Whitehead for the Many
by
SINCE The Wit and Wisdom of Whitehead was published, Alfred North Whitehead has died. This does not alter the value of the book, but it does deeply affect the tone in which one speaks of that philosopher and his work. For he advanced the frontiers of humanity and added stature to the dignity of man. More nearly than anyone else he grasped and harmonized in his thought the bewildering welter of new discoveries in this revolutionary epoch, and gradually his achievement will be diffused among the masses of mankind, even as myriads of us today live by the precepts of sages whose very names we have never so much as heard.
An anthology should send its reader to the originals. This “Wit-and-Wisdom” title which Mr. A. H. Johnson has chosen (the book is published by the Beacon Press, $2.50) is a traditional one, going hack at least as far as George Eliot. Philosophers’ wit is likely to he Olympian lightning. Their comics are cosmic, an intense inner laughter of the mind, a play of slightly ironic intellect over the higher idiosyncrasies of the human species. The laughter of Nietzsche, for example, is highly sardonic.
Whitehead was a gracious being. The lowly great no less than the famous great have in common the charm of their simplicity, but was over being more gracious than Alfred Whitehead? He put others so completely at their ease and so at their best that unless watched he himself would listen more than a thirsty suppliant wished he did. In conversation his wit kept flashing out, and in his published works it sparkles at moments the least expected, relieving the sustained effort of the reader with a brief breather, even while it illumes the land scape of ideas. This volume of Mr. Johnson’s is obviously a labor of love, and, as might be expected, is inspired also by veneration. The thirty-page portrait sketch which opens the book gives a fair idea of the benign philosopher’s personality, properly tinged with the humor which accompanied his days. Affectionate laughter at and with a venerated figure is a sign of the soul’s health. Here is no pompous ponderosity. The figure is warm, human, lovable.
Anthologies are meant to be read by snatched bites, picked up and laid down at odd moments. The reader will find this especially true of the present volume. Its excerpts are so charged with voltage that a very little goes a long way. In fact, having tried the opposite method, of seeing how much of it I could read and still keep reflecting on what the pages mean, I found my saturation-point to be like the little boy’s who said, “I can still chew, but I can’t swallow any more.”
On the ot her hand, as a means of ingress to Whit ehead’s work, this book is admirable. It does provide hints of his enormous range, richness, and variety; and most of the excerpts are such as can be understated by the laity, of whom I am one. Even if the render never progressed beyond this anthology but did pack its aphorisms firmly under his hatband, he would find them infinitely fructifying, if not indeed revolutionary depth-bombs to his traditional habits of thinking.
There are two professions especially which could profit by prolonged and habitual contemplation of these pages and of the originals to which they lead, that of teaching and that of preaching. Whitehead had a high regard for both, and especially for certain kinds of preachers. He once spoke of a party of liberal clergymen who came to see him because he could not, just then, go to see them, and how impressed he was by the freedom and largeness of their ideas. He thought they were, on the whole, superior to the average college faculty, one reason being that their profession obliges them to keep more closely in touch with the needs of common life.
If I might make another suggestion it would be to the doctors. They would find these pages peculiarly congenial, first of all, because their own professional thinking is of necessity so open-mindedly flexible, and beyond that, because here they would sense a combination in high degree of what they themselves are, the man of science as humanist, which is what Whitehead was. He considered what he called “the good American doctor” to be one of the most advanced types of humanity which has so far appeared on this planet.
My final suggestion would be to follow tins anthology by reading the volume of his Essays in Science and Philosophy, which was published last summer. That is a front hall to the mansion of his mind, and to it, this admirable, brief anthology is a vestibule.