The river and the labyrinth – part I

What process philosophy gets right, and where it gets lost

Heraclitus contemplating a river flowing by, with the city of Ephesus in the background. Image by Nano Banana.

Panta rhei, everything flows, said the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. You cannot step into the same river twice, not because of any mystical reason, but because rivers are constituted by continuous flux. In modern terms, a proton isn’t a thing sitting there, it’s a continuous process of quarks exchanging gluons, existing only in virtue of those interactions.

This ancient intuition is genuinely profound and scientifically vindicated, yet in its 20th-century elaboration by Alfred North Whitehead, it got buried under an avalanche of invented metaphysical furniture – panpsychism, eternal objects lodged in a divine mind, and a God who “prehends” electrons.

What I’ll try to show in what follows is that so-called process philosophy starts with a good map of reality, then gets catastrophically lost in its own labyrinth. Which is too bad, because Heraclitus (and the Stoics he influenced) was on to something important, and it would be nice to be able to recover the right path once the modern briars have been cleared from the road.

The kernel of truth: processes all the way down

The Heraclitean insight is in agreement with the best contemporary science. Modern physics strongly supports a process ontology over a substance ontology. Elementary particles are not little billiard balls, they are excitations of quantum fields. Quantum field theory describes the world as fundamentally relational and dynamic. There are no enduring intrinsic substances, only patterns of interaction and becoming.

Moreover, according to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, spacetime itself is a dynamic structure, not a fixed container. As a result, events and their causal relations are more fundamental than objects.

Biology and chemistry also confirm the broad picture: what we call an organism is better described as a set of processes – metabolism, homeostasis, evolution – than as a fixed thing. Even the self is processual: no serious neuroscientist believes in a static, substance-like “soul.”

Non western traditions have produced similar intuitions: the Buddhist pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination) and the rejection of a permanent self (anātman) express remarkably similar intuitions, as does certain Taoist thinking about flux, although these schools of thought didn’t develop the systematic metaphysical overreach Whitehead did, for better and worse.

More recently, the American pragmatists – John Dewey, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce – have for different reasons been considered process philosophers, though they stayed relatively close to empirical experience and avoided the worst excesses of the Whitehead line that I’m criticizing here.

Whitehead’s system: a guided tour of the labyrinth

So, in what, exactly, does Whitehead’s process philosophy consist, and why do I think it has taken a really bad turn, metaphysically and epistemologically speaking? Let me give you a very brief tour of the main concepts.

Whitehead’s most basic move is to reject substance metaphysics and replace it with momentary events called “actual occasions” or actual entities. According to him, electrons, people, and even God are all instances of the same fundamental category. The world is a vast web of these events, each “feeling” (prehending is the technical term he uses) all past occasions before achieving “satisfaction” (his word) and becoming data for future occasions. When an actual occasion “prehends” its past, it’s as if every electron in the universe had to consult the entire history of the cosmos before making its next move. Confused? You should be!

All actual occasions, including electrons, possess experience in some form, though somehow (Whitehead never explains how) experience precedes consciousness, so he’s not saying that electrons are conscious. This is his way of avoiding dualism: mind and matter are not distinct kinds of stuff but different grades of the same experiential process. (I am a physicalist, so I avoid dualism by saying that “mind” is not a separate category – either in terms of substance or of properties – from matter.)

This aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics goes under the self-explanatory term of “panexperientialism.” Since I think experience is not possible without some level of consciousness, I believe he’s talking nonsense, strictly speaking.

Now, for there to be determinate character in the world, Whitehead posits eternal objects, something like (but not quite the same as) Platonic Forms. These eternal objects “ingress” (notice the quasi-comical proliferation of new terms!) into actual occasions to give them specific qualities. The eternal objects in question are, conveniently, housed in the mind of God.

Speaking of which, Whitehead’s theology is referred to as dipolar panentheism: God enters as a “metaphysical necessity,” a dipolar actual entity with a primordial nature (the storehouse of eternal objects) and a consequent nature (temporally engaged, prehending every actual occasion in the universe as it occurs, growing with the world).

This is neither classical theism, which describes God as transcending the world, nor pantheism, which says that God is immanent in the world. Instead, it is panentheism, the notion that God is both coincident with the world and yet somehow also outside the world. In other words, all things exist within God, but God is more than the sum of all things. Good luck making sense of that one.

Whitehead calls his method “speculative philosophy” and his description of it is rather self-congratulatory, as it is supposed to somehow seamlessly merge science, aesthetic experience, imagination, and religious intuitions, among other things. He uses an interesting metaphor to get the point across: imagine an airplane that takes off from the ground of experience, soars high into imagination, but eventually must come back to the ground and make contact with experience again. From where I stand, his plane took off but got lost in space and never made it back home.

The epistemological void: metaphysics without a safety net

Why is all of the above highly problematic? For one thing, because process philosophy explicitly and proudly announces that it reverses the post-Cartesian tradition by doing ontology before epistemology, a radically bad move, in my immodest opinion. I argued before that whenever philosophers, scientists, or anyone proposes a new notion, hypothesis, or theory, the obvious question is: how do you know that? If the answer is vague and involves a lot of hand-waving, then we can smell bullshit and we are entitled to dismiss the whole thing as not even wrong.

An excellent article about process philosophy, published by J.R. Hustwit in the (peer reviewed) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, notes that Whitehead deliberately sidesteps Kant’s transcendental critique by going “neoclassical.”

In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant examines how human knowledge is possible by investigating the mind’s role in structuring experience. He argues that our cognition doesn’t simply reflect reality but actively structures it through innate mental frameworks (such as the concepts of space and time).

Kant’s critique isn’t just a modern fad, it’s the hard-won recognition that we need an account of how knowledge is possible before we build castles in the sky. You can’t (or shouldn’t) circumvent that by calling it “pre-modern” and then dismissing it.

Whitehead does gesture toward science, in fact he does it constantly. His main opus, after all, is entitled Science and the Modern World. But he uses scientific findings selectively as inspiration rather than as constraint. He never seriously grapples with what it would mean for his metaphysics to be falsified. His “actual occasions” do not map onto anything in quantum field theory, they are not derived from experiment or observation, and they are not subject to revision by physics. They are armchair constructs dressed in scientific-sounding language.

In fairness, Whitehead was writing in the 1920s-30s, when quantum mechanics was brand new and its implications were contested. So he had some excuse for not taking physics seriously as a constraint. His contemporary followers, however, writing after quantum field theory, the Standard Model, and contemporary neuroscience, have considerably less.

Whitehead claims his system is valid if it is internally coherent and adequate to all of human experience, including, as I said, the religious, aesthetic, and moral kinds. But coherence is not truth, and human experience can go seriously wrong. An internally consistent system can be gloriously, completely wrong. (Unless we are talking about pure mathematics or logic, which do not have to refer to anything in the real world.) Moreover, the notion of “adequacy to experience” is so elastic that it can justify almost anything: astrology, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Aristotelian physics were all “adequate to experience” by their own lights.

In practice, process philosophy’s speculations – be they actual occasions, prehension, or dipolar Gods – are never seriously tested against or constrained by what physics, chemistry, neuroscience, or biology actually find. The resulting system is therefore self-sealing: problems within it are solved by adding more epicycles (like eternal objects, or a mysterious principle of creativity as “ultimate reality”) rather than by consulting the world. This is not the way to do serious metaphysics, but there is an alternative, as we shall see in part II.

[Next time: three objectionable moves and how to salvage the river]