Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out

Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out

Matthew Segall

Despite many sharp disagreements with Francis Herbert Bradley, Alfred North Whitehead asks in his preface to Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) whether the Philosophy of Organism is not, in the final interpretation, “a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic basis.”1 Whitehead invites us to understand his work as a critical reconstruction of the idealist view, and, more specifically, as an imaginative transformation of Bradley’s theory of feeling. Whitehead’s title is already an obvious allusion to F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893). All is here contained in nuce: Whitehead replaces Bradley’s finite centers of appearance with an account of creative process in terms of the concrescence of individual occasions of experience, thereby pluralizing Bradley’s monistic metaphysics into an experiential cosmology offering a consistent, coherent, applicable, adequate, and revisable account of the generalities applying at least to our cosmic epoch, with perhaps a faint whisper of what holds true of all such epochs.

... A review of the largely political reasons for the eclipse of idealism and speculative philosophy more generally clears the air for a renewed examination of Whitehead’s accomplishment. What Whitehead offers is not a return to naïve realism or pre-Kantian dogmatism, but a participatory descendental ontology initiated into the materialism melting intuitions of Absolute Idealism but unwilling to forego concern for the individually creative and yet relationally intimate appropriation of the dead by the living...

The chapter to follow is divided into five parts. Part I introduces Whitehead’s philosophy of history before recounting the sociological reasons for idealism’s decline in the Anglophone world. Part II revisits Whitehead’s work with Russell on the logical foundations of mathematics in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between abstract pattern and concrete process. Part III introduces Whitehead’s metaphysical generalization of the function of propositions in the actual world. Part IV details Whitehead’s creative repurposing of the concept of feeling found in F. H. Bradley’s idealism. Part V concludes with a brief final interpretation emphasizing Whitehead’s process theological amendments to the Bradleyan Absolute.