Beyond the Blind Spot
Whitehead and the Primacy of Experience
"Apart from the experience of subjects there is
nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."
- AN Whitehead, Processs and Reality
This page is inspired by The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. It explores how Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, to which they often refer in the book, can help develop the kind of worldview the authors envision. It consists of three sections: The Primacy of Experience. Non-Dual Awareness, and Twelve Theses. All the ideas are my own, but I have articulated them with help from OpenAI to organize them and to avoid (as much as possible) grammatical infelicities.
- Jay McDaniel
The Primacy of Experience:
Beyond the Six Illusions
The Primacy of Experience
Inspired by The Blind Spot, I want to make the case for the primacy of experience in any valid metaphysics, including one that seeks to be scientific in content and spirit.
By the primacy of experience I have in mind both the subjective experience of individual humans and the intersubjective experience through which they arise, develop, and contribute to one another's identities and existence. Some might assume that individual subjectivity precedes intersubjectivity. First we have the subjects, we might say, and then we have the connections. I propose instead, following Whitehead, many Buddhist traditions, and Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson, that the two are inseparable. There is no individual subjective experience except as it emerges through felt relationships with sentient others. Individuality and intersubjectivity are co-constitutive.
Science itself illustrates this truth. It flourishes only as an intersubjective community of practicing scientists who learn from, challenge, and influence one another. The universe, I suggest, flourishes in much the same way. It is, as Thomas Berry famously observed, "a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." The primacy of experience is therefore also the primacy of relationships, participation, and community and, as I propose shortly, with help from Thompson the primacy of mutliple ways of knowing (artistic and well as scientific) and, in terms of human life: contemplation and love. Thus the primacy of experience includes values that are (or can be) important to us as we awaken to the fact that everything begins with experience. All of this can make sense, however, only if we consider what I will call the "six problematic assumptions" that form our blind spot.
Six Illusions and the Blind Spot
Below I share six ideas—perhaps a bit too stridently, six illusions—that you may have been taught in high school or absorbed from popular culture, and that you may think are "scientific" in some important sense. According to Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson in The Blind Spot, however, these ideas are not actually scientific findings. Rather, they are metaphysical assumptions that have become attached to science. Taken together, they form part of a larger blind spot in contemporary culture: a way of thinking that overlooks the reality and importance of lived experience. If accepted uncritically, they can lead us to believe that our own experience, the experience of people we love, and even the experience of other animals and forms of life on Earth do not really matter all that much.
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson are by no means anti-scientific. To the contrary, they are very much pro-science, and they believe that science can be advanced, with new knowledge, if it breaks free of these questionable assumptions,
They are not newcomers to the issues they discuss. They together expertise from three complementary disciplines. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester whose research explores stellar evolution, astrobiology, and the relationship between science, culture, and the future of planetary civilization. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and science writer at Dartmouth College whose work examines the origins of the universe, the limits of scientific knowledge, and the philosophical implications of modern physics. Thompson is a philosopher at the University of British Columbia whose work integrates phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and Buddhist philosophy in the study of consciousness and human experience. Together, they combine the perspectives of physics, cosmology, philosophy, and cognitive science to argue for a new understanding of science that takes lived experience as fundamental rather than peripheral.
The central argument of The Blind Spot is that these six ideas are not scientific findings but metaphysical assumptions that have become attached to science. Moreover, so the authors argue, the assumptions have perilous consequences. They encourage us to discount the significance of lived experience and to regard consciousness, meaning, value, beauty, love, suffering, and purpose as secondary or illusory features of reality. They can lead us to think that what matters most in our lives—the felt experience of being alive and in relationship with others—is somehow less real than the abstractions used to describe it. We fall into what Whitehead calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." [1]
Most of The Blind Spot is devoted to excavating and critiquing the emergence of blind-spot metaphysics and its underlying assumptions. The authors recognize, however, that criticism alone is not enough; a forthcoming book is on the way dealing with post-Blind Spot philosophy and science, and they facilitate an excellent podcast, interviewing many luminaries (scientists, philosophers, artists, and more) who point in that direction, Formerly called The Blind Spot it is now called Life, the Universe, and All the Rest. Click here to listen. In their book and in their podcast they point to a need for a post–Blind Spot metaphysics, and they indicate, in the last part of the book. that elements of such a worldview are already beginning to emerge within contemporary science and philosophy: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
Students and enthusiasts of Whitehead's philosophy will appreciate the authors' identification of the six problematic assumptions of blind-spot metaphysics. Whitehead repudiates, and offers an alternative, to each of the six ideas. Whitehead's influence is evident throughout the book, especially his early philosophy of the bifurcation of nature, reductionism, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the neglect of lived experience as a foundation for all thinking. It was Whitehead, after all, who wrote, in Process and Reality:
"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." (Process and Reality)
It should be noted, however, that Whitehead's philosophy, as interpreted by others, is itself is not immune from criticism along the lines developed in The Blind Spot. Whitehead is sometimes interpreted from a predominantly third-person perspective, as if reality were fundamentally composed of innumerable microscopic actual entities or occasions of experience whose interactions can be described objectively. In some presentations of process philosophy, lived human experience appears as a derivative phenomenon emerging from more basic units of actuality. From this perspective,we can imagine an essay titled "Blind-Spot Whiteheadianism," arguing that certain interpretations of Whitehead are blind to the primacy of the life-world and to the first-person and intersubjective dimensions of experience emphasized by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson.
The problem is that Whitehead has seldom been read phenomenologically. To read Whitehead phenomenologically is to interpret his philosophy in light of the tradition in Western thought inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, a tradition that insists that lived, first-person experience is the indispensable starting point for all knowing. From this perspective, Whitehead's categories are not merely speculative descriptions of an objective universe existing independently of experience. They are also guides for attending more carefully to the structures, patterns, and dynamics of experience itself. Read in this way, Whitehead's philosophy is not an attempt to explain experience from outside, as if from a God's-eye view. It is an invitation to begin where we always already are—in the midst of experience—and to inquire into what that experience reveals about ourselves, the world, and our place within it.
At the same time, Whitehead reverses a habit of thought that lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Rather than treating human experience as a secondary byproduct of a mind-independent universe already fully understood in abstraction from experience, he begins with human experience itself: that is, first-person experience which includes within itself feeling (prehension), self-enjoyment, self-creativity, subjective aims, and a sense of the possible. The larger cosmos, the microscopic worlds disclosed by science, and the evolutionary history of life on Earth are not denied; they are affirmed as realities that become intelligible through modes of human inquiry grounded in experience. In other worlds, our immediate experience is not an obstacle to understanding reality but a precondition for its apprehension. Scientific knowledge of galaxies, genes, atoms, and quantum fields arises within the horizon of lived experience and remains inseparable from the experiential capacities that make discovery, observation, interpretation, and understanding possible in the first place. It is in this context that we can consider Whiteheadian responses to what I have called the six illusions.
Whiteheadian Alternatives
Bifurcation of Nature — Whitehead rejects the division between an objective world of matter and a subjective world of experience, arguing that every actual entity is simultaneously a moment of becoming that is both experiential and publicly related to other realities. Subjectively experienced values are as much a part of nature as objectively describable facts, and poetic portrayals of nature can disclose truths no less genuine than scientific descriptions.
Reductionism — Whitehead denies that higher forms of life and consciousness can be fully explained by their constituent parts, maintaining instead that every actual entity is a creative synthesis whose unity and novelty exceed the sum of its components. He also explains how some wholes become living organisms possessing agency, feeling, and aims of their own, rather than being reducible to mere aggregates.
Objectivism — Whitehead proposes that all knowledge arises from within experience, so there is no observer-independent standpoint from which reality can be known. Every act of observation and every occasion of feeling occurs from a particular perspective within the world, making perspective an essential feature of reality rather than an obstacle to knowledge.
Physicalism — Whitehead replaces the notion of a fundamentally physical universe with a process-relational ontology in which experience, however rudimentary, is an intrinsic feature of actuality rather than an accidental byproduct of matter. In effect, he redefines physicality itself by proposing that every actual entity—from elementary particles to human beings to God—has physical feelings: that is, feelings of being causally affected by other actual entities.
Reification of Mathematical Abstractions — Whitehead insists that mathematical and scientific abstractions are indispensable tools for understanding reality but must never be mistaken for the concrete world of lived experience from which they are abstracted. Abstractions illuminate reality by simplifying it, but they never replace the richer, more concrete world they seek to describe.
Epiphenomenalism — Whitehead understands experience as an active dimension of every actual occasion, contributing to the creative advance of the world rather than merely accompanying physical processes without causal efficacy. Experience is itself a mode of causal efficacy through which each new moment of the universe helps shape what comes next.
Five Commitments (including to Contemplation and Love)
Of course, there is more to a Whiteheadian response than this. At the end of one of the early episodes of the podcast series Life, the Universe, and All the Rest, Evan Thompson suggests that a post-Blind Spot orientation involves five fundamental commitments:
Together, these five commitments point toward a worldview in which experience, relationality, interdependence, contemplative openness, and love are not peripheral to reality but constitutive of it. A constructive Whiteheadian response to the Blind Spot naturally embraces these five commitments, including contemplation and love. I offer a word about how each might be undersood.
Contemplation can be understood as knowing in its deepest sense: a mode of knowing that includes the many forms of inquiry cultivated in science, art, poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and religion, while recognizing them all as disciplines of the heart as well as the mind. It is a widening of awareness that enables us to become more fully present to the multitudes of life and to understand them on their own terms. It can include meditation and prayer, but also careful observation, scientific experimentation, artistic creation, and philosophical reflection. And it includes love. There may be an important sense in which the very desire to understand other people, other animals, plants, minerals, and indeed the universe itself is a reaching out for communion and thus an act of care. Understood in this way, science itself can become a form of love. An intellectual love that includes emotions within it: emotions of wonder, curiosity, a love of beauty, and a desire to be "with" the world in a resonant way.
It is noteworthy that in Part V of Process and Reality, where Whitehead develops his understanding of God, love becomes a central theme. Just as Buddhism often identifies wisdom and compassion as its two cardinal virtues, so Whitehead's mature thought presents divine vision and divine love as the two defining qualities of God, the ultimate unity of the universe. My suggestion is that a post-Blind Spot orientation need not shy away from the language of love. On the contrary, it can recognize love as one of the fundamental realities at work throughout the universe wherever creatures care for one another and contribute to one another's flourishing. In human life, this cosmic pattern finds one of its deepest expressions in our capacities for tenderness, compassion, friendship, generosity, and self-giving care. Love, understood in this broad sense, is not an accidental addition to reality but one of its most profound expressions.
Panpsychism and Panexperientialism
It might seem, given what has been said above, that a single word to name the Whiteheadian alternative to Blind Spot metaphysics is panexperientialism. Whitehead himself did not use the term, but one of his most astute interpreters, David Ray Griffin, coined it to describe Whitehead's idea that experience is found at every level of actuality, not in human life alone. A contemporary parallel in many philosophical circles is panpsychism.
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson are sympathetic to the impulse behind panpsychism—the desire to move beyond the assumption that consciousness somehow emerges from wholly non-conscious matter. Nevertheless, they argue that most contemporary forms of panpsychism remain trapped within what they call the Blind Spot. They begin with essentially the same picture of reality accepted by physicalism: a world fundamentally composed of physical building blocks existing independently of experience. Panpsychism then attempts to solve the problem of consciousness by attributing some form of mentality or experience to those building blocks.
In doing so, however, it neglects what the authors regard as the deeper primacy of consciousness. This primacy has two dimensions. The first is the primacy of lived, non-objectified human experience as the context within which any account of physical building blocks can arise. The second is what they call horizonal consciousness: consciousness as the experiential horizon within which anything can appear, be recognized, or become meaningful in the first place. Rather than beginning with experience as immediately lived, panpsychism begins with a picture of a world "out there" and then adds consciousness to that picture. As the authors write:
Inspired by The Blind Spot, I want to make the case for the primacy of experience in any valid metaphysics, including one that seeks to be scientific in content and spirit.
By the primacy of experience I have in mind both the subjective experience of individual humans and the intersubjective experience through which they arise, develop, and contribute to one another's identities and existence. Some might assume that individual subjectivity precedes intersubjectivity. First we have the subjects, we might say, and then we have the connections. I propose instead, following Whitehead, many Buddhist traditions, and Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson, that the two are inseparable. There is no individual subjective experience except as it emerges through felt relationships with sentient others. Individuality and intersubjectivity are co-constitutive.
Science itself illustrates this truth. It flourishes only as an intersubjective community of practicing scientists who learn from, challenge, and influence one another. The universe, I suggest, flourishes in much the same way. It is, as Thomas Berry famously observed, "a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." The primacy of experience is therefore also the primacy of relationships, participation, and community and, as I propose shortly, with help from Thompson the primacy of mutliple ways of knowing (artistic and well as scientific) and, in terms of human life: contemplation and love. Thus the primacy of experience includes values that are (or can be) important to us as we awaken to the fact that everything begins with experience. All of this can make sense, however, only if we consider what I will call the "six problematic assumptions" that form our blind spot.
Six Illusions and the Blind Spot
Below I share six ideas—perhaps a bit too stridently, six illusions—that you may have been taught in high school or absorbed from popular culture, and that you may think are "scientific" in some important sense. According to Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson in The Blind Spot, however, these ideas are not actually scientific findings. Rather, they are metaphysical assumptions that have become attached to science. Taken together, they form part of a larger blind spot in contemporary culture: a way of thinking that overlooks the reality and importance of lived experience. If accepted uncritically, they can lead us to believe that our own experience, the experience of people we love, and even the experience of other animals and forms of life on Earth do not really matter all that much.
- Bifurcation of Nature — Reality is divided into two separate domains: an objective world of matter and a subjective world of experience. The objective world is "real" and the subjective world is "merely psychological."
- Reductionism — Complex phenomena, including life, mind, and consciousness, can ultimately be explained in terms of their simpler and usually "smaller" physical components. Elementary particles are the "really real" things.
- Objectivism — Reality can be fully understood from a third-person, observer-independent, God-like standpoint, without reference to lived experience.
- Physicalism — Everything that exists is fundamentally physical as understood in physics and chemistry; all phenomena are ultimately explicable in chemical and physical terms.
- Reification of Mathematical Abstractions — Mathematical entities and scientific models, dealing with invariant or unchancing laws, are more real than the experiential world from which they are abstracted.
- Epiphenomenalism — Conscious experience is a byproduct of physical processes rather than as a causally efficacious dimension of reality. Consciousness is created by the brain, lacking agency of its own.
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson are by no means anti-scientific. To the contrary, they are very much pro-science, and they believe that science can be advanced, with new knowledge, if it breaks free of these questionable assumptions,
They are not newcomers to the issues they discuss. They together expertise from three complementary disciplines. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester whose research explores stellar evolution, astrobiology, and the relationship between science, culture, and the future of planetary civilization. Gleiser is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and science writer at Dartmouth College whose work examines the origins of the universe, the limits of scientific knowledge, and the philosophical implications of modern physics. Thompson is a philosopher at the University of British Columbia whose work integrates phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and Buddhist philosophy in the study of consciousness and human experience. Together, they combine the perspectives of physics, cosmology, philosophy, and cognitive science to argue for a new understanding of science that takes lived experience as fundamental rather than peripheral.
The central argument of The Blind Spot is that these six ideas are not scientific findings but metaphysical assumptions that have become attached to science. Moreover, so the authors argue, the assumptions have perilous consequences. They encourage us to discount the significance of lived experience and to regard consciousness, meaning, value, beauty, love, suffering, and purpose as secondary or illusory features of reality. They can lead us to think that what matters most in our lives—the felt experience of being alive and in relationship with others—is somehow less real than the abstractions used to describe it. We fall into what Whitehead calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." [1]
Most of The Blind Spot is devoted to excavating and critiquing the emergence of blind-spot metaphysics and its underlying assumptions. The authors recognize, however, that criticism alone is not enough; a forthcoming book is on the way dealing with post-Blind Spot philosophy and science, and they facilitate an excellent podcast, interviewing many luminaries (scientists, philosophers, artists, and more) who point in that direction, Formerly called The Blind Spot it is now called Life, the Universe, and All the Rest. Click here to listen. In their book and in their podcast they point to a need for a post–Blind Spot metaphysics, and they indicate, in the last part of the book. that elements of such a worldview are already beginning to emerge within contemporary science and philosophy: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
Students and enthusiasts of Whitehead's philosophy will appreciate the authors' identification of the six problematic assumptions of blind-spot metaphysics. Whitehead repudiates, and offers an alternative, to each of the six ideas. Whitehead's influence is evident throughout the book, especially his early philosophy of the bifurcation of nature, reductionism, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the neglect of lived experience as a foundation for all thinking. It was Whitehead, after all, who wrote, in Process and Reality:
"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." (Process and Reality)
It should be noted, however, that Whitehead's philosophy, as interpreted by others, is itself is not immune from criticism along the lines developed in The Blind Spot. Whitehead is sometimes interpreted from a predominantly third-person perspective, as if reality were fundamentally composed of innumerable microscopic actual entities or occasions of experience whose interactions can be described objectively. In some presentations of process philosophy, lived human experience appears as a derivative phenomenon emerging from more basic units of actuality. From this perspective,we can imagine an essay titled "Blind-Spot Whiteheadianism," arguing that certain interpretations of Whitehead are blind to the primacy of the life-world and to the first-person and intersubjective dimensions of experience emphasized by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson.
The problem is that Whitehead has seldom been read phenomenologically. To read Whitehead phenomenologically is to interpret his philosophy in light of the tradition in Western thought inaugurated by Edmund Husserl, a tradition that insists that lived, first-person experience is the indispensable starting point for all knowing. From this perspective, Whitehead's categories are not merely speculative descriptions of an objective universe existing independently of experience. They are also guides for attending more carefully to the structures, patterns, and dynamics of experience itself. Read in this way, Whitehead's philosophy is not an attempt to explain experience from outside, as if from a God's-eye view. It is an invitation to begin where we always already are—in the midst of experience—and to inquire into what that experience reveals about ourselves, the world, and our place within it.
At the same time, Whitehead reverses a habit of thought that lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Rather than treating human experience as a secondary byproduct of a mind-independent universe already fully understood in abstraction from experience, he begins with human experience itself: that is, first-person experience which includes within itself feeling (prehension), self-enjoyment, self-creativity, subjective aims, and a sense of the possible. The larger cosmos, the microscopic worlds disclosed by science, and the evolutionary history of life on Earth are not denied; they are affirmed as realities that become intelligible through modes of human inquiry grounded in experience. In other worlds, our immediate experience is not an obstacle to understanding reality but a precondition for its apprehension. Scientific knowledge of galaxies, genes, atoms, and quantum fields arises within the horizon of lived experience and remains inseparable from the experiential capacities that make discovery, observation, interpretation, and understanding possible in the first place. It is in this context that we can consider Whiteheadian responses to what I have called the six illusions.
Whiteheadian Alternatives
Bifurcation of Nature — Whitehead rejects the division between an objective world of matter and a subjective world of experience, arguing that every actual entity is simultaneously a moment of becoming that is both experiential and publicly related to other realities. Subjectively experienced values are as much a part of nature as objectively describable facts, and poetic portrayals of nature can disclose truths no less genuine than scientific descriptions.
Reductionism — Whitehead denies that higher forms of life and consciousness can be fully explained by their constituent parts, maintaining instead that every actual entity is a creative synthesis whose unity and novelty exceed the sum of its components. He also explains how some wholes become living organisms possessing agency, feeling, and aims of their own, rather than being reducible to mere aggregates.
Objectivism — Whitehead proposes that all knowledge arises from within experience, so there is no observer-independent standpoint from which reality can be known. Every act of observation and every occasion of feeling occurs from a particular perspective within the world, making perspective an essential feature of reality rather than an obstacle to knowledge.
Physicalism — Whitehead replaces the notion of a fundamentally physical universe with a process-relational ontology in which experience, however rudimentary, is an intrinsic feature of actuality rather than an accidental byproduct of matter. In effect, he redefines physicality itself by proposing that every actual entity—from elementary particles to human beings to God—has physical feelings: that is, feelings of being causally affected by other actual entities.
Reification of Mathematical Abstractions — Whitehead insists that mathematical and scientific abstractions are indispensable tools for understanding reality but must never be mistaken for the concrete world of lived experience from which they are abstracted. Abstractions illuminate reality by simplifying it, but they never replace the richer, more concrete world they seek to describe.
Epiphenomenalism — Whitehead understands experience as an active dimension of every actual occasion, contributing to the creative advance of the world rather than merely accompanying physical processes without causal efficacy. Experience is itself a mode of causal efficacy through which each new moment of the universe helps shape what comes next.
Five Commitments (including to Contemplation and Love)
Of course, there is more to a Whiteheadian response than this. At the end of one of the early episodes of the podcast series Life, the Universe, and All the Rest, Evan Thompson suggests that a post-Blind Spot orientation involves five fundamental commitments:
- Experience — a commitment to experience as fundamental and as the starting point for philosophy, art, science, and religion.
- Relationships — a commitment to relationships as primary to life and existence, including both the intimacy of felt relationships and the relational patterns they embody.
- Interdependence — a commitment to the recognition that all things co-emerge or co-arise, so that the very idea of an independently existing entity is mistaken.
- Contemplation — a commitment to cultivating the kind of attentive openness that creates space to listen to, feel the presence of, and understand other realities on their own terms.
- Love — a commitment to love as an indispensable dimension of human life and, perhaps, of reality itself.
Together, these five commitments point toward a worldview in which experience, relationality, interdependence, contemplative openness, and love are not peripheral to reality but constitutive of it. A constructive Whiteheadian response to the Blind Spot naturally embraces these five commitments, including contemplation and love. I offer a word about how each might be undersood.
Contemplation can be understood as knowing in its deepest sense: a mode of knowing that includes the many forms of inquiry cultivated in science, art, poetry, philosophy, spirituality, and religion, while recognizing them all as disciplines of the heart as well as the mind. It is a widening of awareness that enables us to become more fully present to the multitudes of life and to understand them on their own terms. It can include meditation and prayer, but also careful observation, scientific experimentation, artistic creation, and philosophical reflection. And it includes love. There may be an important sense in which the very desire to understand other people, other animals, plants, minerals, and indeed the universe itself is a reaching out for communion and thus an act of care. Understood in this way, science itself can become a form of love. An intellectual love that includes emotions within it: emotions of wonder, curiosity, a love of beauty, and a desire to be "with" the world in a resonant way.
It is noteworthy that in Part V of Process and Reality, where Whitehead develops his understanding of God, love becomes a central theme. Just as Buddhism often identifies wisdom and compassion as its two cardinal virtues, so Whitehead's mature thought presents divine vision and divine love as the two defining qualities of God, the ultimate unity of the universe. My suggestion is that a post-Blind Spot orientation need not shy away from the language of love. On the contrary, it can recognize love as one of the fundamental realities at work throughout the universe wherever creatures care for one another and contribute to one another's flourishing. In human life, this cosmic pattern finds one of its deepest expressions in our capacities for tenderness, compassion, friendship, generosity, and self-giving care. Love, understood in this broad sense, is not an accidental addition to reality but one of its most profound expressions.
Panpsychism and Panexperientialism
It might seem, given what has been said above, that a single word to name the Whiteheadian alternative to Blind Spot metaphysics is panexperientialism. Whitehead himself did not use the term, but one of his most astute interpreters, David Ray Griffin, coined it to describe Whitehead's idea that experience is found at every level of actuality, not in human life alone. A contemporary parallel in many philosophical circles is panpsychism.
Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson are sympathetic to the impulse behind panpsychism—the desire to move beyond the assumption that consciousness somehow emerges from wholly non-conscious matter. Nevertheless, they argue that most contemporary forms of panpsychism remain trapped within what they call the Blind Spot. They begin with essentially the same picture of reality accepted by physicalism: a world fundamentally composed of physical building blocks existing independently of experience. Panpsychism then attempts to solve the problem of consciousness by attributing some form of mentality or experience to those building blocks.
In doing so, however, it neglects what the authors regard as the deeper primacy of consciousness. This primacy has two dimensions. The first is the primacy of lived, non-objectified human experience as the context within which any account of physical building blocks can arise. The second is what they call horizonal consciousness: consciousness as the experiential horizon within which anything can appear, be recognized, or become meaningful in the first place. Rather than beginning with experience as immediately lived, panpsychism begins with a picture of a world "out there" and then adds consciousness to that picture. As the authors write:
"The problem with current versions of panpsychism is that they accept the blind-spot conception of science and the physicalist picture of reality, but then sprinkle consciousness over physical reality everywhere like pixie dust. Although this gives consciousness a kind of primacy, it’s not the right kind to supplant the Blind Spot. The primacy of consciousness as a special kind of building block is not the primacy of consciousness as that within which anything appears to us, including whatever we may take as building blocks. Unless we recognize the second kind of primacy, the primacy of horizonal consciousness, including how it necessarily enfolds the primacy of embodiment, we won’t be able to recognize the strange loop that obviates the Blind Spot. At the end of the day, current versions of panpsychism amount to a stopgap for dealing with the problem of consciousness within the context of the Blind Spot."¹
A further word is in order about what the authors mean by horizonal consciousness. They write:
"The horizon metaphor reveals a way of thinking about consciousness that we will call the horizonal conception. Consciousness is the horizon for the world's disclosure: the world appears and is present to us from within the horizon of consciousness. Consciousness is the horizon of anything we can perceive, think about, and investigate, including when we are doing science. We can observe, imagine, and investigate things only within the horizon of consciousness, and anything that we determine to be real or factual gets this determination from within the horizon of consciousness."
Their point is that consciousness is not simply one thing among others in the world. It is the experiential horizon within which anything can appear as meaningful, intelligible, or real. Consciousness is therefore not merely another feature of reality to be added to a scientific ontology; it is also a condition for the very possibility of ontology itself.
A similar caution can be directed toward some forms of panexperientialism. One could substitute the word experience for consciousness throughout the discussion above, and many of the same concerns would arise. Panexperientialism rightly rejects the notion of a wholly nonexperiential world and insists that experience, in some form, belongs to the fabric of reality itself. Yet if it is interpreted primarily as a theory about the intrinsic nature of entities existing independently of lived human experience—as though lived human experience were simply one phenomenon among others, reducible to smaller units called actual occasions—it can become another account of what the world is like "out there" rather than an inquiry beginning from the lived immediacies through which any conception of a world becomes possible. In that form, it loses phenomenological adequacy.
This is where Whitehead himself may offer resources that some later panexperientialists have neglected. In his mature philosophy, as found in Science an the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead does not begin with an external inventory of the world's constituent parts in isolation from the mind, as he does in his earlier philosopyy, The Concept of Nature. He begins with experience as given in its concrete richness His analysis of actual occasions is not meant to replace lived experience with a speculative ontology but to interpret what lived experience already reveals about the character of reality. Human experience is thus not simply one instance of actuality among countless others. It is also the point of departure for philosophical reflection, the place where reality first discloses itself.
The challenge, then, is not simply to affirm that experience exists all the way down. It is also to recognize that lived, embodied, first-person experience is the horizon within which any theory of what exists can arise and be understood. To speak of actual occasions, quantum events, galaxies, neurons, evolutionary processes, or physical laws already presupposes the lived experience within which such concepts emerge and acquire meaning. A post–Blind Spot philosophy must therefore attend not only to the experiential character of reality but also to the lived and horizonal dimensions of experience through which reality becomes manifest in the first place. Read in this way, Whitehead's philosophy of organism can be understood not simply as a form of panexperientialism but as an attempt to unite phenomenological fidelity with speculative cosmology.
Non-Dualism: Two Sides of One Experiential Coin
The word non-dualism is used in many different ways. Sometimes it refers to the claim that only consciousness is ultimately real; sometimes to the idea that all distinctions are ultimately illusory; sometimes to mystical experiences in which the distinction between self and world momentarily dissolves. While each of these meanings has its place, the form of non-dualism most relevant to a post-Blind Spot philosophy is different.
Here non-dualism means that the act of experiencing and the world experienced are inseparable aspects of a single event. Every experience has a subjective pole—the experiencing, feeling, or apprehending—and an objective pole—the world that is experienced. Neither exists in isolation from the other. There is no object that is experienced apart from an act of experiencing, and there is no act of experiencing that is not, in some way, an experiencing of a world.
This understanding resonates with Whitehead's distinction between the private and public sides of every actual occasion. The private side is the becoming subject, the moment of feeling and integration. The public side is the world that has been inherited and that, once the occasion has completed itself, becomes available for others to experience. They are not two separate realities but two poles of one experiential event—two sides of a single experiential coin.
Understood in this way, non-dualism does not abolish the distinction between subject and object. Rather, it rejects the idea that they can exist independently of one another. It affirms their mutual implication. Experience is always experience of a world, and the world is always a world for experiencing subjects.
This interpretation brings Whitehead into fruitful conversation with phenomenology. Husserl's intentionality, Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception, and Whitehead's philosophy of organism all point toward a relational ontology in which subjects and worlds arise together in acts of experience. The world is public, experience is private, but each presupposes the other. The result is neither idealism nor materialism, but a genuinely non-dual understanding of reality in which the public and private, object and subject, are inseparable dimensions of the same ongoing process of becoming.
Here non-dualism means that the act of experiencing and the world experienced are inseparable aspects of a single event. Every experience has a subjective pole—the experiencing, feeling, or apprehending—and an objective pole—the world that is experienced. Neither exists in isolation from the other. There is no object that is experienced apart from an act of experiencing, and there is no act of experiencing that is not, in some way, an experiencing of a world.
This understanding resonates with Whitehead's distinction between the private and public sides of every actual occasion. The private side is the becoming subject, the moment of feeling and integration. The public side is the world that has been inherited and that, once the occasion has completed itself, becomes available for others to experience. They are not two separate realities but two poles of one experiential event—two sides of a single experiential coin.
Understood in this way, non-dualism does not abolish the distinction between subject and object. Rather, it rejects the idea that they can exist independently of one another. It affirms their mutual implication. Experience is always experience of a world, and the world is always a world for experiencing subjects.
This interpretation brings Whitehead into fruitful conversation with phenomenology. Husserl's intentionality, Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception, and Whitehead's philosophy of organism all point toward a relational ontology in which subjects and worlds arise together in acts of experience. The world is public, experience is private, but each presupposes the other. The result is neither idealism nor materialism, but a genuinely non-dual understanding of reality in which the public and private, object and subject, are inseparable dimensions of the same ongoing process of becoming.
Twelve Theses for Reflection:
The Blind Spot and Whitehead
1. Lived Experience as the Starting Point of Knowledge
Science presupposes experience rather than explaining it away. We must first live in the world before we can investigate it scientifically.
2. The Blind Spot
Science has a "Blind Spot" when it forgets its experiential origins. The mistake occurs when scientific models, abstractions, and mathematical descriptions are treated as more real than the lived world from which they are derived.
3. The Hidden Metaphysics of Modern Science
The dominant scientific worldview rests on six metaphysical assumptions rather than scientific discoveries. These assumptions—the bifurcation of nature, reductionism, objectivism, physicalism, the reification of mathematical abstractions, and epiphenomenalism—are philosophical commitments rather than empirical findings.
4. The Blind Spot Generates False Problems
Many of the deepest puzzles in contemporary science arise from this Blind Spot. Persistent problems concerning time, quantum mechanics, consciousness, life, artificial intelligence, cosmology, and ecology are intensified because experience has been excluded from the scientific picture rather than incorporated into it.
5. Beyond Clock-Time: The Ever-Renewing Now
One of the clearest examples of the Blind Spot is the tendency to confuse measured clock-time with lived time. Clock-time is an indispensable abstraction for science, but it is derived from the more fundamental reality of the ever-renewing present in which life is actually lived.
As emphasized by Husserl in his analyses of the living present and by Bergson in his philosophy of durée (duration), the ever-renewing now is not a static instant but a living process. Each present moment carries memories of what has been, anticipations of what may come, and an immediate awareness of what is becoming. The present is always changing, yet it is always present; we never step outside the now into either the past or the future. The past survives in memory and inheritance, the future in anticipation and possibility, while life itself unfolds in the continual renewal of the living present.
Whitehead's philosophy of organism deepens this insight by understanding each actual occasion as a moment of creative becoming in which the past is inherited, the future is anticipated, and a genuinely new present comes into being. This activitycreates the continuity of lived time; as Whitehead puts it: "There is a becoming of continuity but no continuity of becoming." Recovering this lived sense of temporality opens new possibilities for understanding consciousness, creativity, freedom, and the becoming of the world itself.
6. A More Complete Science
A genuine science must integrate first-person and third-person perspectives. Human experience is not merely another object to be studied but an indispensable source of evidence and understanding. Science therefore requires an ongoing dialogue among phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and the arts.
7. Toward a Post-Blind Spot Worldview
Seeing beyond the Blind Spot is essential for a meaningful and sustainable civilization. Recovering the place of lived experience is not merely a philosophical correction; it reshapes our understanding of humanity, our relationship with the Earth, and the ethical vocation of science itself. It invites us to understand ourselves as embodied participants in the unfolding and interconnectedness of nature, rather than merely as detached observers occupying a putative "God's-eye" point of view.
8. Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
Whitehead's philosophy of organism offers one of the most promising metaphysical resources for moving beyond the Blind Spot. By replacing a universe of inert substances with a universe of interrelated events of subjective becoming that are inseparable from the actual worlds they experience, it provides a conceptual framework in which experience, creativity, and relationality are fundamental rather than accidental.
The authors of The Blind Spot draw significantly on Whitehead's early work, especially The Concept of Nature, with its critique of the bifurcation of nature and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They are currently developing a sequel tentatively entitled Post-Blind Spot, which may engage Whitehead's later works--Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas—more extensively.
9. The Need for a More Phenomenologic Depth in Whitehead
Whitehead's philosophy can help us move beyond the Blind Spot, but only if it is interpreted in a way that includes rather than excludes first-person lived experience as an indispensable source of philosophical reflection and scientific understanding. Such an interpretation is most fully realized when Whitehead's cosmology is enriched through dialogue with phenomenological traditions in Western philosophy, especially Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, together with Asian philosophical traditions and both Eastern and Western contemplative practices.
Not unlike the way post-Blind Spot perspectives are now being developed in neurophenomenology under the influence of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others, there needs to be more phenomenology in contemporary presentations of Whitehead's philosophy. Whitehead's categories can then be understood not simply as metaphysical concepts but also as guides for attending to the structures of lived experience.
10. Beyond Panexperientialism
Appeals by Whiteheadian thinkers to panexperientialism are valuable insofar as they challenge the assumption that experience somehow emerges from wholly non-experiential matter. Yet they remain inadequate if they stop with attributing experience to the physical world while neglecting the irreducible richness of human subjectivity, first-person awareness, and intersubjective life.
Equally important, they must recognize that consciousness—or, more broadly, lived experience—is not simply one kind of experience among others. It is the ever-present horizon within which all human knowing, questioning, imagining, interpreting, and scientific inquiry take place. The point is not merely that there is experience throughout the universe, but that every act of understanding begins within the field of lived experience itself.
This horizon need not be understood as a generative source from which particular experiences arise. It can instead be understood, in a phenomenological and transcendental sense, as the condition for the possibility of any particular experience. In this respect it is analogous to Whitehead's Category of Subjective Unity. Just as every actual occasion achieves its own unity through a process of integration, every human act of knowing presupposes the unifying horizon of lived experience within which the world is disclosed. A genuinely post-Blind Spot philosophy of organism must therefore attend both to experience as a feature of reality and to the horizon of experience as the indispensable condition for our knowledge of reality.
11. Five Commitments: Experience, Relations, Interdependence, Contemplation, and Love
A genuinely post-Blind Spot philosophy of organism requires more than panexperientialism alone. It calls for affirming the primacy of experience, the primacy of relations, the primacy of interdependence, the importance of contemplative attention—including prayer, meditation, thoughtful introspection, and contemplative science—and the centrality of love.
The primacy of experience means more than recognizing experience throughout nature. It means recognizing that all knowing, feeling, imagining, questioning, and responding to the world occur within the horizon of lived experience. There is no standpoint outside experience from which reality can be known, and every inquiry begins within this transcendental horizon that makes particular experiences and acts of understanding possible.
The primacy of relations and interdependence means recognizing that experience is never merely private or self-enclosed. Human beings come into being through relationships with one another, participating in shared worlds of language, culture, history, and mutual understanding. At the same time, human life is embedded within wider communities of life that include other animals, plants, ecosystems, and the Earth itself. A post-Blind Spot worldview therefore affirms both intersubjectivity and our participation in the more-than-human world.
Contemplation cultivates the capacity to encounter other beings on their own terms, listening before explaining and attending before judging. It opens us to realities that cannot be grasped through detached observation alone and deepens our awareness of the horizon of experience within which all understanding takes place.
12. Love as as an Expression of a Post-Blind Spot Worldview
Love is the fulfillment of a post-Blind Spot orientation toward reality. It includes intellectual love: the desire to understand the world truthfully and sympathetically. It includes interpersonal love: the care that enables persons to flourish in communities of mutual respect and compassion. It includes love for the more-than-human world: delight in, reverence for, and responsibility toward animals, plants, ecosystems, and the Earth itself. It includes lives of service, in which understanding becomes generosity and knowledge is directed toward the well-being of others.
Seen in this light, the pursuit of knowledge is not fundamentally an act of detached observation but of participatory care. There may be an important sense in which the very desire to understand other people, other animals, plants, and indeed the universe itself is a reaching out for communion. Understood in this way, science at its best is a form of intellectual love—a disciplined search for truth animated by wonder, beauty, humility, and care.
The final aim of a post-Blind Spot worldview is not simply to produce better theories but to cultivate wiser, more compassionate, and more beautiful ways of inhabiting the Earth. In this sense, philosophy, science, art, and religion converge in a shared vocation: to deepen our participation in reality through understanding, contemplation, service, and love.
The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot
Ignore Human Experience
Matthew Segall in Dialogue with Evan Thompson
A compelling argument for including the human perspective within science, and for how human experience makes science possible.
“This is by far the best book I've read this year.”
—Michael Pollan, Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction, Harvard University; #1 New York Times bestselling author
“(A) stimulating manifesto for changing the way we look at things.”
--Wall Street Journal
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompsoncall for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth.The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
“This is by far the best book I've read this year.”
—Michael Pollan, Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction, Harvard University; #1 New York Times bestselling author
“(A) stimulating manifesto for changing the way we look at things.”
--Wall Street Journal
It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompsoncall for a revolutionary scientific worldview, where science includes—rather than ignores or tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective truth.The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a highly refined, constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate crisis and increasing science denialism.
Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humanity has looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but we’ve gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position, we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot, which the authors show lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe, quantum physics, life, AI and the mind, consciousness, and Earth as a planetary system. The authors propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
The "blind spot" is the tendency to imagine that reality can be understood entirely from a third-person, objective standpoint while neglecting the first-person and intersubjective dimensions through which all knowledge actually arises.
Such is the subject of the influential book The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. They argue that science has too often forgotten its own experiential foundations, and that the problem lies not in science itself but in a worldview that once served an important purpose yet has become problematic philosophically, scientifically, socially, and spiritually.
The metaphysics underlying this blind-spot worldview, the authors suggest, includes at least six interconnected assumptions:
The significance of these assumptions extends far beyond academic philosophy. The third-person, objective standpoint has permeated much of modern culture and the culture of contemporary science, shaping how many people understand nature, knowledge, consciousness, and even themselves. It encourages the view that reality is fundamentally a collection of objects to be observed, measured, predicted, and controlled from the outside. While this perspective has yielded extraordinary scientific and technological achievements, critics argue that it has also obscured the lived, embodied, relational, and meaningful dimensions of existence.¹
Against these assumptions, The Blind Spot argues for the primacy of lived experience and the life-world of intersubjective existence. Science remains indispensable, but it must be understood as arising from and remaining accountable to the experiential world that makes scientific inquiry possible in the first place.
Most of The Blind Spot is devoted to excavating and critiquing the emergence of blind-spot metaphysics and its underlying assumptions. The authors recognize, however, that criticism alone is not enough. There is also a need for a post–Blind Spot metaphysics, and they believe that elements of such a worldview are already beginning to emerge within contemporary science and philosophy: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.
Students and enthusiasts of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy will certainly appreciate the authors' identification of the six problematic assumptions of blind-spot metaphysics. Indeed, Whitehead's influence is evident throughout the book, especially in its critique in his early philosophy of the bifurcation of nature, reductionism, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the neglect of lived experience as a foundation for all thinking. It was Whitehead, after all, who wrote, in Process and Reality:
"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience."
It should be noted, however, that Whitehead's philosophy itself is not immune from criticism along the lines developed in The Blind Spot. Whitehead is sometimes interpreted from a predominantly third-person perspective, as if reality were fundamentally composed of innumerable microscopic actual entities or occasions of experience whose interactions can be described objectively. In some presentations of process philosophy, lived human experience appears as a derivative phenomenon emerging from more basic units of actuality. From this perspective,we can imagine an essay titled "Blind-Spot Whiteheadianism," arguing that certain interpretations of Whitehead are blind to the primacy of the life-world and to the first-person and intersubjective dimensions of experience emphasized by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson.
Truth be told, Whitehead's philosophy can be interpreted in different ways. One reading begins with actual occasions conceived as metaphysical building blocks. Another begins with lived experience itself and understands Whitehead's cosmology as an effort to generalize features first disclosed within experience. It is this latter possibility that makes Whitehead such an important conversation partner for the post–Blind Spot project. At his best, Whitehead does not explain experience away. Rather, he invites us to recognize experience, feeling, participation, and relationship as clues to the nature of reality itself.
¹ There is a larger historical background to the concerns raised in The Blind Spot. The critique of the third-person, objective standpoint has been especially prominent in the phenomenological tradition, beginning with Edmund Husserl and continuing through Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These thinkers argued that scientific abstractions arise from a more fundamental life-world (Lebenswelt) of lived experience and cannot be fully understood apart from it. Similar critiques can be found in certain Buddhist traditions, particularly those emphasizing direct awareness, embodied practice, and the interdependent character of experience. Although phenomenologists and Buddhists differ in important respects, both challenge the assumption that reality can be adequately understood solely from an external, observer-independent standpoint. In this respect, The Blind Spot can be seen as part of a larger intellectual movement seeking to restore the significance of lived experience to our understanding of the world.
Such is the subject of the influential book The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. They argue that science has too often forgotten its own experiential foundations, and that the problem lies not in science itself but in a worldview that once served an important purpose yet has become problematic philosophically, scientifically, socially, and spiritually.
The metaphysics underlying this blind-spot worldview, the authors suggest, includes at least six interconnected assumptions:
- Bifurcation of Nature — Reality is divided into two separate domains: an objective world of matter and a subjective world of experience.
- Reductionism — Complex phenomena, including life, mind, and consciousness, can ultimately be explained in terms of their simpler physical components.
- Objectivism — Reality can be fully understood from a third-person, observer-independent standpoint, without reference to lived experience.
- Physicalism — Everything that exists is fundamentally physical, and all phenomena are ultimately explicable in physical terms.
- Reification of Mathematical Abstractions — Mathematical entities and scientific models are more real than the experiential world from which they are abstracted.
- Epiphenomenalism — Conscious experience is a byproduct of physical processes rather than as a causally efficacious dimension of reality.
The significance of these assumptions extends far beyond academic philosophy. The third-person, objective standpoint has permeated much of modern culture and the culture of contemporary science, shaping how many people understand nature, knowledge, consciousness, and even themselves. It encourages the view that reality is fundamentally a collection of objects to be observed, measured, predicted, and controlled from the outside. While this perspective has yielded extraordinary scientific and technological achievements, critics argue that it has also obscured the lived, embodied, relational, and meaningful dimensions of existence.¹
Against these assumptions, The Blind Spot argues for the primacy of lived experience and the life-world of intersubjective existence. Science remains indispensable, but it must be understood as arising from and remaining accountable to the experiential world that makes scientific inquiry possible in the first place.
Most of The Blind Spot is devoted to excavating and critiquing the emergence of blind-spot metaphysics and its underlying assumptions. The authors recognize, however, that criticism alone is not enough. There is also a need for a post–Blind Spot metaphysics, and they believe that elements of such a worldview are already beginning to emerge within contemporary science and philosophy: network theory, complex systems theory, QBism, relational quantum mechanics, biological autonomy, embodied cognition, enaction, and neurophenomenology.
Students and enthusiasts of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy will certainly appreciate the authors' identification of the six problematic assumptions of blind-spot metaphysics. Indeed, Whitehead's influence is evident throughout the book, especially in its critique in his early philosophy of the bifurcation of nature, reductionism, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the neglect of lived experience as a foundation for all thinking. It was Whitehead, after all, who wrote, in Process and Reality:
"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience."
It should be noted, however, that Whitehead's philosophy itself is not immune from criticism along the lines developed in The Blind Spot. Whitehead is sometimes interpreted from a predominantly third-person perspective, as if reality were fundamentally composed of innumerable microscopic actual entities or occasions of experience whose interactions can be described objectively. In some presentations of process philosophy, lived human experience appears as a derivative phenomenon emerging from more basic units of actuality. From this perspective,we can imagine an essay titled "Blind-Spot Whiteheadianism," arguing that certain interpretations of Whitehead are blind to the primacy of the life-world and to the first-person and intersubjective dimensions of experience emphasized by Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson.
Truth be told, Whitehead's philosophy can be interpreted in different ways. One reading begins with actual occasions conceived as metaphysical building blocks. Another begins with lived experience itself and understands Whitehead's cosmology as an effort to generalize features first disclosed within experience. It is this latter possibility that makes Whitehead such an important conversation partner for the post–Blind Spot project. At his best, Whitehead does not explain experience away. Rather, he invites us to recognize experience, feeling, participation, and relationship as clues to the nature of reality itself.
¹ There is a larger historical background to the concerns raised in The Blind Spot. The critique of the third-person, objective standpoint has been especially prominent in the phenomenological tradition, beginning with Edmund Husserl and continuing through Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These thinkers argued that scientific abstractions arise from a more fundamental life-world (Lebenswelt) of lived experience and cannot be fully understood apart from it. Similar critiques can be found in certain Buddhist traditions, particularly those emphasizing direct awareness, embodied practice, and the interdependent character of experience. Although phenomenologists and Buddhists differ in important respects, both challenge the assumption that reality can be adequately understood solely from an external, observer-independent standpoint. In this respect, The Blind Spot can be seen as part of a larger intellectual movement seeking to restore the significance of lived experience to our understanding of the world.