ABSTRACT
In The Antichrist, Nietzsche preached that, ‘Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously’. This predicament applies no less to Alfred North Whitehead, the twentieth century’s most outstanding yet obscured philosopher. Whitehead was a master of mathematics before becoming a master metaphysician – a journey that traversed logic, pedagogy, physics, and the philosophy of science. Despite his broad and deep knowledge of modes of thought and the methods of nature, his philosophy did not slot into the contemporary categories of popular or accepted cognisance or ideology. This essay will examine how Whitehead’s metaphysics – which he called the philosophy of organism, and which today is more commonly referred to as process philosophy – acts in its splendid intricacy as denouncement against the pillars of modern monotheism, monolithic science, and the monotony of modern philosophy. Whitehead did not reject these pillars so much as tilt them orthogonal – a proud heretic. His God was transcendent and immanent, yet aesthetically hedonic, thus conducive to a revaluation of values. His science was critical of the contemporary and still current caricature of nature as a dead machine. His philosophy replaced substance with process, dichotomies with identity. All of this he did and was immediately repaid with that which is worse than flames at the stake: general neglect. But posthumously, the work set alight flames of thought baying to burn down the monoliths of modernity.
