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Alfred North Whitehead (1861±1947), mathematician and philosopher, founded a movement called `process philosophy', although he himself did not use the term. The antecedents of this movement can be traced back to Heraclitus (540±480 BCE) and David Hume (1711±1776). Other in¯uences include William James (1842±1910) and John Dewey (1859±1952). We ®nd no evidence that Rogers ever read Whitehead's major work on the philosophy of the organism (Whitehead, 1929/78), although he does make one secondary reference (1963/80) to Prigogine citing Whitehead. None- theless, we see Process and Reality as the philosophical ground for organis- mic psychology and for the theory and practice of person-centred therapy. Although complex and dense, it gives philosophical weight to the import- ance in person-centred therapy of experience, process and perception.

Process philosophy holds that the central task of philosophy is to develop a metaphysical cosmology that is adequate to all experienced facts. To be adequate, these facts or `actual entities' must give equal weight to all intuitions grounded in human experience, such as the aesthetic, ethical and religious or spiritual, as well as to those of the natural sciences. In this Whitehead anticipates modern and postmodern concerns about holistic thinking, interconnectedness, and interdisciplinarity, and provides the philosophical base for enquiry into the nature of the organism in a number of disciplines (see, for instance, Lewontin, 2000). In order to integrate experience and science, process philosophy is equally critical of what it views as the exaggerations of science, such as `scienti®c materialism' and the `sensationalist' doctrine of perception; and of religion, principally the notion of divine omnipotence.

Some of these terms warrant brief explication. Scienti®c materialism describes the view that everything, including human experience, can be explained in terms of the movement of matter, which has no spontaneity, internal process or intrinsic value. The alternative is to conceive the basic units of the world as processes. The `sensationalist' doctrine of perception posits that we perceive of things only by means of our physical sensory organs, a doctrine Whitehead rejects in favour of a view that experience can be con®rmed by subjective evaluation. In a rare reference to the (then)

modern psychology, Whitehead (1929/78, p. 141) bemoans its limitations: `one dif®culty in appealing to modern psychology, for the purpose of a preliminary survey of the nature of experience, is that so much of that science is based upon the presupposition of the sensationalist mythology.' In promoting the value of common-sense beliefs, such as the intuitive knowledge that humans can think and feel at the same time, and that thoughts and actions are not wholly determined by antecedent causes, Whitehead and other process philosophers are adopting the pragmatic maxim of James that, if an idea cannot be lived in practice, it should not be af®rmed in theory.

The key points of process philosophy are:

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A concern with what Whitehead (1929/78, p. xiii) calls `the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of ``actual entities'''. This pre®gures both Allport (1955/83) and Rogers (1961/67b), for more on which see pp. 63±7 and Chapter 5.

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That experience or feeling is the hallmark of human existence, rather than abstract thinking or metaphysics. In this Whitehead's work offers a critique of most modern(ist) philosophy, in particular positivism, and has inspired more recent work examining organic life as subjective activity (see Diefenbeck, 1995), and the making of consciousness (Damasio, 1999, who cites Whitehead).

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That the task of philosophy is to make our immediate experience intelligible so that we can discover how we can experience the actual world. In this Whitehead is reaching back to Plato and Aristotle. In the preface to Process and Reality Whitehead (1929/78, p. xi) said that `the writer who most fully anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism is John Locke', and like Locke, Whitehead is certainly an empiricist. Although working independently, Whitehead's concerns parallel those of Martin Heidegger, and there is a sense in which we may see Whitehead as a phenomenological empiricist.

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That `the reality is the process' (Whitehead, 1925/67, p. 72). In a sub- sequent book Adventures of Ideas (1933, p. 355), one which Whitehead said he most wanted to write, he summarises the process of what happens between the time an external experience impinges on body, spinal column and brain, and the time it is uttered forth: `The process is itself the actuality.' This echoes Goethe's view of nature as a dynamic, process- based phenomenon, a view which has, in turn, inspired a movement called `process theology' (see, for example, Grif®n, 1976), and which pre®gures quantum physics and its dynamic understanding of particles and waves.

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That `prehension' is more fundamental than sensory perception (Whitehead, 1925/67). This refers to a more primitive mode of percep- tual experience, which may or may not be conscious, and represents the

concrete fact of relatedness. In a previous work, The Concept of Nature, Whitehead (1920) had constructed a powerful phenomenology of perception based on the rejection of the `bifurcation of nature', arguing that disjunction between subject and object, res cogitans and res extensa, renders the world of life and the world of science incompatible. We see a similarity between Whitehead's concept of prehension and Rogers' (1959b) reference to `subception', a term he adopted from McCleary and Lazarus (1949) to mean discrimination without awareness.

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That mind and body are one. This is based on the `nondualistic inter- actionism' of process philosophy which avoids the problems of both dualism and materialism. `The philosophy of organism' writes Whitehead (1929/78, p. 219) `is a cell-theory of actuality. Each ultimate unit of fact is a cell-complex, not analysable into components with equivalent completeness of actuality.' In a passage which pre®gures current research in neuroscience, Hartshorne (1962, p. 229) says that `cells can in¯uence our human experiences because they have feelings that we can feel. To deal with the in¯uences of human experience on cells, one turns this around. We have feelings that cells can feel.'

Having given something of the philosophical background to the organism, we turn to an elaboration of its nature and qualities.

In document TRIBUNAL SUPERIOR DE CUENTAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FISCALIZACIÓN DE INGRESOS, DIRECCIÓN DE FISCALIZACIÓN (página 59-63)