Alfred North Whitehead (1861 to 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell and, later in life at Harvard, founded what is now called process philosophy: the view that the world is made not of lasting lumps of matter but of events, each coming into being through its relations with everything else. His main statement of it is Process and Reality (1929). His picture of a deeply interconnected world, in which some kind of feeling goes all the way down, overlaps at many points with the animist view, though he was a philosopher, not an animist, and he ranked kinds of experience in a way Therapeutic Shamanism does not.
Who was Alfred North Whitehead? #
He was born in Ramsgate, Kent, in 1861, and spent most of his working life as a mathematician, at Cambridge and then in London. With his former student Bertrand Russell he wrote the three volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910 to 1913), an attempt to ground mathematics in logic. In 1924, at the age of sixty-three, he moved to Harvard as a professor of philosophy, and there wrote the books for which philosophers remember him: Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929), Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938). He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947.1
What is process philosophy? #
A way of seeing the world as made of happenings, not things. Whitehead called his own version the philosophy of organism. In it, the final real things are not bits of matter that simply sit in one place and last, but momentary events of experience, which he called actual occasions, “drops of experience, complex and interdependent”.2 Each one comes into being by taking in, or ‘feeling’, the occasions before it, and then passes on to be felt by those that follow. What looks like a lasting thing, a stone or a person, is a long chain of such occasions.
‘Feeling’ is his technical word for the way one event takes account of another, and it is going on everywhere, mostly without any awareness at all. Consciousness, in his view, is a late and rare arrival on top of all this feeling, not its base. In his words, “Consciousness flickers”.3
What did he think had gone wrong with the modern picture of nature? #
That science had mistaken a useful abstraction for the real world. Modern science, he said in Science and the Modern World, had quietly taken on a picture of nature as “irreducible brute matter” that is “senseless, valueless, purposeless”, and then forgotten that this was only a convenient way of thinking. He called the mistake, taking the abstract for the concrete, “the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”.4
Followed to its end, he said, that picture strips the world of everything we actually meet in it. The scent goes from the rose and the song from the nightingale, and nature becomes “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” He did not believe it. He called the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Shelley, as witnesses on the other side, and concluded that “The romantic reaction was a protest on behalf of value.”4
What did Whitehead say about God? #
He kept the word, but rejected the all-powerful creator who stands outside the world and commands it. The idea of a transcendent creator “at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys” was, he thought, a fallacy, and he traced it to the Church giving God “the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar”, God made in the image of the imperial rulers of Egypt, Persia and Rome.5 In its place he described a God who works slowly and quietly, through love, not force, and who takes in everything that happens in the world, “the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who understands.”6
Others built a whole theology on this. Charles Hartshorne developed Whitehead’s ideas into process theology, and the theologian John B. Cobb applied them to the environment, in what is often called the first single-authored book of environmental ethics, Is It Too Late? (1971).7
How does process philosophy connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At several points, though the two reach them by different roads. Whitehead reasoned his way, as a mathematician and philosopher, to a world of interrelated events in which feeling is everywhere. In shamanism similar ground is reached through experience. Everything is made of energy, and that energy is alive and conscious, so everything around us is alive and conscious too, though often in ways very different from ours.8
Interconnection is the clearest meeting point. For Whitehead, every event is made out of its relations to others. In shamanic reality, everything is connected to and part of everything else; things that look separate in ordinary reality are protrusions from a deeper interconnected web of energy, so that, as the physicist David Bohm suggested, any single atom could in principle tell us about every other.9 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
His rejection of the imperial God also has a counterpart. In Therapeutic Shamanism the gods that appear after the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, meddling in human affairs and demanding to be worshipped and obeyed, are not really Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer beings at all, but repressed energies from the human collective unconscious; hunter-gatherers generally had little interest in gods and goddesses.10 The two critiques arrive at a similar place from opposite starting points, one from inside Christian philosophy, the other from animism. See Do animists believe in God, or in gods and goddesses? What is the Great Mystery?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over ranking. In Process and Reality Whitehead regularly spoke of ‘high-grade’ and ‘low-grade’ organisms, and saw consciousness as arising only in the higher phases of experience. Therapeutic Shamanism refuses that kind of ladder. There are different kinds of consciousness, not higher and lower ones. Think of a continuum with self-awareness at one end and collective-awareness at the other, with humans far out at the self-aware end and so the least collectively aware. Treating our own self-awareness as the “highest” form of consciousness is part of our arrogance as humans and the myth of our supremacy.11
There are other differences too. Whitehead’s occasions are not persons, and nothing in his scheme is there to be met or related to; in animism the living world is a community of beings to be in relationship with. And where Whitehead built his system around a God, the animism of Therapeutic Shamanism worships nothing. See Is the living world intelligent?
Does everything really feel? #
Philosophers disagree. The anthropologist and systems thinker Gregory Bateson, who also saw mind running through the living world, drew the line at single atoms. He did not agree with Whitehead that the mental character of the larger world means the smallest parts of it must have a mental character too.12 Whitehead, for his part, held that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing at all, and offered his scheme as a best attempt, not a proof: “There is nothing here in the nature of proof.”13 See Who was Gregory Bateson, and what is an “ecology of mind”?
He is also famously hard to read; his philosophy has been called among the most difficult in the whole Western canon, which is one reason given for his influence staying relatively narrow.14
