Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
Whitehead argues that philosophy must center on the unfiltered flow of experience.
In plain terms
Philosophy should start with raw experience, not complex theories.
What can you take from it?
Ground philosophy in real experience.

Where it applies

  • philosophical inquiry
  • scientific modeling
  • research

Putting it to work

  • study lived experience
  • strip away theory
  • focus on data

Questions to consider

  • Can experience be unfiltered?
  • What comes before theory?

Another view

Raw experience may be biased or unreliable.

More from Alfred North Whitehead

  1. The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

    Permalink to quote #34
  2. The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to c…

    Permalink to quote #36
  3. The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.

    Permalink to quote #33

Related quotes

  1. It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can…

    Archibald MacLeishArchibald MacLeish quote #1
  2. For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealisations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches…

    Niels BohrNiels Bohr quote #5
  3. Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical r…

    David DeutschDavid Deutsch quote #6