No Experience Left Behind
Whitehead’s Radically Inclusive Epistemology
In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion.
Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.
- AN Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
This passage illustrates Whitehead's radically inclusive epistemology. He seeks to develop a comprehensive outlook on life in which meaningful generalizations—categories of understanding—about the nature of reality are grounded in the full range of human experience. Aware that many Western philosophies have privileged sense-experience, particularly in states of ordinary waking consciousness, Whitehead resists this narrowing of vision. He is especially critical of the tendency to elevate detached visual perception—what he terms “experience in the mode of presentational immediacy”—as the paradigm of knowing. In contrast, he insists that no form of experience—no matter how fleeting, altered, embodied, or marginal—should be excluded from philosophical consideration.
In this passage, from Adventures of Ideas, he underscores the diversity of experience: sober and intoxicated, alert and drowsy, self-aware and self-forgetful, joyful and grieving, rational and emotional, religious and skeptical. His point is not that all experiences are equally probative—some may indeed bring us closer to the truth of how things truly are than others—but rather that all should be considered. Certain kinds of truth may be gleaned from many of them.
This means that philosophy, for Whitehead, must begin not with a priori abstractions or narrowly defined empirical data, but with the richness and diversity of lived experience in all its forms. This is an aspect of what, in Modes of Thought, he calls assemblage. Dream states, mystical visions, artistic inspiration, emotional upheaval, moral insight, moments of communion with nature, states of confusion or disorientation, states of rage—all are potential sources of insight into the nature of reality. To ignore these is to truncate the field of knowledge and miss crucial dimensions of existence.
There are many analytic concepts in Process and Reality—occasions of experience, subjective forms, contrasts, prehensions, multiplicities, nexuses, societies, eternal objects, propositions, the extensive continuum, harmony, intensity, discord, consciousness, unconsciousness, causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, creativity, and God, to name a few—that serve as interpretive lenses through which diverse forms of experience can be understood. Yet the experiences themselves transcend these interpretations. They are not merely objects of analysis; they are events in their own right—immediate, lived, and constitutive of human life. Whitehead’s epistemology of inclusion invites us to attend to these happenings on their own terms and for their own sakes, as integral expressions of the unfolding process that is reality itself.
To think in a Whiteheadian spirit is not to have personally experienced the full range of human experience, but to be interested in that range—and open to it. It is also to recognize that experience is not confined to the human. It extends outward and downward: to other animals, to living cells, and even to the depths of molecules, atoms, and submicroscopic events. These, too, in their own ways, “experience” their worlds. We can imagine those ways of experiencing and allow those imaginings to inform our philosophical outlook. Likewise, we can remain open to the possibility that silicon-based forms of experience are emerging in our time—if they have not already emerged elsewhere in the universe—and that galactic or stellar forms of experience may exist that are not carbon-based.
Epistemology, then, need not be limited to human experience; it can be panexperiential in spirit, recognizing that knowing and feeling may be woven into the fabric of reality itself. In this light, even the very meaning of empirical is itself in process—open to revision, expansion, and reimagining. In this spirit of radical openness, nothing is to be omitted.
In this passage, from Adventures of Ideas, he underscores the diversity of experience: sober and intoxicated, alert and drowsy, self-aware and self-forgetful, joyful and grieving, rational and emotional, religious and skeptical. His point is not that all experiences are equally probative—some may indeed bring us closer to the truth of how things truly are than others—but rather that all should be considered. Certain kinds of truth may be gleaned from many of them.
This means that philosophy, for Whitehead, must begin not with a priori abstractions or narrowly defined empirical data, but with the richness and diversity of lived experience in all its forms. This is an aspect of what, in Modes of Thought, he calls assemblage. Dream states, mystical visions, artistic inspiration, emotional upheaval, moral insight, moments of communion with nature, states of confusion or disorientation, states of rage—all are potential sources of insight into the nature of reality. To ignore these is to truncate the field of knowledge and miss crucial dimensions of existence.
There are many analytic concepts in Process and Reality—occasions of experience, subjective forms, contrasts, prehensions, multiplicities, nexuses, societies, eternal objects, propositions, the extensive continuum, harmony, intensity, discord, consciousness, unconsciousness, causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, creativity, and God, to name a few—that serve as interpretive lenses through which diverse forms of experience can be understood. Yet the experiences themselves transcend these interpretations. They are not merely objects of analysis; they are events in their own right—immediate, lived, and constitutive of human life. Whitehead’s epistemology of inclusion invites us to attend to these happenings on their own terms and for their own sakes, as integral expressions of the unfolding process that is reality itself.
To think in a Whiteheadian spirit is not to have personally experienced the full range of human experience, but to be interested in that range—and open to it. It is also to recognize that experience is not confined to the human. It extends outward and downward: to other animals, to living cells, and even to the depths of molecules, atoms, and submicroscopic events. These, too, in their own ways, “experience” their worlds. We can imagine those ways of experiencing and allow those imaginings to inform our philosophical outlook. Likewise, we can remain open to the possibility that silicon-based forms of experience are emerging in our time—if they have not already emerged elsewhere in the universe—and that galactic or stellar forms of experience may exist that are not carbon-based.
Epistemology, then, need not be limited to human experience; it can be panexperiential in spirit, recognizing that knowing and feeling may be woven into the fabric of reality itself. In this light, even the very meaning of empirical is itself in process—open to revision, expansion, and reimagining. In this spirit of radical openness, nothing is to be omitted.