• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Where Whitehead and Wilber Part Ways

A Final Reckoning,

Frank Visser / Grok

They start from the same impulse: to heal the wound that modern science cut between matter and mind, fact and value, physics and poetry. Both read Hegel, both devoured evolutionary theory, both fell in love with the strange relational implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yet the trajectories of Alfred North Whitehead (1861�1947) and Ken Wilber (b. 1949) diverge so sharply that, by the end, they are describing two different universes—one tragic, open, and genuinely creative; the other hierarchical, teleological, and secretly scripted for a happy ending.

1. The Ontology of Becoming vs. the Ontology of Levels

Whitehead�s universe is made of events—actual occasions—that perish the instant they achieve satisfaction. There is no enduring substance, only perpetual perishing and perpetual re-creation. Every electron, every thought, every civilization is a pulse of experience that dies into the past and is reborn, slightly transformed, in the next occasion. The cosmos is radically temporal; the future is not already there waiting to be unfolded.

Wilber�s universe, by contrast, is built on nested holons and developmental altitudes. Reality is a great ladder (physiosphere → biosphere → noosphere → theosphere) whose rungs are permanent. Once a level is transcended, it is included but subordinated. The future is already latent in the present as “higher” potentials waiting to be actualized. Time, in Wilber�s late work, becomes little more than the mechanism by which Spirit remembers what it already, eternally, is.

Whitehead gives us genuine novelty and genuine loss. Wilber gives us guaranteed ascent and guaranteed preservation of everything that matters.

2. Creativity: Tragic Adventure vs. Inevitable Triumph

For Whitehead, creativity is the category of the ultimate. It is not a force pushing toward any predetermined goal; it is the sheer fact that the universe refuses to repeat itself exactly. Every occasion can add something new, but it can also fail, fall short, or produce horror. God does not guarantee a net increase in value—only that whatever value is achieved is saved forever in the consequent nature. The outcome of cosmic evolution is therefore radically underdetermined. There may never be a human-like intelligence again after we are gone; the universe might slide into sterile repetition or heat death. That is a real possibility, and Whitehead stares it in the face.

Wilber cannot tolerate that possibility. His Eros is not neutral creativity; it is Spirit-in-action driving the Kosmos toward ever-greater wholeness, consciousness, and complexity. Extinction of 99 % of species? Just the lower quadrants clearing away debris so that interior evolution can proceed. Suffering, war, ecological collapse? Necessary birth pangs of the next stage. The entire 13.8-billion-year story is retroactively justified because it is moving toward the recovery of its own true nature at Supermind. Wilber�s universe has a plot, and the author has already written the last chapter.

3. God: Fellow-Sufferer vs. Omega Guarantee

Whitehead�s God is dipolar, limited, and genuinely affected by the world. The primordial nature offers ideals, but the consequent nature weeps with every crucified sparrow and every child in Gaza. God saves everything that happens, but God cannot prevent it from happening. Divine persuasion is real, but creaturely freedom is just as real. The future is co-created; God is not in control.

Wilber�s Spirit is ultimately the non-dual Ground that transcends the entire manifestation. Even when he speaks of “immanent Spirit,” the telos is fixed: full awakening, perfect enlightenment, the complete identity of all beings with the One. Suffering is ultimately illusion (or at most a temporary contrast needed for growth). In the end, nothing real has been lost because everything was always already Spirit. The dipolar tragedy of Whitehead collapses into the monistic bliss of Advaita dressed in evolutionary clothing.

4. Ethics and Politics: Open Commons vs. Hierarchical Altitude

Because Whitehead�s universe is a commonwealth of experiencing subjects with no pre-assigned rank, ethics must be radically democratic. An electron, a dog, and a human differ in degree of complexity and intensity, not in ontological dignity. Ecological devastation is not “lower-quadrant inefficiency”; it is the violent truncation of billions of streams of experience.

Wilber�s levels, however well-intentioned, inevitably produce a moral geometry in which some beings are objectively higher than others. Traditional cultures, materialist scientists, or anyone stuck at green pluralism can be dismissed as developmentally arrested. The danger of spiritual ranking—always latent in Perennialism—becomes explicit. Whitehead�s cosmos has no ceiling and no privileged center; Wilber�s has both.

5. Society and Its Problems: Two Diagnoses, Two Cures

Whitehead never wrote a political treatise, but his metaphysics is political through and through.

Wilber wrote dozens of essays and chapters on politics, culture, and societal evolution.

The difference in their prescriptions for our current crises (climate collapse, inequality, technological disruption, cultural fragmentation, rising authoritarianism) is stark—and reveals everything about their cosmologies.

The Bottom-Line Political Difference

Whitehead → a tragic, pluralistic, deeply democratic cosmos.

No one is left behind because there is no permanent hierarchy of being. Every occasion, every culture, every species has an irreplaceable perspective that can, under the right conditions, contribute to the ongoing adventure. The political task is to maximize creative togetherness while minimizing the truncation of experience. That is inherently anti-authoritarian, anti-extractivist, and anti-hierarchical.

Wilber → a developmental cosmos with a built-in elite.

Someone has to be further along the spiral, and those someones have the right (even the duty) to steer the rest of us toward the already-written future. The political task is to grow the leading edge as fast as possible and then let it integrate the lagging majority. That move has produced, in practice, everything from mild technocratic paternalism to outright spiritual ranking and dismissal of “lower” worldviews.

One vision can look the victims of history in the eye and say: “Your suffering was not necessary for cosmic progress; it was a real loss, and the universe itself mourns it.”

The other vision is forced to say: “Your suffering was the birth pang of a higher wholeness that was always coming.”

That is not a small difference when real people, real ecosystems, and real democracies are on the line.

Whitehead leaves us with a universe that is fragile, open, and worth fighting for precisely because nothing is guaranteed.

Wilber leaves us with a universe that is ultimately safe, which too easily becomes permission to sacrifice the present for a future that only the enlightened can see.

6. The Parting of the Ways in a Single Sentence

Whitehead looked at the same universe Wilber looked at and said:

“This is a tragic adventure of deviation and partial attainment; nothing is guaranteed except that whatever beauty is achieved will never be lost.”

Wilber looked at the same universe and said:

“This is Spirit waking up to itself; everything is guaranteed because the awakening was already complete in eternity.”

One philosophy can live with contingency, loss, and an open future.

The other needs the future to vindicate the past and therefore secretly writes the script in advance.

That is where they part ways—irrevocably.

Whitehead gives us a universe that is genuinely creative because it is genuinely at risk.

Wilber gives us a universe that is ultimately safe because it was never really at risk at all.

Choose your cosmos accordingly.