Alfred North Whitehead

Wilber's View

Whitehead is one of the quiet load-bearing sources under Wilber's holon terminology. Wilber takes Whitehead's process philosophy — in particular the concepts of prehension (the "feeling" or contact by which any occasion, however primitive, registers another) and creativity (which Whitehead called "the ultimate category," the "eternal activity" underlying all emergence) — as direct precedents for his own account of holons as having both interiors and a drive toward ever-new syntheses. Whitehead's famous dictum "the many become one, and are increased by one" becomes, in Wilber's hands, close to a formal definition of how holons emerge: differentiation and integration in a single creative act, at every level from atoms to civilizations. Wilber also credits Whitehead, alongside Hegel and Gebser, as one of the first real philosophers of vision-logic — someone whose systematic grasp of "identity-in-difference" pointed at nonbifurcated reason before the term existed. Whitehead's "the within of things" epistemology (prehension as consciousness present, in some degree, all the way down) also puts him alongside Spinoza and Aurobindo as a source for Wilber's claim that interiority is not an emergent add-on but a dimension present at every level of the Kosmos.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

This is what Whitehead referred to as creativity (which he called "the ultimate category"—the category necessary to understand any other category), and what Jantsch and Waddington call self-transcendence.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2

This is Whitehead's famous dictum: "The many become one and are increased by one."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2

Whitehead uses "prehension" to describe the contact and thus "feeling" of an object by any subject, no matter how "primitive," including atoms (thus his famous statement, "Biology is the study of big organisms, physics the study of little organisms").

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4

As Whitehead's famous summary has it, the cosmos is now "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly." (To which he added, "Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined.")

— Whitehead, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12

Hegel was one of the first great philosophers of vision-logic, as were Schelling, Whitehead, and a few others we will explore later; and not just because of their systematic wholeness—that had been attempted before—but because of their explicit grasp of identity-in-difference or "nonbifurcated Reason" or vision-logic.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

See Also

• holons — the concept page whose interior/creativity language draws directly on Whitehead's prehension and "creativity"
• spinoza — the other major "interiority of holons" source Wilber pairs with Whitehead
• vision-logic — the mode of cognition Wilber credits Whitehead (with Hegel and Gebser) as an early philosopher of
• hegel — grouped with Whitehead as an early philosopher of vision-logic