While I had already struggled through much of it myself in both cases, knowledgeable teachers gave me context that allowed me to situate the metaphysical solution in relation to the problems it was designed to solve. Everything makes more sense when it is nested in a network of relationships -- an observation Whitehead would certainly appreciate.

Thanks for the question, Emmett -- hope you came back to read it. For the rest of you, please forgive this brief foray into the more technical and less generally relevant (or interesting) aspects of my academic specialty. You're welcome to cleanse your palette by submitting a question of your own!