Understanding Whitehead: My Conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove

I joined Jeff on his New Thinking Allowed Podcast to discuss Whitehead

I began by outlining Whitehead’s life and intellectual trajectory. Born in 1861 on the Isle of Thanet in England, Whitehead first made his mark as a mathematician. He spent 25 years at Cambridge University, where he influenced and later collaborated with Bertrand Russell on their monumental work Principia Mathematica. The goal of Principia was to ground all of mathematics in formal logic, but the project ultimately failed due to insurmountable paradoxes. While this failure greatly upset Russell, Whitehead saw it as liberating. It freed him to explore a new speculative method in philosophy.

In 1924, Whitehead moved to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he wrote his most significant philosophical works, including Process and Reality. While quite popular at Harvard, Whitehead’s influence waned after his death, being kept alive for the last half century or so mainly by theologians. Only more recently have an increasing number of scientists, philosophers, artists, and activists started to rediscover his work, particularly in light of challenges posed by new scientific paradigms and a worsening ecological crisis that has forced deep reconsideration of the cosmological basis of Western civilization.

What makes Whitehead difficult to categorize is his unique approach. He sought to reconcile the insights of British idealism, especially F.H. Bradley, with the scientific and analytical advances of the early 20th century. Unlike Bradley, Whitehead did not adopt a purely idealistic view that reduces reality to mind or consciousness. Instead, he developed a novel position he called “organic realism.” In Whitehead’s worldview, reality is made up of interrelated processes, not static substances. For him, both mind and matter are intertwined, with subjective experiences being just as much a part of nature as the objective phenomena studied by science. This sets him apart from analytic philosophers and logical positivists, who often dismissed subjective experiences like emotions, values, and consciousness as irrelevant to understanding reality.

Mishlove, being a parapsychologist, was particularly interested in Whitehead’s openness to phenomena like telepathy. In Process and Reality, Whitehead explicitly suggests that telepathy could be a natural consequence of his philosophy, where the universe is an interconnected network of non-conscious feelings. From this perspective, what we call “paranormal” is simply the conscious manifestation of underlying connections that are always present. Whitehead saw the experiences we tend to dismiss as anomalies—such as psychic phenomena—as revealing deeper truths about the structure of reality itself.

In discussing the broader philosophical landscape, we explored the relationship between German and British idealism and how these traditions influenced Whitehead. I see Whitehead as a thinker who inherited aspects of both traditions, particularly through figures like Bradley and German idealists such as Hegel and Schelling. Whitehead was critical of the dualism that emerged from Descartes and the scientific revolution, particularly the bifurcation of nature into conjectured material causes and subjective perceptions that are supposedly irrelevant to scientific understanding. His philosophy of organism aims to overcome this divide by re-integrating subjective experiences into the natural world. In this sense, Whitehead’s work aligns with thinkers like William James, whose “radical empiricism” also rejected the sharp separation of mind and matter.

Another key theme we explored is Whitehead’s affinity with Romanticism, particularly the work of Goethe. Like Goethe, Whitehead saw nature as an evolving, organic process that cannot be fully captured by reductionist scientific methods. Goethe’s concept of the Urpflanze (archetypal plant) and his belief that poetic and scientific insight are intertwined resonate deeply with Whitehead’s idea that aesthetics and imagination are essential for understanding the world. Both thinkers challenge the notion that reality can be reduced to mere quantities and measurements, emphasizing instead the importance of feeling.

Unfortunately, as we discussed, institutions that attempt to promote this kind of holistic science education—such as Schumacher College in the UK, where I once studied and taught—struggle to survive in a world dominated by industrial and technological imperatives. Yet, given the ecological crises we face, there has never been a more urgent need for this integrative approach to science.

Whether we’re trying to make sense of psychic phenomena, integrating subjective experience into scientific understanding, or confronting the ecological catastrophe, Whitehead’s process philosophy provides a much-needed vision that bridges the gap between science, spirituality, and human experience. As Mishlove and I concluded, Whitehead’s work may have been ahead of its time, but it is more relevant than ever in helping us navigate the complex world we live in today.