The Importance of Forgetting ‘Perishing’ in Whitehead’s Cosmology and Epistemology

In this paper, I will address a constructive criticism of the papers that appeared as a Symposium on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy of Education (Interchange, 26(4), pp. 341–415, 1995). In his criticism of those papers, George Allan (1998) claimed that the contributors to the Symposium were not as Whiteheadian as they thought they were because they failed to contextualize their papers in the harmony and holism of Whitehead’s organic philosophy. Allan thought, in essence, that we had committed a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Ironically, this is exactly what we had been trying to avoid. With regards to my paper, Allan felt that I had failed to explain the importance of perishing for Whitehead in the becoming and objective immortality of the superject of experience. Hopefully, I have done a better job of this in what follows. I would also like to begin exploring the implications of Whitehead’s cosmology and epistemology for the advance of theory in psychology. On a pleasant afternoon in Oulu, Finland I was discussing the ideas presented here with my friend Hannu Soini who said to me, “when one is learning it is important to forget certain things so they do not impede our creativity.” Hence, the title of this paper and a further exploration of the concepts that Hannu and I feel are impeding the advance of psychology. I would like to preface with a reminder that when I try to explain Whitehead’s philosophy succinctly I sometimes fail to explain things well. His is a truly organic conception of reality so please forgive me.