Process Thought and Bridge Building: A Response to Stephen K. White

Stephen White focuses his attention on what he calls “depth” experiences and the role that cultivating such experiences could have in public life in a democracy. Depth experiences are those transformative experiences that lead people to question the values that they had previously assumed and to alter their sense of purpose. These moments come in “positive” and “negative” forms, White says: some are felt as experiences of abundance, integrity, or meaningfulness which White calls experiences of fullness, and others are felt as experiences of absence, alienation, loss, and limitation, which White calls experiences of dearth. My aim here is not to capture White’s proposal in all of its richness but only to provide a constructive, “bridge-building” response to it from a process perspective. This response makes three points: two noting important areas of agreement between his approach and a process approach to political theory, and the third noting an important tension.