The essay below exceeds the length of Substack’s email client but it is available in its entirety by following the link at the top of the email.
To judge by the plants and fish I have seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to India, not in order to discover something new, but in order to contemplate in my own way what has already been discovered.1
These words are excerpted from a letter that Goethe wrote to his friend, Karl Ludwig von Knebel, from Italy on August 18, 1787. With this unassuming statement, Goethe offers a unique perspective on an universal mystery: the paradox of the one and the many. How many countless beings had been born, trodden, and died upon the same European peninsula when Goethe penned these words? And yet the selfsame country has revealed herself to no two of these souls in the same way. The world eternally offers itself in the present moment to perish into memory. Splintering each instant into a myriad distinct viewpoints, yet the world is forever reborn again: in body as cosmos and in spirit as experience. Even as each of a thousand snowflakes in a winter street reflects, “in [its] own way,” the starlight of innumerable cosmic bodies, so every being of the universe is also a mirror of that universe. William Blake captures2 this wonder of wonders:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
Nothing could be more vain than to seek comprehension of the poet’s meaning through recourse to formal logic or Newtonian physics. One might as well attempt to rend the air incorporal with a blade, or measure the principle of Justice with a balance. The renowned philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead recognises this futility when he notes that “logic presupposes metaphysics.”3 Whitehead offers another approach to the great enigmas, however, when he writes that “the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coördinated.”4 Let us then attempt to “contemplate in [our] own way” the world that is Whitehead’s system of speculative philosophy, and let us undertake this task according to the thinker’s own recommended method. Finally, Whitehead also provides a measure of success when he writes, “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”5
Any inquiry into the wonderful world of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy will demand some initiation into what some have interpreted as a consistent insistence on his part on a singularly abstruse manner of expression. Perhaps under the premise that new wine is unbefitting to old wine-skins, Whitehead’s style dictates that one should be hard-pressed to uncover a single word of plain Saxon amidst the mass of synthetic Greco-Latin “neo-verbalisms” that characterise the philosopher’s preferred manner of expression. Indeed, the cobbled Frankensteinian quality of Whitehead’s language may tend to terrify the neophyte and as such presents what is likely the greatest obstacle to appreciation of his genius. Let us, therefore, waste no time in overcoming this initial barrier to comprehension of this great thinker.
Such terms as prehension, actual occasion, eternal object, ingression, concrescence, and God in his consequent and primordial natures appear as cognitive hurdles which may, however, become stepping-stones on the summit to comprehension. Given the ecology of ideas—or as Whitehead writes, that “each entity, of whatever type, essentially involves its own connection with the universe of other things”6—to undertake such a journey will lead us on a grand traverse over peaks and vales of philosophical history. The world of ideas appears all the more holographic when it is appreciated that each idea is embedded in an ecology that extends through time as well as intellectual “space.”
Central to Whitehead’s project in the discipline of philosophy is to conceive of a world-view that may account for all aspects of experience, and prehension is the philosopher’s neologism to describe the genesis of such experience. Ordinarily, one employs the word “perception” for this process, but Whitehead justifies a novel coinage when he writes:
The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive.”7
In a the substance ontology typical of most of the history of Western science, bits of matter are posited as the building-blocks of reality. As far back as Democritus in Ancient Greece, for instance, one may discover thinkers advancing the materialistic conception of reality: “By convention sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void,”8 the Pre-Socratic thinker purportedly declared. By Whitehead’s time, some two and a half millennia later, the metaphysical doctrine of materialist physics stood as a fully-established intellectual edifice. Of course, the Colosseum was not built in a day and neither was the structure of twentieth century materialist metaphysics. Instead, the latter represented a fruition of the joint labour of philosophers across centuries and meridians. Aristotle had contributed an important development to Democritus’ physicalist conception of reality with the former’s notion of hyle, literally “wood.” With the latter, Aristotle intended to delineate the unformed material potential whereupon a formative principle, called “morphē,” should continually act. Arabic philosophers of the Middle Ages elaborated Aristotle’s physics in several ways to fit it into congruence with the Islamic doctrine. Perhaps most important in regard to the present inquiry was the former’s conception of hyle, or matter, as not merely potential, but also actual. While according Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism, all matter bore an immanent form—the latter representing the actualising aspect of what the former contained as potential—eminent Arabian thinkers such as Averroës (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina) began increasingly to hypostasize matter (hyle) and form (morphē). Ultimately, these aspects were to be cloven asunder such that matter or substance could be conceived entirely in abstraction, which is to say, utterly devoid of form or quality. This completion was left to thinkers of seventeenth century Europe, when the philosophic structure initiated by Democritus achieved its inauguration. As the dawn of scientific revolution burst forth over Europe, Copernicus, Galileo, Locke, Bacon, Harvey, Newton, and Descartes, jointly placed the keystone on this grand erection. Whitehead describes the physical-metaphysical division of substance and form as one of these thinkers expressed it:
At the beginning of the modern period Descartes expresses this dualism with the utmost distinctness. For him, there are material substances with spatial relations, and mental substances. The mental substances are external to the material substances. Neither type requires the other type for the completion of its essence. Their unexplained interrelations are unnecessary for their respective existences.9
Continual additions to the edifice of physical science in the centuries to follow had seen it come to tower above all competition. Whitehead describes the doctrine of “scientific materialism” that represented what many took to be the culmination of this philosophical development:
There persists … [according to this conception, a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call “scientific materialism.”10
Whitehead, however, explicitly rejects the world-conception that posits “irreducible brute matter” as the foundation of reality. As the title of his most famous work suggests, and as he moreover explicitly elaborates in many of his works and lectures, Whitehead conceives of reality as process. In a 1938 lecture which would subsequently be published in the collection titled Modes of Thought, for instance, Whitehead declares that of “One main doctrine, developed in these lectures, is that existence (in any of its senses) cannot be abstracted from process. The notions of process and existence presuppose each other.”11
To relate Whitehead’s assertion to Aristotle’s original conception of hylomorphism, one may recognise in the notion of process precisely that development whereby form acts immanently in matter. In the unfoldment from potential to actuality, form represents the entelechial principle that guides this process. Thus, possibility becomes deed through the perennial wedding of form and substance. Whitehead conceives of this dynamic evolution to be far more concrete than the abstraction of matter. Scientific materialism is untenable for Whitehead because, evidently, material particles cannot constitute the basis of a reality of which process, and not matter, is basic. The atoms of Whitehead’s universe, therefore, are not atoms at all, but sentient events, which he opts to call “actual occasions.” These actual occasions conspire to form “societies of actual occasions,” which, we would ordinarily call “entities,” or “organisms,” irrespective of technical Whiteheadian argot. “Ingression ,” for Whitehead, describes the process of prehension by actual occasions, but emphasises the “objective” or “potential” pole of the event. Through prehension, “eternal (potential) objects”—like yellow, medium-sized, or the number 3, for instance—ingress into the experience of actual occasions (or societies thereof) and thereby undergo a process of concrescence. This is to say that the eternal objects “grow together” and thereby become concrete. We might imagine potential eternal objects pouring into concrete reality through the subjectivity of actual occasions, and thereby becoming actual objects of experience. As a coral reef represents the submarine sacrifice of myriad microscopic architects who offered their skeletons as bricks and their corpses as mortar, so actual occasions sparkle in an atomic instant, like snowflakes in the moonlight, and then perish into the substance of manifest reality: subjectivity flashes forth as invisible scintillae. Each flash grasps the entire cosmos in its prehension, and then falls to the ground of objectivity. In Whitehead’s words:
Let us...assume that each entity, of whatever type, essentially involves its own connection with the universe of other things. This connection can be viewed as being what the universe is for that entity either in the way of accomplishment or in the way of potentiality. It can be termed the perspective of the universe for that entity. For example, these are the perspectives of the universe for the number three, and for the colour blue, and for any one definite occasion of realized fact.
Each perspective for any one qualitative abstraction such as a number, or a colour, involves an infinitude of alternative potentialities. On the other hand, the perspective for a factual occasion involves the elimination of alternatives in respect to the matter-of-fact realization involved in that present occasion, and the reduction of alternatives as to the future; since that occasion, as a member of its own contemporary world, is one of the factors conditioning the future beyond itself.12
Here we find ourselves again confronted with the mystery of the one and the many, as well as the perennial philosophic riddle of subject and object. Whitehead indicates the former with his enigmatic thought infinitely profound assertion that “The many become one and are increased by one.”13
Let us now consider whether it be possible to integrate subject and object into Whitehead’s conception and thereby reveal these two questions to be but different aspects of a single mystery. Manifold thinkers sundered the polarity of experience in manifold manners, but a standard model of perception imagines a subjective representation of a world of objects. This picture, however, is clearly unsuitable for Whitehead’s philosophy. Whitehead, in contrast to the typical dualistic model, delineates a framework in which the distinction between subject and object is one not of metaphysics or epistemology, but simply of sequence. Actual occasions, as subjects, are continually crystallising into objects and offering themselves to the prehension of new subjects. Thus we may invite into our mind’s eye the image of an unbounded infinity of momentaneously-prehending subjects. Whitehead calls the latter “actual occasions,” but we could just as well call them “temporal subjects” and counterpose them against an universe of “eternal objects.” Sensitive societies of such actual occasions constitute a limitless fleet of spaceless and invisible subjects traversing the open sea of forever-passing time. Each actual occasion appears as particle only in a virtual present. Then, in the flashing instant of actuality, the ephemeral subject merges with the waves which are the widening wakes of all of its innumerable counterparts. Thus we must cite the final words of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous work:
[s]o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.14
“Current” and “actual” share one of their meanings. Thus, to imagine time as the current of actuality, and space as the geometric relations between the intermingling wakes, is an useful image to overcome the tendency to mistakenly reify space and time.
The notion of reification warrants a special emphasis. Whitehead identifies one of the most pernicious patterns of modern thought as the fallacy of misplacing concreteness onto products of abstraction. Such a fallacy consists in intellectually “drawing off” or abstracting a single aspect of what is inherently manifold, contextual, and concrete, and then supposing the former to be something independent. In other words, it is to suppose the products of a process to precede the process that produced them. As a skeleton is unintelligible without the organism that formed it, so matter, eo ipso, is no less of a conceptual corpse.
The conception of Newtonian space that subsists in abstraction from the entities that it relates presents another particularly salient fallacy of misplaced concreteness, together with the notion of time as something that could flow irrespective of, and in independence from, the events that it witnesses. Time does not pass; rather it is itself the passage. Likewise space does not contain objects but is instead the tissue of relation between them. Societies of actual occasions are martyrs. They bear witness to time by perishing into space, which is a holy graveyard whose scope is measured by the relations of their crosses. One is reminded of the letter by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:
How all things are in migration! How they seek refuge in us. How each of them desires to be relieved of externality and to live again in the Beyond which we enclose and deepen within ourselves. We are convents of lived things, dreamed things, impossible things; all that is in awe of this century saves itself within us and there, on its knees, pays its debt to eternity.
Little cemeteries that we are, adorned with the flowers of our futile gestures, containing so many corpses that demand that we testify to their souls. All prickly with crosses, all covered with inscriptions, all spaded up and shaken by countless daily burials, we are charged with the transmutation, the resurrection, the transfiguration of all things.15
The poet Muriel Rukeyser likewise captures the spirit of Whitehead’s conception with her lines:
The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms16
for every object was once a subject and thus bears as immanent memory the history of the world. As seeing cannot see itself, but only what is seen, so each temporal subject is an omnidirectional eye that awakens to itself only in its prehension of other subjects, in which process the latter become objects, and so on in such an epistemic transaction, as warp and woof, et cetera, forever. “To be is to be a potential for every [subsequent] becoming”17 Whitehead writes.
With the modicum of acquaintance we may have gained with these several players who collaborate through prehensile relativity to weave the pansentient universe, we may now bend the path of our inquiry to the weft, which is to say, actual experience. Whitehead’s cosmology stands out in the history of the discipline in that the former places metaphysical value on experience. It accomplishes this, however, without sacrificing logical rigour in the manner of the philosopher David Hume, for instance, who famously denied the principle of causality for the reason that it does not present itself for immediate apprehension by the senses. In contrast to the Empiricist tradition, which may also be called “Dogmatism of the Senses,” many world-conceptions reject precisely this most immediate advent of reality and attempt instead to replace living experience with a model of it. Conventional scientific materialism provides an example of this archetypal impulse of thought in its basic substitution of quantitative mapping for qualitative territory. The Kantian tradition offers another example of the same in its hypostatisation of unknowable noumena as the “Things-in-Themselves” of manifest phenomena. To wit, the hyper-intelligent thinker posits a hypothetical reality outside of experience and then subsequently ignores his own deed. The result of such a concatenation of thought is that a representation is taken for reality in the process which the inestimable Owen Barfield referred to as philosophic “idolatry.”18 Immanuel Kant, indeed, posited an epistemologically-inaccessible world of “Things-in-Themselves” and overlooked the fact that he himself dictated the terms of its unknowability through his own ratiocination. As we indicated above, although the connection may come as a surprise, modern scientists often engage in what is, in principle, the same legerdemain as “The Sage of Königsberg” when they posit all manner of elementary waves and particles behind phenomenal appearance. The former consist in sheer quantity and have no quality whatsoever other than that which the scientist has abstracted from her actual experience and grafted-on to her thought-model, like mass, momentum, spin for instance. Because quality is the constitutive principle of actual experience, an abstract model of reality consisting entirely in quantity can never be experienced; it can never “ingress into actuality through the prehension of (societies of) actual occasions,” as it were. Again, the reason for this epistemic prohibition is none other than the rejection of quality that was implicit in the terms of its original invention. If I wish to ascertain whether it is raining, it does no good to check the ground under a roof. As tempting as it would be to polemicise the tendency to transpose method into metaphysics, many far wiser thinkers than the writer of this piece have already undertaken such a project. Whitehead himself, for example, writes of
the complete muddle in scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology, and in epistemology” after “every single item in this general doctrine is denied, but that the general conclusions from the doctrine as a whole are tenaciously retained. The result is a complete muddle in scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology, and in epistemology.19
In fidelity to both experience and reason, therefore, Whitehead begins the first chapter of his magnum opus with the following stipulation, which is to chart the course of his entire philosophical adventure: “Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.”20 If this initially appears to be an unassuming task, then one has failed to grasp Whitehead’s meaning. Whitehead’s opening represents a no-less ambitious undertaking than to formulate a theory of everything—the “World in a Grain of Sand,” the infinite universe as comprehended in experience by definite occasion. One must indeed admire Whitehead’s aspiration irrespective of one’s estimation of his success.
Whitehead continues in the opening of Process & Reality:
By this notion of interpretation I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here applicable means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and adequate means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation...21
In Whitehead’s counterposition of “the particular instance” and “the general scheme,” we discover again an allusion to the great mystery of the one and the many, as well as a recognition of the extraordinary balancing-act that any comprehensive system of philosophy must achieve: the conjugation of immediate experience and logic, Empiricism and Rationalism. Whitehead indicates the former aspect when he writes that:
Our datum is the actual world, including ourselves; and this actual world spreads itself for observation in the guise of the topic of our immediate experience. The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience. But we are not conscious of any clear-cut complete analysis of immediate experience, in terms of the various details which comprise its definiteness...22
Whitehead explicitly recognises the latter aspect when he describes “[the] second condition for the success of imaginative construction [as] the unflinching pursuit of the two rationalistic ideals, coherence and logical perfection.”23
To weave Whitehead into to the mythic history of Western philosophy, we could imagine that he joins the historically-sundered strands that began with Plato and his most famous disciple, respectively. In this way, the philosopher as visionary and the philosopher as scientist may again coincide. Whitehead recognises the essential importance of philosophy when he writes that
The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization.24
Any human organism or organisation that lacks soundness within and amongst its ideas must be deemed unhealthy because it is splintered, fragmented, and therefore not whole. It lacks the harmonizing principle of Justice, as Plato might have observed. Whitehead diagnoses precisely such philosophical schizophrenia when he writes that
At present the scientific world is suffering from a bad attack of muddle-headed positivism, which arbitrarily applies its doctrine and arbitrarily escapes from it. The whole doctrine of life in nature has suffered from this positivist taint.25
No one would think to dispute the truth of a handsaw or a bagel; instead the latter are measured according to their value. As the famous phrase reminds us, however, “Man does not live by bread alone.”26 A diet of “muddle-headed positivism, which arbitrarily applies its doctrine and arbitrarily escapes from it” may appear defensible on the grounds of abstract logic, but it can hardly serve as nourishment for the soul and spirit. “Health” is from Old English hælþ, meaning “wholeness, a being whole, sound or well,” and can claim the modern English words “whole” and “hale” as cognative cousins. The word “holy” shares a similar family history, though it arrived in English by way of Greek holos, which is “whole.” Thus, Whitehead, as both metaphysicist and metaphysician, formulates a speculative philosophy and frames a concrete one—which is to say, a concrescent, or “grown together” ideal coherence, as the organic healing of a wound. The former offers a visionary cosmology and the latter a remedy for the fragmented human soul.
With this perspective we have arrived at a mountaintop of sorts in this exploration, and in our contemplation the truth may suddenly dawn,
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time
As T. S. Eliot writes in the end of Four Quartets. Even as the light of vast expanses twinkled in the mirror-eye of every drop of dew, so we discover in this moment all of history in condensation. Space and time in their entirety always find reflection in every actual occasion. From this vista we can finally contemplate the dual nature of Whitehead’s God.
In a survey of the surrounding space, in which a single glance may apprehend the heavens and the earth, we may behold the consequent face of God. In retrospection of our journey, we may furthermore recognise the continual incarnation of God’s primordial nature into His consequent nature with every footstep along the way. Every actual occasion flashes as the metaphysical inflection-point in which subject becomes superject, seed-potential becomes consummate fact—eternity enters into time, and then achieves eternity again but in a new form. The new timelessness is as objective fact, recorded in the crystalline memory of space. Goethe achieves the heights of poetic exultation at the end of his life when he expresses this transformation in the final lines of Faust:
Earth’s insufficiency Here finds fulfilment; The indescribable Here becomes deed; The eternal-feminine Draws us on high.
Goethe’s eternal-feminine is a lure of possibility; the womb of the future out of which every moment is born anew. Whitehead describes this highest mystery:
Now process is the way by which the universe escapes from the exclusions of inconsistency. Such exclusions belong to the finitude of circumstance. By means of process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite. Process is the immanence of the infinite in the finite; whereby all bounds are burst, and all inconsistencies dissolved.27
In mountaintop reflection over our adventure, we recognise that the laboratory for this transmutation was and remains our own soul, and the soul of every being. Whitehead expresses this revelation when he writes that “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects.”28 Meister Eckhart lends further enunciation to this loftiest epiphany that is the coincidence of the definite and the infinite, The Many and the One: “It must therefore be known that to know God and to be known by God is the same. We know God and see Him in that He makes us to see and to know.”29 The primordial nature of God envisions the full-blossom already in the emerging bud, and beholds God’s consequent nature as the forever-unfolding flower. In the haunting words of Eliot:
Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always-- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
The essay above was reworked from a paper I submitted circa 2018 while earning my Doctorate degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s World View (first published 1897, trans. William Lindeman, New York: Mercury Press, 1985), 33.
Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” 1803.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 107.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 232.
Ibid., 91.
Whitehead, Science & the Modern World (New York: Macmillan Company, 1925)101.
C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy (New York, 1909), “Fragment O,” 60.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 204.
Whitehead, Science & the Modern World, 18.
Whitehead, 131.
Ibid., 91.
Whitehead, Process & Reality (New York: Macmillan Company, 1929), 32.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1995), 141.
Rilke, “Letter to Sophy Giauque,” November 26, 1925.
Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness.”
Whitehead, Process & Reality, 31.
Barfield, Saving the Appearances, (Wesleyan Press, 1988).
Whitehead, Science & the Modern World, 180.
Whitehead, Process & Reality, 1.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid.,11.
Ibid., 12.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 31.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 203-204.
Matthew 4:4.
Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 107.
Whitehead, Process and Reality, 166.
Sermons of Meister Eckhart, trans. Claud Field, 1909.