Whitehead's "Foresight," Or How Philosophy Can Shape the Business Mind of the Future

Written for the Institute of Transactional Philosophy as part of our Institute Studies in January 2024

The following essay was written for the Institute of Transactional Philosophy and accompanied a talk I gave for the Institute on the island of Oahu back in January (image above). It draws on the work of Alfred North Whitehead in an attempt to answer the question: What would it mean to bring a more philosophical attitude to our business activities? I hope to make the case that the ideal business mind is also the ideal philosophical mind.

Historical Context

Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861-1947) first course in philosophy was the one he taught as a newly hired professor for the Harvard Philosophy Department in the Fall semester of 1924. Prior to being invited to Cambridge, Massachusetts at 63 years old, Whitehead was already a renowned British mathematician, known especially for his work with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica (1909-1911) and beloved by his students at the other Cambridge in the UK, where he taught at Trinity College for 25 years. Harvard University was seeking to rebuild its philosophy department after losing intellectual giants like William James and Josiah Royce to retirement a decade or so earlier. Whitehead had recently found himself drawn into the philosophy of science in an effort to sort out the conceptual conundrums raised by the revolution in physics then underway. A triptych of texts published between 1919 and 1922 caught the eye of the then famous French philosopher, Henri Bergson, who praised Whitehead as the most important thinker writing in English. Harvard jumped at the chance to bring Whitehead to America, and he did not disappoint. During his nearly 15 years teaching at Harvard, he published more than half a dozen books including his magnum opus Process and Reality (1929), which is in my opinion the most important systematic treatise on metaphysics written in the 20^th century.[0]

Whitehead’s self-titled “Philosophy of Organism” was not merely aimed at clarifying the conceptual foundations of physics but sought to integrate the findings of the natural sciences with human life more broadly, including our aesthetic, moral, and religious experiences. To this end, he collaborated with his Harvard colleagues across a variety of disciplines, including biology, psychology, religious studies, and sociology.

The fruits of this transdisciplinary collaboration include Whitehead’s lecture titled “Foresight,” which was originally delivered to the faculty and students at Harvard’s Business School in 1930. It was first published as a preface to Wallace Brett Donham’s book, Business Adrift, in 1931. Donham, the Dean of the Harvard Business School for 23 years, was quite impressed with Whitehead, whose philosophy was a key influence on the reforms he sought to institute in business education.^[1] A key theme of Donham’s Business Adrift is the idea that businesses cannot operate in isolation from the society in which they exist. While financial success is essential, so too is the role a business plays in assuring the well-being of employees, customers, and the wider community. Donham understood Whitehead’s holistic philosophy as providing a deeper justification for his aspirational view of the role of business in human society.

Whitehead’s lecture was also eventually included as a chapter in the first part of his book Adventures of Ideas (1933), which focuses on the history of Western societies, highlighting important ideals that have guided the evolution of our civilization. Chief among these ideals is “freedom,” which Whitehead points out only gradually became the highest value of modern societies (e.g., despite being credited with the inauguration of democracy, ancient Athenian society still took slavery as a matter of course). 

Whitehead’s collaboration with Donham began just as the Great Depression was devastating the global economy, leading to steep declines in industrial production and crippling unemployment. It would be the longest and most severe depression of the 20^th century. The crisis led to a major shift in economic thinking, as the traditional laissez-faire approach came under fire and the groundwork was laid for more robust government involvement in the economy, including social welfare programs. In addition to his influence on Donham, while still at Cambridge University Whitehead had served on John Maynard Keynes’ dissertation committee. Keynes would go on to have an outsized impact on 20^th century economic theory.

The Civilizational Role of Commerce

A key theme in the evolution of civilized consciousness traced by Whitehead is the movement from societies governed by coercive force toward those organized by rational persuasion. He singles out the leading role of commerce in this transformation, as it represents the main alternative to violence and war, whether within or between societies. Of course, warfare is quite profitable, both in terms of the production and sale of weapons and, when the dust settles, in opening up new markets; and so right up to our own day, commerce can easily be corrupted into serving barbarism.

Indeed, the linkage between corporate profits and the military ambitions of nation-states remains among the greatest threats to our fragile planetary civilization. The military-industrial complex’s only competitor in this respect is the linkage between corporate profits and ecological devastation. The reduction of the natural world to a mere storehouse of raw materials awaiting industrial extraction and production (and a trash dump for toxic waste) to serve the mediate goal of satisfying consumers and the ultimate end of stuffing shareholder pockets has, in a few short centuries, shifted the very climate of the planet and initiated the 6^th great mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Prior mass extinctions were caused by the likes of asteroid impacts and super volcano eruptions. This time, it’s the greed driving humanity’s global economy.

The seeking of profits is not the problem: profits are a necessary part of doing business. The problem is the exclusive focus on the maximization of individual private wealth and property without due consideration being paid to the health of human society and the rest of the community of life on Earth.  Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is not some sort of supernatural intervention that automatically transforms selfish competition in the marketplace into shared prosperity for society. The source of the astonishing capacity of free market societies to self-organize is only “invisible” because it first flows into the physical world out of human hearts.[8] Our social and ecological bonds do not just take care of themselves. Our economies must also be driven by an ethos of care for the common good and a method of foresight that broadens the imaginations of investors beyond quarterly shareholder profits.

For these reasons Whitehead laments that, for businesspeople, “the motive of success is not enough.” For success, measured in terms of financial gain alone, “produces a short-sighted world which destroys the sources of its own prosperity.” He thus sought to impress upon Harvard’s business students the importance of a more philosophical outlook on their activities, one which would cure them of “the disease of short-sighted motives.” A century after Whitehead’s lecture, American society has only become more dominated by the business mind. Thus, as Whitehead saw it,

“a great society is a society in which men of business think greatly of their functions. Low thoughts mean low behavior, and after a brief orgy of exploitation low behavior means a descending standard of life.^{” [2]}

What would it mean to bring a more philosophical attitude to the activities of commerce? In general, it means examining the ideals and beliefs from which spring our motives for action. It means seeking to cultivate the higher virtues rather than reducing human nature to its lowest vices.

Adam Smith, author of the famous Wealth of Nations (1776), cannot be blamed for the corporate and oligarchical greed that is associated with free market economies. He is also the author of the lesser-known Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which argues that we are driven not only by self-interest but also by fellow-feeling and concern for others. A partial reading and abstract application of classical theories of capitalist political economy has left us with a degraded image of human beings as Homo Economicus: selfish profit-maximizers, content to justify widespread socioeconomic injustice as an unhappy consequence of the Laws of Nature.

Rightly or wrongly, the theories of thinkers like Smith and Thomas Malthus (author of An Essay on the Principle of Population published in 1798) have been interpreted to construe the normal structure of society as one consisting of a natural division between “the fortunate few” and “the semi-destitute many.” Whitehead’s summary of the sorry situation is that:

“…there must be a pool of labor, starving and destitute, ready to work on the wages of bare subsistence. Factories taking advantage of such cheap labor will drive out of trade those managed on fanciful humanitarian lines.” ^[3]

Whitehead’s Call to Uplift the Business Mind

In the modern period, the general image of the human being from the point of view of economics has emphasized our vices and ignored our virtues. Whitehead seeks to intervene in the current downward trend of our civilization by uplifting the business mind from its shallow pursuit of short-term profit toward deeper and more enduring ends. This requires not only a renewed commitment to human virtue, but the enactment of a new vision of the world, a world within which commerce can achieve its higher purpose, which is to finally transition our species beyond the desire to control nature and other human beings by the application of force, toward the wise application of foresight to our interactions with nature and a respect for the freedom and creativity of every human being.

Whitehead thus focuses his remarks to Harvard’s business students on the question of historical foresight. Nowadays, we take the accelerating pace of social change as a matter of course. My parents and even my grandparents were already well-acquainted with massive disruptions in social routine, whether due to political, technological, or cultural revolutions, or to world war. But a century ago, Whitehead could still remark that he was living through the first period of human history within which it could no longer be assumed that “each generation will substantially live amid the conditions governing the lives of its fathers and will transmit those conditions to mold with equal force the lives of its children.”^[4] While in the past, the rate of significant change was considerably longer than an individual lifespan, at present, it is hardly an exaggeration to say we are surprised not to witness a new upheaval every few years. 

Earth Systems scientists now refer to the post-WW2 period as The Great Acceleration.^[5] This period marks a simultaneous surge in the rate of growth across a variety of metrics of human activity, including population, technological advance, urbanization, energy consumption, and resource exploitation. In such a situation, developing historical foresight becomes both a more urgent and a more daunting task.

Whitehead begins by distinguishing the type of foresight that is needed to direct our business activities from the predictive power of natural science. Science deals in general laws, but human history is checkered with contingencies introduced both by unexpected natural catastrophes as well as the creative actions of free individuals. In aggregate, much human behavior can be described by statistical laws; but such reduction is inevitably backward facing, impotent in the face of the free deeds of creative individuals who thwart the norm. Though it participated in their development, science in its careful observation of the natural course of events could not predict the world-remaking inventions of electronic media, atom bombs, or artificial intelligence.

The Cultivation of Foresight as a Cooperative Enterprise

Despite the catalogue of our ignorance, we are not entirely without foresight. But its cultivation requires more than just scientific knowledge. We also need the wisdom to determine which among the infinitude of available facts is relevant to our forecast. Whitehead gives the counter example of the science of astronomy, wherein the set of available facts and the laws which predict them are relatively simple (but only relatively). Though the stars are many, astronomers can measure and model their motion with great precision, projecting out their locations millions of years hence. “Unfortunately, the facts of history, even those of private individual history, are on too large a scale. They surge forward beyond control.” ^[6] Thus, a different method is needed for the procurement of historical foresight. Whitehead ventures to sketch such a method, but he humbly admits to his audience that he lacks the detailed know-how of practical businesspeople. His role as a philosopher is not to explain to businesspeople how best to apply the method in this or that concrete circumstance, but rather to inspire in them a new mentality that, through their own informed application of the method, will promote the success not only of their own business ventures, but uplift the general welfare of the whole Earth community.

Whitehead views foresight as broad understanding of the functioning of human society, including its physical and biological basis, its technological powers, and its psychological motives. But no single individual human being possesses a mastery of all the relevant issues. For the business world even to approach such mastery, the pursuit of foresight must be engaged in as “a cooperative enterprise.”^[7] In other words, rather than cutthroat competition, the successful provision of foresight requires that corporate firms cooperate with one another, as well as with consumers, in the co-management of a more humane and ecologically regenerative economy.

Whitehead’s ideal vision of the business community converges with the “associative economics” outlined by Rudolf Steiner as part of his social threefolding proposal.^[8] The idea is not to eliminate free markets by imposing centralized state control over a planned economy, but to enmesh a decentralized and diverse array of corporations more intimately within the social and ecological relations they are intended to serve. This means re-imagining the corporation not as a profit-maximizing and cost-externalizing machine, but as an organizational means of efficiently serving the real needs of human beings within healthy ecological limits. Producers, distributors, and consumers must work together to better understand these needs and limits, which entails more transparency and mutuality in all economic decision-making.

The Place of Business in Human Life

Such a renewal of economics along more cooperative lines also entails more consciously delimiting the role of business in human life. Our cultural and political institutions ought not to collapse into the economic sphere and run like businesses. The commodification of various conditions of human life (including education, science and technology, religion, art, etc.) and the regulatory capture of politicians has wrecked our society. Whitehead insists that “the learned and imaginative life is a way of living, and is not an article of commerce.” As the philosopher Brian Hendley remarks in his review of Whitehead’s contributions to business education, “current references to the ‘knowledge industry’ and to university research as a ‘commodity’ to be provided cost-effectively to ‘clients’ or ‘consumers’ underscore the relevance of Whitehead’s point.”^[9] To be clear, it is not that economic decision-making should take place in isolation from cultural and political issues. The freedom, knowledge, and love cultivated in cultural activities like education, the arts, and spirituality, and the rights and responsibilities codified into law by democratic governments, stem from distinct values that should not be collapsed into or unduly ruled over by the ends of economics. 

Follett’s Contributions to Collaborative Decision-Making

The pursuit of a more associative economics can benefit from the approach to collaborative decision-making proposed by Mary Parker Follett, who elaborated Whitehead’s organic philosophy into a new theory of organizational management in her book Creative Experience (1924). Rather than approaching the necessity of shared decision-making among producers, distributors, and consumers under the assumption that each group has fixed interests that will need to be compromised, Follett encourages us to view our interests more fluidly. The belief that individual interests are frozen leads to a dissociative economy of competition, where the fear of loss and the desire for coercive control underlies every exchange. In line with Whitehead’s ideal vision of the replacement of force by persuasion, Follett proposes a new conception of “coactive power,” whereby our collaborative activities not only embody but evolve our purposes. By engaging one another with sympathetic imagination, our interests transform, allowing diverse desires to harmonize into greater efficiency and value than had we remained fixed in our own self-interest and forced to compromise.

As Follett put it, 

“We must abolish any conception of power that has an atomistic taint. The only possible way of getting rid of the greed and scramble of our present world is for all of us to realize that the power we are snatching at is not really power, not that which we are really seeking, that the way to gain genuine power, even that which we ourselves really want, is by an integrative process.”^[10]

Ignore Routines at Your Peril

While many critics of the capitalist status quo have proposed sweeping revolutionary transformations that would upend the existing social order and replace it with some more rationally designed alternative, Whitehead cautions that “routine is the god of every social system.” Our complex civilization is the result of many an intelligent insight, but once the insights are translated into some adequate routine, “the intelligence vanishes and the system is maintained by a coordination of conditioned reflexes.”^[11] In other words, we do not necessarily know the purposes of all the routinized activities involved in supporting our day to day survival. It is a grave illusion to imagine we might burn it all down and redesign society from the ground up on rational principles alone. We must begin where we are, paying due attention to the ways that successful introduction of progressive ideas depends upon the careful preparation of good soil and seasonal timing. As Whitehead says, the “grounds for the current routine must be understood” as far as is possible, and “the sorts of novelty just entering into social effectiveness have got to be weighed against the old routine.” ^[12]

Nonetheless, part of attending to current circumstances entails accepting that we no longer inhabit a stable unchanging social system. The old theories of political economy are inadequate for having prematurely closed accounts on human potential and for their ignorance of the impact of economic activities on the environment. A deeper knowledge not only of the varieties of human nature but of the complexity of Earth’s life systems is required to render explicit a method of foresight adequate to the times. We know from even a cursory study of history that civilizations are born, culminate, and die. Without the procurement of an adequate method of foresight, our own civilization is doomed to follow the pattern. Only this time, given the global extent of our economic interrelations, civilizational collapse threatens to be even more devastating than prior cycles of decay. 

Whitehead concludes his sketch of a method of foresight by imagining the ideal business mind of the future. His insistence on the importance of understanding, conforming to, and supervising both the internal structure and external purposes of routine finds exemplification in the Transaction Cycle outlined by John Patterson and Kirkland Tibbels of Influential U.^[13] The cycle is a guide to the sorts of virtuous, value-enhancing habits supportive of a successful business enterprise. But foresight requires something more. It requires a “philosophic power” of imaginative insight into the flux of social life, including a cultivated sensitivity to the relevant facts, a broad attentiveness to shifts in religious outlook, to scientific discoveries and their attendant technological changes, to fashion trends, and to political upheavals. In sum, the foresight to be developed by the business mind of the future will require “an unspecialized aptitude for eliciting generalizations from particulars and for seeing the divergent illustrations of generalities in diverse circumstances.” ^[14]

Thus, the ideal business mind is also the ideal philosophical mind. Philosophy is not or at least ought not to be just a matter of obscure academic debates between irritable professors. It is the attempt to survey possibilities in comparison with actualities: “In philosophy, the fact, the theory, the alternatives, and the ideal, are weighed together.”^[15] Without an inspiring and coordinating philosophy of life to guide our economic activities, civilization can at best only regress into decadence and boredom, and at worst succumb to the violent tumult of warfare. The business mind of the future, in order to uplift our commercial activities from their addiction to war, exploitation, and extraction, must be enriched by philosophic education and its application, attuned not just to economic theory but to the whole complexity of human motives and to the fragility of the living planet upon which we depend. 

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^{[0] See my essay “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out” for more on why I think this. URL: https://footnotes2plato.com/2023/06/21/whiteheads-philosophy-of-organism-turning-idealism-inside-out-draft-article/}

^[1] See Brian Hendley (2000), “Whitehead and Business Education: A Second Look,” in Interchange (31), p. 181. 

^[2] Adventures of Ideas, 98. 

^[3] Adventures of Ideas, 73.

^[4] Adventures of Ideas, 92-93. 

^[5] https://futureearth.org/2015/01/16/the-great-acceleration/

^[6] Adventures of Ideas, 88. 

^[7] Adventures of Ideas, 89. 

^[8] “The Urgency of Social Threefolding in a World Still at War with Itself,” in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 19(1) (2023). URL: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1069/1723

^[9] Brian Hendley (2000), “Whitehead and Business Education: A Second Look,” in Interchange (31), p. 183.

^[10] Creative Experience, 188. 

^[11] Adventures of Ideas, 90. 

^[12] Adventures of Ideas, 93.

^[13] https://influentialu.global/blog/transaction-cycle-examples

^[14] Adventures of Ideas, 97. 

^[15] Adventures of Ideas, 98.