Discussing Whitehead with Jeffrey Mishlove on “New Thinking Allowed”

It was a real pleasure to join host Jeffrey Mishlove on his show, New Thinking Allowed. He invited me on to discuss (surprise, surprise) the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. We explored Whitehead’s historical context, his engagement with contemporaries like Bertrand Russell, F.H. Bradley, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and how his process philosophy continues to resonate with contemporary currents of thought.

I began by situating Whitehead in his time, noting that he started his career as a mathematician at Cambridge, where he co-authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Though this work was initially celebrated, it ultimately failed to fully ground mathematics in logic, which was liberating for Whitehead. This “failure” led him to shift his focus to philosophy, where he sought to integrate science, aesthetics, and metaphysics in ways that formal logic couldn’t fully encompass. Whitehead embraced a broader inquiry, one that included not only analytic rigor but also the intuitive, imaginative, and aesthetic dimensions of experience.

We discussed Whitehead’s relationship with F.H. Bradley, a prominent British idealist. While Whitehead shared an interest in preserving some elements of idealism, he rejected Bradley’s emphasis on the Absolute and instead developed what he called “organic realism.” Whitehead’s thinking often defies categorization because he sought a middle ground between extremes—between mind and matter, logic and aesthetics, and traditional forms of idealism and realism. His approach valued individual experience and rejected the notion that the plurality of the world could be dismissed as “mere appearance.” Instead, he aimed to integrate the multifariousness of reality, from the physical to the psychological and spiritual.

We also touched on William James and his radical empiricism, which had a significant influence on Whitehead. James suggested that all experience is valid data for philosophy, including mystical and parapsychological phenomena. Whitehead took James’ psychology and systematized it, creating a metaphysical scheme that could accommodate everything from the most precise measurements in physics to the rich emotional and sensory aspects of human life.

In discussing Whitehead’s critique of modern science, I explained his rejection of the bifurcation of nature—a split between primary qualities (like mass) and secondary qualities (like color or taste). Whitehead saw this division as an artificial construct and argued that we need to reorient science to the study of everything we are aware of in perception, beyond any splits between “inner” and “outer.” This led to his philosophy of organism, where all entities in nature are interconnected through what he called “prehension,” a form of non-conscious feeling that links everything in the universe.

I also explored Whitehead’s relationship with German idealism, particularly the influence of thinkers like Hegel and Schelling, as well as Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Whitehead aimed to bridge the gap between the Romantic critique of science and the scientific worldview, advocating for what I would call a “romantic science” that appreciates both the beauty of nature and the insights provided by scientific analysis.

Toward the end of the conversation, we ventured into the esoteric aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy, particularly how it intersects with Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy and Goethean science. I believe Whitehead’s vision of an interconnected, feeling-filled universe aligns with these approaches, and I see potential for a future science that integrates a more imaginative, aesthetic approach to understanding the world.