Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician (co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica) who turned to metaphysics late in life and produced, in Process and Reality (1929), the twentieth century’s most ambitious system of process philosophy.

Against the picture of the world as enduring bits of inert matter, Whitehead held that reality is composed of “actual occasions of experience” — momentary events of becoming, each of which “prehends” (feels and incorporates) its entire past and creatively responds before perishing into data for the next.

Every actuality, however minute, has an experiential, value-laden inside; the universe is a creative advance of interrelated happenings, not a collection of static substances. Whitehead is a major rigorous ancestor of contemporary “ consciousness is fundamental“ and “ everything is interconnected“ thought.

His panexperientialism (experience all the way down) is a primary technical resource for modern panpsychism; his relational ontology underwrites holistic, ecological, and “we are all connected” spirituality; and his process theology gave us a God who is in time, affected by the world, and persuasive rather than coercive — a deity congenial to New Thought and progressive spiritual movements.

David Bohm’s “implicate order” and the dialogue between physics and consciousness draw on him directly. The honest framing: Whitehead is serious speculative metaphysics, not manifestation doctrine, but his world of feeling, creativity, and universal interrelation is among the most legitimate intellectual homes for mind-power’s deepest intuitions.