Process Philosophy from Plato to Whitehead and Beyond

Curt Jaimungal invited me on his Theories of Everything Podcast

In this conversation with Curt, I tried to sketch the long arc of Western philosophy that leads into my own process view, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and running through Descartes, Kant, the German Idealists and Romantics, and finally Whitehead. I start with Plato because, as Whitehead quipped, “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato himself is not a systematic philosopher. He writes dialogues that stage doctrines and, just as importantly, stage the best refutations of those doctrines. His thinking is guided by powerful intuitions, and as Whitehead warns, we should be very careful about disregarding Plato’s intuitions. Yet Plato never really leaves us with resolution. Most of the dialogues end in aporia, a point where reason reaches its limit. At that point Plato turns to story or myth, which symbolically and imaginatively depicts the situation without pretending to offer a purely logical solution.

Aristotle, his greatest student, inaugurates something like natural science as we know it. He begins systematically observing, classifying, and working out a syllogistic logic that is deeply rooted in the grammar of the Greek language. Out of this he develops a subject–predicate logic and a substance–property ontology: the world is thought in terms of subjects that bear predicates, substances that have properties. This framework works extremely well for the middle-sized objects of everyday experience: tables, chairs, rocks, plants, animals. For nearly two thousand years, it structures Latin and scholastic thought. But as modern science revives the mathematical mode of thought that Plato championed and as we move into relativity and quantum theory, it becomes increasingly clear that an ontology of static substances with inhering properties is inadequate. At the same time, within medieval thought itself we see a crucial break: the rise of nominalism. Where Plato and Aristotle had treated forms or universals as having a real role in structuring matter and connecting particulars, the nominalists collapse universals into mere concepts abstracted from many experiences of particulars. “Dog” or “yellow” are no longer seen as participating in a more-than-mental reality; they are simply names we give to many this-es and that-s we point to.

I stress that this shift is not originally driven by secular motives. Medieval nominalism is motivated, instead, by a theological concern to preserve divine omnipotence. If universals and mathematical relationships exist in an eternal, independent order, then even God cannot make one plus one equal three. For the nominalist, that is intolerable. So they want even logic and arithmetic to be contingent on divine fiat: one plus one equals two because God wills it so. Plato, by contrast, in the dialogue the Euthyphro, insists that God is good because the Good is good, not that the Good is good because God says so. The moral and logical order is not subordinate to sheer power. That dispute about whether power is subject to logos or logos to power has haunted Western thought ever since.

With Descartes we get another decisive transformation. Descartes is usually taken to break sharply with Aristotelian scholasticism, but in an important sense he is still working with the notion of substance as “that which requires nothing but itself in order to exist.” What he does is sever Aristotle’s purposive, teleological dimension from its material embodiment and split reality into two kinds of substance: thinking substance (res cogitans), identified with soul or mind, and extended substance (res extensa), identified with matter. Part of his motivation here is political and religious. Having fought in the Thirty Years’ War, he wants to articulate a philosophical language that Catholics and Protestants alike can agree on. The soul is left to the Church; extended substance is given to science. We then get a view of nature as extended, mathematically describable stuff stripped of intrinsic purpose, while purpose, agency, and consciousness are confined to the human soul. Animals, on this model, are mere machines. Descartes famously told his students to ignore the squeals of the dogs they dissected, since these were only the squeaks of broken gears. This is an instance of how a philosophical system can override obvious experiential facts in order to protect its internal coherence. In Aristotle there is still one world, layered and teleological throughout: plants, animals, humans all have souls of different grades and all of nature operates according to intrinsic purposive principles. With Descartes, only human souls are purposive; nature becomes, at best, an externally designed mechanism.

At that point Curt presses me on what any of this has to do with the “real world.” I respond by going back to Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder. Wonder is not mere curiosity about how this or that works. It is an emotion of amazement at the fact that anything exists at all. It may not have a “use” in the narrow pragmatic sense, but it opens the possibility of spiritual reflection on our lives and the derivation of meaning from that reflection. Beyond this, philosophy also has very pragmatic roles: in ethics, in helping us integrate the proliferating special sciences into a coherent picture of the cosmos and our place within it. We now live in a situation where physicists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists often cannot understand each other across the hallway because of specialization. Philosophy can function as a kind of Rosetta Stone, seeking a scheme of ideas in terms of which all these specialized knowledges might become communicable. And, as I note, the very insistence that everything must be “useful” or “practical” is itself a philosophical stance that deserves interrogation.

Kant represents another fundamental shift. Up through Descartes, the central questions of “first philosophy” were ontological and metaphysical: what kinds of things are there, and in what categories do we think them? Kant argues that before we can responsibly answer those questions, we have to ask how knowledge is possible at all. He does not invent epistemology, but he elevates it to first philosophy. Reading Hume forces him to recognize that we have no sensory experience of necessary connection or causality; we see one billiard ball strike another, but we never see “necessity” itself. Yet Newtonian physics delivers extraordinarily precise and apparently necessary laws. Kant wants to preserve the necessity and universality of Newtonian science while avoiding dogmatic metaphysics. He does this by arguing that space and time are not containers “out there”; they are forms of intuition provided by our own cognitive organization. Likewise, we do not derive categories like substance, causality, necessity from experience; rather, these are a priori categories of the understanding through which we synthesize experience. Knowledge is not the mind passively conforming to objects; it is objects as they appear conforming to the a priori structure of our subjectivity. This is his “Copernican revolution,” the philosophical equivalent of what Copernicus achieved in astronomy: just as Copernicus explained the apparent motions of the heavens by reference to the movement of the Earth, Kant explains the order of appearances by reference to the structure of the subject.

To keep this from collapsing into solipsistic subjectivism, Kant insists that these forms of intuition and categories are necessary and universal for all rational beings. He calls his position at once “transcendental idealism and empirical realism”: idealism because the conditions of experience are supplied by the subject, realism because there is a world of things in themselves independent of us, even if we can say nothing determinate about it. Science, on this account, is strictly limited to phenomena, to appearances as structured by our sensibility and understanding. This limitation is deliberate. Kant fears that if mechanistic science were allowed to describe things in themselves, it would inevitably be turned on the human being, undermining the possibility of freedom and morality by reducing us to complex machines. Scientific knowledge itself presupposes free, conscious agents capable of organizing and articulating experience. So freedom, for Kant, belongs to the noumenal side of our being, beyond the grasp of scientific explanation.

In his third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, Kant looks at our aesthetic judgments of beauty and at the biological world. There he sees something that cannot be made sense of in purely mechanistic terms. Organisms seem to involve a different kind of causality: not linear cause–effect, but circular, holistic organization in which parts produce one another for the sake of a whole. In mechanisms, parts are externally arranged to perform a function; their purpose is imposed from outside by a designer. In organisms, purpose seems intrinsic. Kant even says that in a single blade of grass there is a kind of inner purposiveness. Here, freedom, which he had previously confined to human beings, seems to flicker in even the simplest living things. This insight into the difference between organic and mechanical order cracks open his earlier dualisms and directly inspires German Idealism and Romanticism.

Fichte radicalizes Kant by emphasizing the creative power of the I. For Fichte, all of philosophy flows from the freedom of the ego. The entire world is, in some sense, a construct of the I; nature is there to be transformed into self. This quickly becomes a program for turning everything that resists human agency into an instrument of human will, which is not a bad description of what industrialization and technologization have achieved. Schelling begins as Fichte’s disciple but cannot accept a view in which nature is merely an appearance for the subject. Influenced by pietist nature mysticism and a panentheistic sense that the physical world is God’s body rather than something utterly other than God, he wants to treat the whole cosmos as a living organism imbued with a world-soul. He extends Kant’s insight about organisms to the universe as a whole: all the apparently separate parts of nature are in fact moments in a process of self-organization. Spirit or mind is, in the beginning, unconscious, hidden in nature; through a long evolutionary history of self-organizing polarities (gravity and light, electricity and magnetism, etc.) it gradually emerges into consciousness in the human being. Nature is unconscious spirit, and the human being is called to become conscious spirit. In a way, this is an early answer to what we now call the “hard problem of consciousness”: you will never get conscious agency at the far end of a process that starts with entirely dead, mindless matter. Mind must be in some sense there from the beginning, however seedlike.

Hegel, Schelling’s friend and sometime rival, takes a different tack. If Schelling is constantly beginning again, following new intuitions and revising his systems (very much like Plato’s aporetic style), Hegel aims for a finished, totalizing science of wisdom. In the Phenomenology of Spirit he traces how ordinary sense-certainty, through a dialectical process of negation and contradiction, leads ultimately to absolute knowing, in which the split between subject and object is aufgehoben, sublated into a higher unity. Hegel famously likens some forms of undifferentiated monism to a night in which all cows are black, criticizing attempts to affirm oneness by erasing all difference. His dialectic preserves difference as a necessary moment in the process by which Spirit comes to know itself. In a sense, Hegel recapitulates the history of philosophy and then declares it complete. Unsurprisingly, he provokes his own negations: Marx flips him “from head to feet” by reinterpreting the dialectic in terms of material conditions and class struggle; later thinkers flip Marx; and contemporary figures like Žižek return to Hegel and German Idealism to think through our present antitheses between freedom and mechanism, subjectivity and system. Hegel himself is not easy to escape. As Foucault joked, every time we think we’ve walked beyond Hegel, we turn the corner and find him standing there waiting, laughing.

From there I pivot to Whitehead, who is in some ways the late heir to this lineage and in other ways a fresh beginning. Whitehead starts as a mathematician, a rugby-playing schoolboy turned Cambridge don. For 25 years he teaches mathematics at Cambridge, mentoring Bertrand Russell and eventually co-authoring Principia Mathematica. The logicist project to derive arithmetic from pure logic is, as I put it, both an extraordinary success and a failure. It launches modern symbolic and predicate logic, but it also generates deep paradoxes that Gödel will later clarify. Russell is devastated by this failure; Whitehead is liberated. He realizes that there are metaphysical issues about the nature of reality and the status of logic that must be addressed prior to formalization.

At the same time, Einstein’s relativity is transforming physics. Whitehead becomes fascinated by the nature of space and time, presents to the Aristotelian Society, and resists what he sees as an idealist reading of relativity that makes everything mind-dependent. He wants a realistic interpretation. He even develops his own tensor formulation of gravitation in The Principle of Relativity, motivated by worries about the epistemological coherence of curved spacetime. If spacetime itself is warped by matter, how can we ever be sure our rulers are straight? It seems we would have to know where all the masses are in order to measure anything at all, which puts us in the paradoxical position of needing to know everything before we can know anything. Whitehead wants to distinguish the geometry of spacetime as an abstract field of potential from the physics of gravitation, and he insists on some principle of uniformity if measurement is to be possible.

This leads him to a broader critique of what he calls the “bifurcation of nature,” a split that goes back to Galileo between primary qualities (mass, size, motion, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, sound, taste, etc.). Science, we are told, concerns only the primary, while the secondary are relegated to the subjective “additions” of our senses. Whitehead thinks this worked methodologically for some time but leaves us with an intolerable picture in which there are two worlds: the “conjecture,” the world of scientific models, and the “dream,” the world as we actually experience it. He wants to reunite them. Nature, he says, is what we are aware of in perception. That includes the redness of the sunset as much as the electromagnetic wavelengths by which a physicist might model it. Redness is not merely a subjective overlay. It is a relational quality in a relational universe. Science is the study of the patterns that inhere in this perceptual field. It presupposes, and cannot itself account for, the existence of a knowing mind and the intelligibility and unity of nature. Here Whitehead agrees with Kant: there are transcendental conditions of science that science itself cannot establish. When contemporary theoretical physicists spin multiverse speculations far beyond possible observation, Kant would say they have ceased to do science and are doing metaphysics, and often bad metaphysics.

In the mid-1920s, invited to Harvard, Whitehead finally turns explicitly to philosophy. In Science and the Modern World he gives a history of science and mathematics and begins to work out what he calls his “organic realism.” Just as Kant glimpsed an intrinsic purposiveness in organisms, and Schelling expanded that to a cosmological principle, Whitehead begins to understand physical “objects” like atoms as self-organizing systems, tiny organisms. They exhibit at least a minimal degree of agency and interiority or experience. At that scale their experience is so attenuated that their behavior can be described with great precision by mathematical laws, but on his reading of early quantum theory there is still some sliver of genuine potentiality and thus some degree of decision. Newtonian mechanics had allowed us to imagine nature as the sum of already actualized particles in absolute space. Quantum physics reintroduces potentiality, entanglement, non-locality, and undermines the notion of simple location. It also makes the idea of “nature at an instant” problematic: even a photon seems to require a duration to fully actualize. So we can no longer think in terms of freeze-frame slices of a pre-given block universe built out of independent substances.

This is the point at which Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, his process metaphysics, emerges. Instead of substances that “require nothing but themselves in order to exist,” he posits “actual occasions” or “actual entities”: momentary drops of experience, events in an interlocking nexus of relations. Every actual occasion is itself a nexus of relations; nothing is simply self-contained. Causal transmission is not a purely external push–pull mechanics; it feels like something from the inside. In each moment, an actual occasion inherits the entirety of its past world (though different aspects of the past carry different weights) and integrates that with some field of relevant possibilities. This integration is what he calls concrescence. When concrescence reaches satisfaction, the occasion perishes. It passes from subjective immediacy to objective immortality and becomes available as datum for subsequent occasions. The universe thus grows through a rhythmic pattern of many becoming one and being increased by one. There is a constant movement of unification (each new occasion integrating the whole past) and pluralization (each new decision introducing novel perspective), so we never arrive at a final totalization. It is a pluriverse made of perspectives on perspectives.

To name the way occasions relate, Whitehead introduces the neologism “prehension.” Physical prehensions are how a concrescing occasion feels and appropriates its actual past; conceptual prehensions are how it feels possibilities, the realm of “eternal objects” or Platonic forms that have not yet been actualized. Every actual occasion is a synthesis of physical and conceptual prehensions. God, in Whitehead’s system, is an actual entity of a special sort, the primordial concrescence in which the infinite realm of possibilities is ordered in a way that makes them relevant to finite situations. Creativity, not God, is ultimate. God is the first creature of creativity, the emergent limitation of infinite possibility that makes any finite actuality possible at all. In the realm of the truly infinite, the possibility of limitation is itself included, and when that possibility is actualized we get the primordial ordering principle: a divine function mediating between possibility and actuality. Whitehead’s God is not an omnipotent creator ex nihilo standing outside the process. God is inside the process, subject to the same categories, playing a persuasive, not coercive, role. In this sense, the “God” Nietzsche declared dead is dead for Whitehead too.

Curt asks me to connect this to free will. My answer is that obviously our will is constrained in countless ways: by our biology, our history, our developmental wounds, our social conditions. Yet we have a direct experiential awareness of effort, of decision, of the fact that we could have done otherwise in certain situations, and we all know the feeling of regret and guilt. That sense of agency is not illusory in the trivial sense. The question is how to think it in a way that avoids the simplistic dichotomy between total determinism and an absolute, unconstrained libertarian freedom. In Whiteheadian terms, there is more freedom on the mental pole of experience than on the physical pole; our imaginations are far more plastic than our bodies. And our will is largely unconscious. We do things and only later fabricate conscious stories about why. Freedom, then, is not a given but a task. It is something we have to cultivate by bringing more awareness to the factors that usually operate in the dark. Here I connect with Jung: to the extent that unconscious complexes govern us from below, we are determined by them; as we bring them into consciousness, they become instruments or energies we can begin to work with rather than obstacles that bind us.

At this point Curt invites me to stop talking about everybody else’s systems and articulate where I stand. I say that as a 38-year-old academic, I’m quite humble about my influences. My channel is called Footnotes to Plato for a reason. But I also feel a pressing need to ask, in a renewed way: what is the human being? Not in isolation from science, art, religion, and politics, but as the locus where all of those domains intersect. We have become a civilization so intoxicated by the technological applications of our scientific knowledge and the economic payoffs of capitalism that we have lost sight of the source of all value. To the extent that we remain a mystery to ourselves, both individually and as a species, our knowledge of nature will remain partial and our religious and political projects will remain dangerous. Jung realized that the greatest threat was not any particular technology, from nuclear weapons to AI, but the unknown psyche wielding those tools. Until we understand ourselves more deeply, our immense power will continue to be wielded blindly.

This has implications for politics and for how we think about evil. I worry when I see, for example, a CEO murdered and the killer turning into a folk hero online. I understand the anger and frustration at systemic injustice, but the moment we justify murder in the name of justice, we have lost contact with the idea that individual souls are the locus of ultimate value. Justice is, in the Platonic sense, about right relations among persons. If your ideal of justice permits you to treat individuals as expendable means, I am not sure on what basis you can still claim to be fighting for justice at all. Projection of evil onto “those people over there” has fueled the worst crimes in human history. A Whiteheadian–Jungian orientation says: if you want to overcome evil, start at home. Evil is a potential in each of us. Deal with the shadow in yourself before mobilizing against the shadow you see in your enemies. That does not mean abandoning politics, but it does mean tempering political passion with psychological and spiritual self-work.

Toward the end, we turn to mortality. I had Jacques-Louis David’s painting of “The Death of Socrates” behind me, and I take that as an opportunity to recall Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates, condemned to death by Athens for corrupting the youth and not believing in the state gods, accepts the hemlock rather than flee into exile. He tells his students that philosophy is preparation for dying. One way to cut through our civilizational distractions is to remember that each of us and everyone we love will certainly die. If you live your life backwards from the perspective of your deathbed, you are afforded the greatest possibility of living a meaningful life. At that final threshold, our values clarify. I doubt many of us will wish we had chased more money, more status, more stimulation. We are more likely to wish we had spent more time contemplating the mystery of existence, deepening our relationships, and participating consciously in the adventure of being human.

All of this leads into a suspicion that has been growing stronger for me: that our current picture of the physical universe as a gargantuan, mostly empty space in which we are mere slime on a rock orbiting a middling star is as short-sighted as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system was 500 years ago. I think we are on the cusp of another inversion, analogous to the ones we have traced through Kant, Schelling, and Whitehead, that will reorient our Weltanschauung. It will not deny astrophysical facts, but it will change the way we situate consciousness in relation to the cosmos. However vast outer space may be, it pales in comparison to the depths of interiority. Consciousness is not a negligible epiphenomenon; it is the very medium in which the cosmos becomes known and, I would argue, the way in which the creative advance of the universe passes into reflective, value-laden form. The task before us, then, is not only to map the outer reaches of space, but to turn inward, to explore the depths of the human spirit, and to build a civilization oriented less around conquest and control and more around self-inquiry, wonder, and the cultivation of wisdom in the face of death.