An Infinity of Standpoints
Centers of Feeling in a Pluralistic Universe
“It must be remembered that the phrase ‘actual world’ is like ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow,’ in that it alters its meaning according to standpoint.”
"Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates. No two occasions can have identical actual worlds."
"Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 65, 67, 210, 211
A standpoint is a region of the spacetime continuum (the extensive continuum) that is atomized by a sentient mind or, in Whitehead’s language, by a concrescing subject of experience. By human standards it may be large, small, or middle-sized. And it need not be three-dimensional. The spacetime continuum has multiple dimensions.
Whatever the size or scale, a subject prehends and gathers the many data of its actual world into momentary unity from somewhere in the continuum. which is itself a possibility matrix filled with regions of multiple dimensions. Each subject inhabits its own unique standpoint. It is "here" where it is and "now" when it is. The here and now are two sides of a single coin. The here and now is here-now.
In human life but also in all kinds of life, the particular here-now of a subject is not an empty container. It is filled with subjective immediacy, with physical feelings, mental feelings, emotions, subjective aims, self-enjoyment and self-crearivity. And yet no two moments of aliveness are precisely identical, subjectively or objectively. "No two occasions have identical actual worlds."
In some respects, this idea resembles the Jain doctrine of Anekāntavāda: the view that reality is many-sided and that all perspectives are partial rather than absolute. Even a claim to have surveyed the whole of reality, says Whitehead, is self-falsifying, because every survey necessarily occurs from the vantage point—the standpoint—of the surveyor. There are no standpoint-free perspectives. There no view from nowhere. There is a multiplicity of here-nows.
An Infinity of Standpoints
What is the standpoint of a worm? Of a quantum event? Of an alien? Of a terrorist? Of an angel? Of a despot? Of a saint? Of a microbe? Of an octopus? Of a tomato plant? Of a puff of energy in far-off outer space? Of my best friend? Of God?
The differences are striking. The standpoint of a worm may be unimaginably different from that of a human being: nearer to the earth, shaped by touch, vibration, moisture, hunger, danger, and instinctive response. The standpoint of a quantum event may be more primal still, consisting not in reflective consciousness but a burst of incredible intensity. The standpoint of an alien intelligence, if such beings exist, might disclose entirely different forms of perception, emotion, embodiment, temporality, sociality, or relation to the cosmos. The standpoint of an angel, in many religious traditions, might involve forms of awareness and receptivity far more encompassing than those available to embodied human beings. I leave to readers to also imagine the standpoints of despised politicians, terrorists, and devils. This involves imagining their emotions, their aims, their past experiences, their assumptions about the world, and their aspirations for the future.
What is important is that Whitehead’s philosophy encourages us to imagine a universe alive with centers of experience, each receiving the world from somewhere, each inheriting a past, each responding according to its own standpoint within the ongoing becoming of reality. No standpoint exhausts the whole. No creature experiences reality exactly as another does. Yet all beings participate, in differing ways and degrees, in the relational fabric of existence.
Standpoint Recognition
This recognition can deepen humility. It can soften arrogance. It can enlarge compassion. It can encourage curiosity about worlds beyond our own immediate experience. And it can remind us that understanding is always partial, situated, and unfinished.
At the same time, Whitehead’s philosophy does not require moral relativism. Some standpoints nurture beauty, compassion, truthfulness, and the flourishing of life. Others narrow experience into cruelty, domination, resentment, or destruction.
Process philosophy invites us not merely to recognize standpoints, but also to evaluate them in light of the kinds of worlds they help create. It offers a way of thinking about the universe itself as having an ultimate standpoint, albeit in process, variously called "God" and "the universal Spirit of Love" and "Amida Buddha" and "the Great Spirit." Even this reality has a standpoint: emotional and aspirational if not also physical.
To become wiser may partly mean learning to enter imaginatively into standpoints other than our own without losing the capacity for discernment. It may mean recognizing that every being inherits a world from somewhere, and that every act of becoming influences the future of the whole. In what follows I offer further discussion of Whitehead's understanding of "standpoint" with special reference to human beings.
Human Standpoints
As noted above, in Process and Reality a standpoint is a region within the extensive continuum from which a concrescing subject prehends and receives its actual world.
Imagine seeing a friend across the street and waving at her. She is surprised to see you and does not seem to recognize you, at least at first. But then she smiles, realizing it is you, and waves back. Your “standpoint” is where your body is, on the south side of the street. You are “here” in one region of the extensive continuum, while she is “over there” on the north side of the street, in another region. Conversely, from her perspective, she is “here” on the north side of the street where she is standing, and you are “over there” on the south side, waving at her. You occupy different “heres” and “theres,” relative to your respective standpoints within the extensive continuum.
This does not mean that either of you inhabits a private or self-contained world. She is present in your experience “here” even while standing “over there,” and you are present within her experience, too. You are immanent within each other in such a way that your respective experiences include one another. Indeed, Whitehead goes further, He suggests that the feelings - the emotional states - of others are part of the objective content of our subjective experience, either directly (through hybrid prehensions) or indirectly (as mediated by contiguous events.) We are not just self-contained, we are also other-inhabited. Our here-nows include portions of their here-nows.
Yet even within this mutual immanence, we remain distinct in terms of our locations and their experiential perspectives. We do not fuse into a single subject of experience. Each person at any given moment occupies a different standpoint within the extensive continuum, and each therefore receives the shared world from a different locus of feeling, perception, memory, and response.
This is one of the deepest implications of Whitehead’s idea of standpoint. Reality is relational through and through, but relationality does not erase perspective. We participate in one another’s becoming while still receiving the world from irreducibly different standpoints.
Although Whitehead formulates this idea primarily in geometrical terms through his notion of the extensive continuum, the idea of standpoint can be extended far beyond spatial location. Consider four examples:
A biographical standpoint arises from the particular history a person carries. Two people may witness the same event yet interpret it differently because their past experiences differ. Someone shaped by suffering may perceive danger where another perceives opportunity. Someone formed by trust may experience openness where another experiences hesitation. Biography conditions perception.
An emotional standpoint concerns the mood or feeling-tone through which the world is encountered. The same room may feel welcoming to one person and oppressive to another. The same conversation may be heard with gratitude, anxiety, resentment, hope, or tenderness. Emotional life colors the world that is prehended.
A cultural standpoint arises from the symbols, stories, rituals, languages, and social inheritances through which people learn to interpret existence. Different cultures foreground different dimensions of reality: individuality or community, transcendence or immanence, stability or change, human agency or ancestral continuity. Culture shapes not only what people believe, but also what they notice and value.
A historical standpoint concerns the particular moment in history from which experience occurs. Human beings living in different epochs inhabit different horizons of possibility and anxiety. A person living in the medieval world, the industrial world, or the digital age inherits different assumptions about nature, selfhood, authority, technology, and the future. History itself becomes part of the standpoint from which the world is received.
In all of these cases, standpoint involves both connection and difference. We share a world, but never from exactly the same place within it. We participate in one another’s experience while remaining distinct centers of feeling and response. Whitehead’s philosophy thus offers a relational understanding of existence that avoids both isolated individualism and the loss of individuality within an undifferentiated whole.
Standpoints in Process
Equally important, our standpoints are never fixed. They are always changing. Every new experience subtly alters the standpoint from which subsequent experiences are received. The person you are today is not the person you were yesterday, because yesterday’s experiences have already become part of the world you inherit and integrate in the present moment.
Whitehead’s philosophy thus suggests that experience is not merely the reception of a fixed world by a fixed self. Both self and world are continuously in process. Each act of concrescence becomes part of the standpoint from which future concrescences occur. We inherit ourselves even as we recreate ourselves.
This ongoing transformation of standpoint is essential to growth, wisdom, and creativity. It makes possible conversion, healing, learning, reconciliation, and new forms of perception. Human life is not simply movement through space; it is movement through standpoints. We continually become different centers of reception and response within the extensive continuum.
At times these changes are gradual and almost imperceptible. At other times they are dramatic. Illness, love, grief, birth, trauma, aging, spiritual awakening, political upheaval, artistic encounter, or deep friendship can radically alter the standpoint from which a person experiences reality. What once seemed impossible may become possible. What once seemed central may become peripheral. Entire worlds of meaning can shift.
Multiple Realms of Existence?
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism traditionally speak of multiple “world-systems” or lokas that extend beyond the particular world-system we inhabit. Although they differ greatly, these cosmologies often share several features:
They also tend to resist the idea that human life on Earth is the sole center of meaning or consciousness.
In Whitehead’s philosophy, the notions of the extensive continuum and cosmic epochs offer a possible analogy to these cosmological visions, even though Whitehead does not develop anything like a traditional Indian cosmology. As noted earlier, the extensive continuum is the relational matrix within which actual occasions arise and perish:a continuum of potentiality which provides a framework for worlds, standpoints, regions, durations, and spatial-temporal relations. Cosmic epochs are large-scale orders of nature governed by relatively stable patterns or laws, and Whitehead leaves open the possibility that different cosmic epochs might embody very different forms of order. These epochs are often imagined as succeeding one another, but they can also be imagined as parallel to one another.
This opens imaginative space for thinking about multiple world-systems or cosmic domains, each with its own characteristic forms of experience, organization, embodiment, temporality, and lawfulness. Whitehead’s universe is not anthropocentric. Human beings occupy one region within a much larger community of actualities extending throughout nature and perhaps beyond the observable universe.
Moreover, because every actual entity prehends the world from its own standpoint, reality is inherently pluralistic and perspectival. There is no single absolute viewpoint from which the whole can be grasped once and for all. In this respect, Whitehead’s philosophy resonates—at least analogically—with the Jain idea of Anekāntavāda and with Buddhist and Hindu visions of a cosmos composed of innumerable worlds, each revealing reality from within its own patterns of relation and experience.
Whitehead’s philosophy does not affirm heavens, hells, devas, bodhisattvas, or liberated siddhas in the traditional religious sense. But the multi-dimensionality of the extensive continuum leave open such possibilities. At the very least, it encourage an image of reality as an open-ended, many-layered, evolving cosmos filled with diverse forms of experience, many of which may far exceed the human world in complexity, intensity, beauty, or awareness. Some of these worlds may be incredicly large, and some incredibly small - at least as compared with our own human points of view.
Out of Body Experiences?
Some interpreters of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy have wondered whether his notions of the extensive continuum, standpoint, and cosmic plurality might offer a speculative framework for understanding out-of-body experiences, soul travel, dreams, visionary states, near-death experiences, and even forms of postmortem continuation. Whitehead himself did not develop a detailed doctrine of survival after death, nor did he describe the soul as a fixed substance separable from the body. Nevertheless, his philosophy does allow for the possibility that experience is more fundamental than matter understood as mere inert mechanism.
In ordinary waking life, the dominant center of feeling in a human being is closely coordinated with the living body, especially the brain and nervous system. Our standpoint within the extensive continuum is normally organized around bodily perception and sensory interaction with the surrounding world. But if the extensive continuum includes multiple dimensions of relationality and if actual entities are fundamentally centers of experience, then one can at least imagine unusual states in which conscious experience becomes partially loosened from its habitual bodily localization.
Out-of-body experiences, for example, might be interpreted as altered patterns of spatial prehension in which the felt center of awareness no longer identifies exclusively with its usual bodily standpoint. Likewise, traditions of soul travel found in Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanic traditions, and mystical currents within other religions may be interpreted not as the movement of a ghostly substance through empty space, but as shifts in experiential standpoint within a multidimensional relational cosmos.
In this view, “travel” need not mean locomotion through physical space alone. It may instead involve changes in perspective, intensity, temporal orientation, dimensional relation, or mode of feeling. Dreams, trance states, meditative absorption, visionary experiences, and reports of near-death perception can then be understood as possible modifications in how a center of experience prehends the world and locates itself within the wider field of reality.
From such a perspective, death itself would not necessarily mean the annihilation of experience, but rather the dissolution of one mode of organizational unity and the possible continuation, transformation, or re-patterning of experiential activity within dimensions of the extensive continuum not ordinarily accessible in waking life. A pilgrimage after death would thus involve not the escape of an immortal substance from matter, but the ongoing adventure of feeling within a living and many-layered universe.
These ideas remain speculative from a Whiteheadian standpoint. Yet Whitehead’s philosophy arguably offers a more open and hospitable metaphysical framework for considering such possibilities than a strictly mechanistic worldview in which consciousness is wholly reducible to localized neural processes.
A Divine Standpoint?
Some religiously minded people, and I am among them, might wonder whether there is not a perspective that transcends all finite standpoints and is, in its own way, all-inclusive or omniscient. From a Whiteheadian perspective, this would correspond to the consequent nature of God: the divine reception of the world in its entirety. Yet even God is not standpoint free.
God may not be located within the extensive continuum in the way finite subjects are. God may not stand “here” rather than “there,” “north” rather than “south.” But God nevertheless prehends the world from a distinctive standpoint: not a spatial standpoint in the ordinary sense, but an affective and temporal one. God feels the world as a whole and receives every creature into the divine life with perfect sympathy and receptivity.
"Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates. No two occasions can have identical actual worlds."
"Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 65, 67, 210, 211
A standpoint is a region of the spacetime continuum (the extensive continuum) that is atomized by a sentient mind or, in Whitehead’s language, by a concrescing subject of experience. By human standards it may be large, small, or middle-sized. And it need not be three-dimensional. The spacetime continuum has multiple dimensions.
Whatever the size or scale, a subject prehends and gathers the many data of its actual world into momentary unity from somewhere in the continuum. which is itself a possibility matrix filled with regions of multiple dimensions. Each subject inhabits its own unique standpoint. It is "here" where it is and "now" when it is. The here and now are two sides of a single coin. The here and now is here-now.
In human life but also in all kinds of life, the particular here-now of a subject is not an empty container. It is filled with subjective immediacy, with physical feelings, mental feelings, emotions, subjective aims, self-enjoyment and self-crearivity. And yet no two moments of aliveness are precisely identical, subjectively or objectively. "No two occasions have identical actual worlds."
In some respects, this idea resembles the Jain doctrine of Anekāntavāda: the view that reality is many-sided and that all perspectives are partial rather than absolute. Even a claim to have surveyed the whole of reality, says Whitehead, is self-falsifying, because every survey necessarily occurs from the vantage point—the standpoint—of the surveyor. There are no standpoint-free perspectives. There no view from nowhere. There is a multiplicity of here-nows.
An Infinity of Standpoints
What is the standpoint of a worm? Of a quantum event? Of an alien? Of a terrorist? Of an angel? Of a despot? Of a saint? Of a microbe? Of an octopus? Of a tomato plant? Of a puff of energy in far-off outer space? Of my best friend? Of God?
The differences are striking. The standpoint of a worm may be unimaginably different from that of a human being: nearer to the earth, shaped by touch, vibration, moisture, hunger, danger, and instinctive response. The standpoint of a quantum event may be more primal still, consisting not in reflective consciousness but a burst of incredible intensity. The standpoint of an alien intelligence, if such beings exist, might disclose entirely different forms of perception, emotion, embodiment, temporality, sociality, or relation to the cosmos. The standpoint of an angel, in many religious traditions, might involve forms of awareness and receptivity far more encompassing than those available to embodied human beings. I leave to readers to also imagine the standpoints of despised politicians, terrorists, and devils. This involves imagining their emotions, their aims, their past experiences, their assumptions about the world, and their aspirations for the future.
What is important is that Whitehead’s philosophy encourages us to imagine a universe alive with centers of experience, each receiving the world from somewhere, each inheriting a past, each responding according to its own standpoint within the ongoing becoming of reality. No standpoint exhausts the whole. No creature experiences reality exactly as another does. Yet all beings participate, in differing ways and degrees, in the relational fabric of existence.
Standpoint Recognition
This recognition can deepen humility. It can soften arrogance. It can enlarge compassion. It can encourage curiosity about worlds beyond our own immediate experience. And it can remind us that understanding is always partial, situated, and unfinished.
At the same time, Whitehead’s philosophy does not require moral relativism. Some standpoints nurture beauty, compassion, truthfulness, and the flourishing of life. Others narrow experience into cruelty, domination, resentment, or destruction.
Process philosophy invites us not merely to recognize standpoints, but also to evaluate them in light of the kinds of worlds they help create. It offers a way of thinking about the universe itself as having an ultimate standpoint, albeit in process, variously called "God" and "the universal Spirit of Love" and "Amida Buddha" and "the Great Spirit." Even this reality has a standpoint: emotional and aspirational if not also physical.
To become wiser may partly mean learning to enter imaginatively into standpoints other than our own without losing the capacity for discernment. It may mean recognizing that every being inherits a world from somewhere, and that every act of becoming influences the future of the whole. In what follows I offer further discussion of Whitehead's understanding of "standpoint" with special reference to human beings.
Human Standpoints
As noted above, in Process and Reality a standpoint is a region within the extensive continuum from which a concrescing subject prehends and receives its actual world.
Imagine seeing a friend across the street and waving at her. She is surprised to see you and does not seem to recognize you, at least at first. But then she smiles, realizing it is you, and waves back. Your “standpoint” is where your body is, on the south side of the street. You are “here” in one region of the extensive continuum, while she is “over there” on the north side of the street, in another region. Conversely, from her perspective, she is “here” on the north side of the street where she is standing, and you are “over there” on the south side, waving at her. You occupy different “heres” and “theres,” relative to your respective standpoints within the extensive continuum.
This does not mean that either of you inhabits a private or self-contained world. She is present in your experience “here” even while standing “over there,” and you are present within her experience, too. You are immanent within each other in such a way that your respective experiences include one another. Indeed, Whitehead goes further, He suggests that the feelings - the emotional states - of others are part of the objective content of our subjective experience, either directly (through hybrid prehensions) or indirectly (as mediated by contiguous events.) We are not just self-contained, we are also other-inhabited. Our here-nows include portions of their here-nows.
Yet even within this mutual immanence, we remain distinct in terms of our locations and their experiential perspectives. We do not fuse into a single subject of experience. Each person at any given moment occupies a different standpoint within the extensive continuum, and each therefore receives the shared world from a different locus of feeling, perception, memory, and response.
This is one of the deepest implications of Whitehead’s idea of standpoint. Reality is relational through and through, but relationality does not erase perspective. We participate in one another’s becoming while still receiving the world from irreducibly different standpoints.
Although Whitehead formulates this idea primarily in geometrical terms through his notion of the extensive continuum, the idea of standpoint can be extended far beyond spatial location. Consider four examples:
A biographical standpoint arises from the particular history a person carries. Two people may witness the same event yet interpret it differently because their past experiences differ. Someone shaped by suffering may perceive danger where another perceives opportunity. Someone formed by trust may experience openness where another experiences hesitation. Biography conditions perception.
An emotional standpoint concerns the mood or feeling-tone through which the world is encountered. The same room may feel welcoming to one person and oppressive to another. The same conversation may be heard with gratitude, anxiety, resentment, hope, or tenderness. Emotional life colors the world that is prehended.
A cultural standpoint arises from the symbols, stories, rituals, languages, and social inheritances through which people learn to interpret existence. Different cultures foreground different dimensions of reality: individuality or community, transcendence or immanence, stability or change, human agency or ancestral continuity. Culture shapes not only what people believe, but also what they notice and value.
A historical standpoint concerns the particular moment in history from which experience occurs. Human beings living in different epochs inhabit different horizons of possibility and anxiety. A person living in the medieval world, the industrial world, or the digital age inherits different assumptions about nature, selfhood, authority, technology, and the future. History itself becomes part of the standpoint from which the world is received.
In all of these cases, standpoint involves both connection and difference. We share a world, but never from exactly the same place within it. We participate in one another’s experience while remaining distinct centers of feeling and response. Whitehead’s philosophy thus offers a relational understanding of existence that avoids both isolated individualism and the loss of individuality within an undifferentiated whole.
Standpoints in Process
Equally important, our standpoints are never fixed. They are always changing. Every new experience subtly alters the standpoint from which subsequent experiences are received. The person you are today is not the person you were yesterday, because yesterday’s experiences have already become part of the world you inherit and integrate in the present moment.
Whitehead’s philosophy thus suggests that experience is not merely the reception of a fixed world by a fixed self. Both self and world are continuously in process. Each act of concrescence becomes part of the standpoint from which future concrescences occur. We inherit ourselves even as we recreate ourselves.
This ongoing transformation of standpoint is essential to growth, wisdom, and creativity. It makes possible conversion, healing, learning, reconciliation, and new forms of perception. Human life is not simply movement through space; it is movement through standpoints. We continually become different centers of reception and response within the extensive continuum.
At times these changes are gradual and almost imperceptible. At other times they are dramatic. Illness, love, grief, birth, trauma, aging, spiritual awakening, political upheaval, artistic encounter, or deep friendship can radically alter the standpoint from which a person experiences reality. What once seemed impossible may become possible. What once seemed central may become peripheral. Entire worlds of meaning can shift.
Multiple Realms of Existence?
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism traditionally speak of multiple “world-systems” or lokas that extend beyond the particular world-system we inhabit. Although they differ greatly, these cosmologies often share several features:
- Multiple realms or planes of existence
- Vast scales of time and space
- Cycles of arising and decay
- Moral or karmic ordering
- Nonhuman intelligences and beings
- A decentered human perspective
- The possibility of liberation from cyclic existence
They also tend to resist the idea that human life on Earth is the sole center of meaning or consciousness.
In Whitehead’s philosophy, the notions of the extensive continuum and cosmic epochs offer a possible analogy to these cosmological visions, even though Whitehead does not develop anything like a traditional Indian cosmology. As noted earlier, the extensive continuum is the relational matrix within which actual occasions arise and perish:a continuum of potentiality which provides a framework for worlds, standpoints, regions, durations, and spatial-temporal relations. Cosmic epochs are large-scale orders of nature governed by relatively stable patterns or laws, and Whitehead leaves open the possibility that different cosmic epochs might embody very different forms of order. These epochs are often imagined as succeeding one another, but they can also be imagined as parallel to one another.
This opens imaginative space for thinking about multiple world-systems or cosmic domains, each with its own characteristic forms of experience, organization, embodiment, temporality, and lawfulness. Whitehead’s universe is not anthropocentric. Human beings occupy one region within a much larger community of actualities extending throughout nature and perhaps beyond the observable universe.
Moreover, because every actual entity prehends the world from its own standpoint, reality is inherently pluralistic and perspectival. There is no single absolute viewpoint from which the whole can be grasped once and for all. In this respect, Whitehead’s philosophy resonates—at least analogically—with the Jain idea of Anekāntavāda and with Buddhist and Hindu visions of a cosmos composed of innumerable worlds, each revealing reality from within its own patterns of relation and experience.
Whitehead’s philosophy does not affirm heavens, hells, devas, bodhisattvas, or liberated siddhas in the traditional religious sense. But the multi-dimensionality of the extensive continuum leave open such possibilities. At the very least, it encourage an image of reality as an open-ended, many-layered, evolving cosmos filled with diverse forms of experience, many of which may far exceed the human world in complexity, intensity, beauty, or awareness. Some of these worlds may be incredicly large, and some incredibly small - at least as compared with our own human points of view.
Out of Body Experiences?
Some interpreters of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy have wondered whether his notions of the extensive continuum, standpoint, and cosmic plurality might offer a speculative framework for understanding out-of-body experiences, soul travel, dreams, visionary states, near-death experiences, and even forms of postmortem continuation. Whitehead himself did not develop a detailed doctrine of survival after death, nor did he describe the soul as a fixed substance separable from the body. Nevertheless, his philosophy does allow for the possibility that experience is more fundamental than matter understood as mere inert mechanism.
In ordinary waking life, the dominant center of feeling in a human being is closely coordinated with the living body, especially the brain and nervous system. Our standpoint within the extensive continuum is normally organized around bodily perception and sensory interaction with the surrounding world. But if the extensive continuum includes multiple dimensions of relationality and if actual entities are fundamentally centers of experience, then one can at least imagine unusual states in which conscious experience becomes partially loosened from its habitual bodily localization.
Out-of-body experiences, for example, might be interpreted as altered patterns of spatial prehension in which the felt center of awareness no longer identifies exclusively with its usual bodily standpoint. Likewise, traditions of soul travel found in Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanic traditions, and mystical currents within other religions may be interpreted not as the movement of a ghostly substance through empty space, but as shifts in experiential standpoint within a multidimensional relational cosmos.
In this view, “travel” need not mean locomotion through physical space alone. It may instead involve changes in perspective, intensity, temporal orientation, dimensional relation, or mode of feeling. Dreams, trance states, meditative absorption, visionary experiences, and reports of near-death perception can then be understood as possible modifications in how a center of experience prehends the world and locates itself within the wider field of reality.
From such a perspective, death itself would not necessarily mean the annihilation of experience, but rather the dissolution of one mode of organizational unity and the possible continuation, transformation, or re-patterning of experiential activity within dimensions of the extensive continuum not ordinarily accessible in waking life. A pilgrimage after death would thus involve not the escape of an immortal substance from matter, but the ongoing adventure of feeling within a living and many-layered universe.
These ideas remain speculative from a Whiteheadian standpoint. Yet Whitehead’s philosophy arguably offers a more open and hospitable metaphysical framework for considering such possibilities than a strictly mechanistic worldview in which consciousness is wholly reducible to localized neural processes.
A Divine Standpoint?
Some religiously minded people, and I am among them, might wonder whether there is not a perspective that transcends all finite standpoints and is, in its own way, all-inclusive or omniscient. From a Whiteheadian perspective, this would correspond to the consequent nature of God: the divine reception of the world in its entirety. Yet even God is not standpoint free.
God may not be located within the extensive continuum in the way finite subjects are. God may not stand “here” rather than “there,” “north” rather than “south.” But God nevertheless prehends the world from a distinctive standpoint: not a spatial standpoint in the ordinary sense, but an affective and temporal one. God feels the world as a whole and receives every creature into the divine life with perfect sympathy and receptivity.
The wisdom of [the divine] subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system—its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy—woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost. - AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 346
This means that even divine knowledge is not the view from nowhere. It is not detached observation. It is participatory feeling. God knows the world by prehending it, suffering it, enjoying it, remembering it, and weaving it into the ongoing unity of divine experience. The consequent nature of God is thus relational through and through. God does not stand outside the becoming of the world as a distant spectator; God participates in that becoming with perfect intimacy.
At the same time, God differs from finite creatures in that the divine standpoint includes all standpoints in all realms without abolishing their distinctness. Every creature is felt from within its own becoming and preserved within the divine life without being reduced to a mere fragment of a total system. unifies the many without erasing the many. Indeed, God feels future standpoints, too, but as not yet actualized or atomized. They are here-nows that will be inhabited and embodied by concrescing subjects, and the decisions of the subjects partially determine what they will be. God know what can be, but not what will be, until it is. Even for God, even for Amidat Buddha, there is a tomorrow.
This means that even divine knowledge is not the view from nowhere. It is not detached observation. It is participatory feeling. God knows the world by prehending it, suffering it, enjoying it, remembering it, and weaving it into the ongoing unity of divine experience. The consequent nature of God is thus relational through and through. God does not stand outside the becoming of the world as a distant spectator; God participates in that becoming with perfect intimacy.
At the same time, God differs from finite creatures in that the divine standpoint includes all standpoints in all realms without abolishing their distinctness. Every creature is felt from within its own becoming and preserved within the divine life without being reduced to a mere fragment of a total system. unifies the many without erasing the many. Indeed, God feels future standpoints, too, but as not yet actualized or atomized. They are here-nows that will be inhabited and embodied by concrescing subjects, and the decisions of the subjects partially determine what they will be. God know what can be, but not what will be, until it is. Even for God, even for Amidat Buddha, there is a tomorrow.