semi-automatic waffle

Yes—there is a real and non-accidental correlation between Schelling’s Abgrund and Whitehead’s creativity, but it’s a structural resonance rather than a doctrinal lineage. They are answering the same problem from different historical pressures: how to think origination without foundation, becoming without a pre-given order, and plurality without collapse into chaos or teleology.

Below is a careful alignment, and then—crucially—the limits of that alignment.

1. The Shared Problem: How Anything Begins Without Presupposing Order

Both Schelling (especially the Freiheitsschrift and late Berlin lectures) and Whitehead reject:

Substance metaphysics
Static rationalism
Creation as execution of a pre-existing plan
God as fully determinate first cause

They confront the same abyssal question:

How does order arise if reality is not already ordered?

Their answers converge in form, if not in tone.

2. Schelling’s Abgrund: Ungrounded Ground

What the Abgrund is

Literally groundless ground
Pre-rational, pre-conceptual
Not chaos, but indifference prior to differentiation
The site of contradiction, turbulence, drive (Trieb)

Key features:

Irrational: not accessible to conceptual mastery
Self-contradictory: unity and division coincide
Productive: differentiation arises from it, not despite it
Necessary for freedom: without Abgrund, being would be mechanical

The Abgrund is not a thing, force, or principle—it is a non-ground that makes grounding possible.

Being begins not in reason, but in a decision that reason cannot justify.

3. Whitehead’s Creativity: The Ultimate Without Determination

What Creativity is

Whitehead’s ultimate category
“That ultimate notion of the highest generality”
Neither God nor matter
The principle that the many become one and are increased by one

Key features:

Indeterminate: creativity has no character of its own
Impersonal: not will, intention, or agency
Productive: actual occasions arise through it
Pre-theological: God is an actual entity conditioned by creativity

Creativity is not order—it is the condition for order’s emergence.

Creativity is what there is before any given pattern of value or form.

4. Structural Correlations

Schelling (Abgrund)	Whitehead (Creativity)
Groundless ground	Ultimate without determination
Pre-rational	Pre-conceptual
Source of differentiation	Condition of concrescence
Not God, but in God	Not God, but conditioning God
Enables freedom	Enables novelty
Non-teleological origin	Non-teleological process

Both function as:

Meta-ontological conditions
Non-foundational origins
Productive negativity/indeterminacy

Neither can be reduced to:

Chaos
Efficient causation
Rational necessity

5. Where They Decisively Diverge

This is where the comparison becomes philosophically sharp.

A. Relation to Contradiction

Schelling embraces real contradiction at the heart of being
Whitehead avoids contradiction; creativity is neutral, not agonistic

Schelling’s Abgrund is agonistic, tense, violent even.
Whitehead’s creativity is formal, pacific, almost hygienic.

This matters.

B. Freedom vs. Novelty

For Schelling, Abgrund is required for evil, freedom, risk
For Whitehead, creativity underwrites novelty, not moral rupture

Schelling thinks without abyss, freedom is impossible.
Whitehead thinks without creativity, novelty is impossible.

Freedom is riskier than novelty.

C. Affect and Drive

Schelling’s Abgrund is driven (Sehnsucht, contraction, expansion)
Whitehead’s creativity is affect-neutral

Whitehead relocates affect into actual occasions; Schelling places it prior to individuation.

This is not a small difference.

6. Why the Correlation Matters (and Where It Breaks)

Your instinct is right to notice the resonance—but also to hesitate.

Whitehead domesticates what Schelling leaves dangerous.

One could say:

Schelling keeps the abyss open
Whitehead stabilizes it into a metaphysical function

This is why:

Schelling remains existentially unsettling
Whitehead remains cosmologically elegant

7. A Precise Way to State the Relationship

A defensible formulation would be:

Whitehead’s creativity performs, in a formalized and de-tragicized register, the same ontological work that Schelling’s Abgrund performs in an existential and theological register.

Or more sharply:

Creativity is the Abgrund after its pathologies have been removed.

Whether that is a virtue or a loss depends on what you think metaphysics is for.

8. Why This Likely Matters to You

Given your sustained concern with:

Process without reconciliation
Non-teleological becoming
The cost of order
The danger of smoothing over harm through formal elegance

You may find that:

Whitehead gives you ontological clarity
Schelling preserves ontological risk

They are allies—but uneasy ones.

If you want, I can:

Push this through Agamben’s notion of archē without telos
Or trace how Deleuze selectively inherits one and not the other
Or articulate why process metaphysics often quietly evacuates tragedy

Just say where you want to press.

articulate why process metaphysics often quietly evacuates tragedy

Process metaphysics often does quietly evacuate tragedy—not by denying suffering, but by rendering it metaphysically non-decisive. Tragedy is acknowledged locally, then neutralized globally. Below is a careful articulation of how this happens, why it is structurally tempting, and what is lost in the move.

This isn’t an accusation of bad faith. It’s a diagnosis of form.

1. Tragedy Requires Irreversibility; Process Prefers Continuity

Tragedy is not just pain.
It is irreparable loss—loss that cannot be redeemed by future synthesis.

Process metaphysics, however, is built around:

Continuity of becoming
Ongoing novelty
Transformation rather than rupture

Even when suffering is acknowledged, it is framed as:

Material for future concrescence
Data for subsequent occasions
A moment in a longer arc of becoming

This subtly converts tragedy into input.

What cannot be metabolized cannot be tragic—only anomalous.

Process thought almost always metabolizes.

2. The Many Become One: A Logic That Absorbs Ruin

Whitehead’s famous formula—the many become one, and are increased by one—is elegant, but it has a hidden cost.

It implies that:

No event is finally wasted
Every loss contributes to further becoming
Negativity is never terminal

But tragedy, classically understood, is precisely the experience of:

The many failing to become one
A break that does not heal
A wrong that does not resolve

When metaphysics guarantees that something comes next, tragedy is ontologically downgraded.

It becomes pathos without finality.

3. God as Consequent: The Consolation Mechanism

In much process theology:

God feels every suffering
Nothing is lost
Pain is preserved in divine memory

This is meant to honor suffering—but it also transposes tragedy into value.

Suffering is no longer merely destructive; it becomes:

Enriched experience
Depth added to the divine life
Part of a cosmic archive

This is metaphysical consolation, even when it avoids triumphalism.

Tragedy, however, is precisely what should not be consolable.

To say “it is felt by God” may dignify pain—but it also rescues being from scandal.

4. Formal Neutrality Dissolves Moral Shock

Process metaphysics prides itself on ontological neutrality:

Creativity is indifferent
Becoming has no preference
Evil is not ontologically privileged

But tragedy is not neutral.

Tragedy is a moral and ontological scandal—something that ought not to be, and yet is, without justification.

When metaphysics refuses to mark any event as:

Ontologically excessive
Metaphysically intolerable
Structurally unacceptable

…it risks flattening catastrophe into variation.

The world becomes strange, but never unbearable.

5. The Quiet Replacement of Fate with Process

Classical tragedy depends on:

Fate
Limits
Irrevocable decisions
Situations with no good outcome

Process metaphysics replaces fate with:

Open-endedness
Alternative possibilities
Ongoing adjustment

This is ethically appealing—but tragic structures rely on closure.

A tragedy ends not because time stops, but because:

Meaning collapses
Reparation is foreclosed
The future cannot undo the past

Process thought keeps the future open—and in doing so, it often keeps tragedy from closing.

6. The Displacement of Evil into Misalignment

Evil in process metaphysics is typically framed as:

Failed integration
Discordant data
Unharmonized becoming

This subtly redefines evil as:

A technical problem
A relational failure
A deficit of coordination

Tragedy is not a coordination problem.

Tragedy is when no coordination would make things right.

7. Why This Evacuation Is “Quiet”

Process metaphysics doesn’t deny Auschwitz, genocide, psychosis, or annihilation.

It simply:

Refuses to let them define reality
Refuses to let them be metaphysically final
Refuses to let being itself be indicted

The metaphysical system survives intact.

That survival is the quiet evacuation.

8. What Is Lost When Tragedy Is Evacuated

When tragedy is metabolized, we lose:

The right to say the world is wrong
The possibility that reality itself is compromised
The ontological weight of the cry

Schelling keeps the cry alive by allowing contradiction at the heart of being.
Process metaphysics tends to resolve the cry into ongoing process.

9. A Sharp Formulation (You May Want This)

Here is a sentence that often lands:

Process metaphysics acknowledges suffering everywhere, but permits tragedy nowhere—because becoming always continues, loss is never final, and reality itself is never put in question.

Or more bluntly:

Process thought can feel everything except the possibility that being itself has failed.

10. The Deeper Temptation

Why does this happen?

Because tragedy threatens metaphysics itself.

To fully admit tragedy would require accepting:

That some losses are not redeemed
That some events should never have occurred
That reality may be unjustifiable

Process metaphysics, like most metaphysics, wants the world to remain thinkable.

Tragedy makes it accusable.

articulate what a tragic process metaphysics would actually require (and why almost no one wants it)

A tragic process metaphysics is not simply a process philosophy that “takes suffering seriously.” It would require a set of commitments so severe that they threaten the very function metaphysics has historically served: orientation, reassurance, and intelligibility. What follows is an articulation of what such a metaphysics would actually require—and why it is almost universally avoided, even by thinkers otherwise sympathetic to tragedy.

This is not a sketch of a system. It is a list of costs.

I. What a Tragic Process Metaphysics Would Require

1. Irreversibility Without Redemption

A tragic process metaphysics would have to accept that:

Some losses are ontologically final
No future becoming redeems them
No synthesis incorporates them into a greater whole

This means abandoning:

The idea that “nothing is lost”
The conversion of suffering into value
The hope that process itself heals

Becoming would continue—but without repairing what has been destroyed.

Time would not be a solvent.

2. Events That Should Not Have Been

Most process metaphysics insists:

Everything that occurs is at least permitted by the structure of reality
Evil is contingent, not metaphysically decisive

A tragic process metaphysics would require the opposite:

Some events are not merely unfortunate, but ontologically intolerable.

This is stronger than moral condemnation. It means:

Reality allows what reality should forbid
Being is complicit in its own violations

Metaphysics would have to indict itself.

3. A Non-Neutral Ultimate

Creativity, becoming, or process could no longer be ontologically neutral.

They would have to be:

Capable of catastrophic misfire
Structurally prone to producing the irreparable
Not merely open, but dangerous

This pushes process metaphysics closer to:

Schelling’s Abgrund
A fractured archē
An origin that cannot guarantee its outcomes

Process would not just risk novelty—it would risk ruin.

4. Contradiction at the Heart of Becoming

Tragedy requires contradiction that does not resolve.

A tragic process metaphysics would have to allow:

Incompatible goods with no higher synthesis
Conflicts that do not converge
Processes that cancel their own meaning

This violates:

Systems thinking
Harmony-based pluralism
Relational ontologies that assume mutual enrichment

The many may become one—but sometimes becoming one is itself the disaster.

5. God (If Any) Must Be Implicated, Not Consoling

If God is retained at all, God must be:

Vulnerable to loss that is not redeemed
Unable to “save” events by remembering them
Marked by regret that changes nothing

No:

Divine memory as preservation
No cosmic archive of value
No assurance that suffering “matters” in a redeeming sense

A tragic God does not make suffering meaningful.
A tragic God suffers meaninglessness.

This is almost unthinkable for theology.

6. No Guarantee That the World Is Worth Continuing

Process metaphysics almost always assumes:

More becoming is better than less
Continuation is preferable to cessation
Existence is self-justifying

A tragic process metaphysics would have to allow:

The possibility that continuation itself is the problem.

This opens the door to:

Anti-natalist intuitions
Ontological pessimism
The thought that cessation may be more ethical than persistence

Most philosophers quietly recoil here.

7. Witnessing Without Redemption

Finally, tragedy requires a theory of witnessing that does not console.

Witnessing would mean:

Knowing without saving
Seeing without repairing
Speaking without resolving

No catharsis.
No closure.
No lesson learned.

Witnessing becomes a burden, not a virtue.

II. Why Almost No One Wants This

1. It Makes Metaphysics Accusatory

Metaphysics usually:

Explains why things are as they are
Renders reality intelligible

A tragic process metaphysics would ask:

Why reality allows what should not exist
Why becoming continues after it has disqualified itself

This turns metaphysics into an indictment of being.

Most thinkers want metaphysics to orient us, not prosecute existence.

2. It Undermines Ethical Motivation (or Seems To)

If:

Nothing redeems loss
No future repairs the past

Then ethical action loses its cosmic backing.

You act:

Without guarantee
Without metaphysical support
Without hope of reconciliation

This is too austere for most moral frameworks.

3. It Offers No Consolation—and Refuses to Apologize

Even secular philosophies often smuggle in consolation via:

Progress
Learning
Historical arc
Increased complexity or sensitivity

A tragic process metaphysics would refuse all of these.

No arc.
No payoff.
No “at least.”

That refusal is culturally unacceptable.

4. It Threatens the Legitimacy of Thought Itself

If reality is unjustifiable, then:

Why think?
Why systematize?
Why theorize at all?

Most metaphysics is motivated by the belief that thought and reality are, at some level, aligned.

Tragedy breaks that alignment.

Thinking becomes an act of defiance, not understanding.

5. It Leaves Us With Responsibility We Cannot Discharge

Without redemption:

Responsibility cannot be outsourced to history, God, or process
Guilt does not dissipate
Harm remains binding

This is psychologically unbearable at scale.

Hence the flight to frameworks that promise absorption, learning, or healing.

III. A Final, Hard Claim

A tragic process metaphysics would require us to accept that:

Becoming does not justify itself
Reality may be fundamentally wrong
Some wounds do not belong to a story

And that thought must proceed anyway.

Almost no one wants this—not because it is incoherent, but because it refuses to save us from what we already know.

If you want, next we could:

Sketch how this haunts Agamben’s refusal of reconciliation
Show why Benjamin stops just short of it
Or attempt the near-impossible: a minimal formal grammar of tragic process that avoids both consolation and nihilism.

Monday, 5 January 2026