Third-Person and First-Person Approaches to Life
Whitehead on Science, Religion,
and the Phases of Experience
“There is, however, a grave divergence between science and religion in respect to the phases of individual experience with which they are concerned. Religion is centered upon the harmony of rational thought with the sensitive reaction to the percepta from which experience originates. Science is concerned with the harmony of rational thought with the percepta themselves. When science deals with emotions, the emotions in question are percepta and not immediate passions—other people’s emotion and not our own; at least our own in recollection, and not in immediacy. Religion deals with the formation of the experiencing subject; whereas science deals with the objects, which are the data forming the primary phase in this experience. The subject originates from, and amid, given conditions; science conciliates thought with this primary matter of fact; and religion conciliates the thought involved in the process with the sensitive reaction involved in that same process. The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself. In this explanation it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world. Science finds religious experiences among its percepta; and religion finds scientific concepts among the conceptual experiences to be fused with particular sensitive reactions.”
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 16
Interpretation and Commentary
Sometimes it seems as if people interested in science and those interested in religion speak past one another. This is not necessarily because they hold conflicting beliefs about the world, but because they attend to different aspects of the world and our experience of it.
Science is primarily concerned with the world as an observable datum of experience—above all, as something measurable, quantifiable, and describable from a third-person perspective. It focuses on the objects of experience—those entities that constitute the initial data of perception. Even when the subject of inquiry is emotion, the scientific gaze typically treats it as a perceptual datum: “other people’s emotion,” or one’s own only as remembered, not as immediately felt.
Religion, by contrast, is concerned with the formation of the experiencing subject—with the immediacy of lived experience as it is enjoyed or suffered in the present. Its focus is on the inward dynamics of self-formation, the first-person process by which a life takes shape in response to the world.
In both instances, says Whitehead, there can be, in his words, a "harmony of rational thought." By this he means that both science and religion include ways of thinking in which idea and values have their own coherence, their own 'rationality.' But the suggestion is that scientific 'rationality' and religious 'rationality' are about different things or different features of experience.
Whitehead recognizes that this distinction, taken rigidly, is a simplification—a useful caricature. In reality, many people are drawn to both approaches. His point is not to divide them but to show that both perspectives—the third-person concern with data and the first-person concern with lived meaning—are indispensable. His philosophical project is to affirm the integrity of each and to provide a vision of reality spacious enough to hold both together.
Whitehead's project centers in his concept of concrescence—the process by which an actual occasion (a moment of experience) comes into being. Each moment of experience begins with data from the past—the world as given, what science studies—and culminates in a new synthesis, a subjective unity of feeling that is lived from within.
Science, then, concerns itself primarily with the initial phase of this process: how data from the world enter into perception, how the world presents itself as percepta. Religion, by contrast, is focused on the later phase, when these data are appropriated, interpreted, and woven into the subjective immediacy of life—the inner formation of meaning, value, and response.
In this way, the distinction between science and religion does not reflect a difference in worlds but a difference in emphases within the same process. Both attend to aspects of the same event: the concrescence of experience itself. Science examines the objective side of that process—the data that shape experience—while religion explores the subjective side—the transformation of data into value and selfhood.