Alfred North Whitehead: 1861-1947

THEHE are men who cherish what ought to be. There are others who stress what is. The former are moralists, the latter scientists. Alfred North Whitehead was something of both, as a philosopher should be. But he was more as well. He was also, perhaps primarily, concerned with seeking connections between the facts that theory seemed to hold apart. He was alive to what might be, partly for the sake of understanding this world in which we daily live. A ruminative man who looked at all things from the vantage of the possible, he was also a precise and rigorous one, as might be expected from a mathematician and a logician who was always at home with fact.

The possible, Whitehead saw, is free from the restrictions characteristic of the things in this more or less arbitrary world. It is free too from the limitations characteristic of traditional mathematics and logic. It is not restricted to what has been or is; it includes much that never was realized. There are no impassable boundaries in it any more than there are in the world of fact, and there should be but one science encompassing it all. From the very beginning Whitehead was aware of and explored this truth.

In his first great work, his Treatise on Universal Abgebra, he dealt with mathematics as a discipline by which one could move in a precise way from any well-defined part of the realm of possibility to any other. An independent and original work, it was without much influence. And now it is somewhat out of date, in part because of Whitehead’s own subsequent labors, particularly as contained in his three-volume Pricipia Mathematica published together with his pupil, Bertrand Russell.

The Principia Mathematica is one of the greatest testimonies to sustained, rigorous thought that we have. Whitehead once said that its greatest accomplishment was the provision of the first real proof that l plus 1 is 2— an achievement which required some hundred pages of most careful reasoning and the use of a most complicated symbolism. But the work is best known for the way it brings logic and mathematics together as a single enterprise, deducing most carefully the basic propositions of both fields from a half-dozen truths and a few undefined ideas. The work has been the inspiration of a whole generation, and only recently have we been learning ways to go beyond it — in part by reflecting on the problems it raised.

It was characteristic of Whitehead to look at his own writings with considerable detachment. He disowned disciples and disliked hero-worship. Everything, he said, had some bearing on everything else, and as a consequence he was most ready to see the relevance of the most diverse approaches and views to his own presentation. Believing firmly that the intellectual life demanded the constant extension of the imagination and the adjustment of discourse to the infinite richness of reality, he was the most flexible and youthful of men in spirit, in speech, and in thought.

Whitehead soon left behind the perspective and values of the Principia Mathematica, to devote himself to questions beyond the province of its method. His first ventures were highly technical and of restricted interest, though there are students of the philosophy of science who think his The Principle of Relativity has been wrongly neglected, and who still study his An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge and his The concept of Nature as the soundest works we have on the nature and meaning of scientific knowledge.

It was not until Whitehead came to America, in 1924, at the age of sixty-three, that he began to make evident to the world the breadth of his interests, the brilliance of his mind, and the freshness, profundity, and boldness of his thought. Harvard, he said, gave him a chance to express himself; there, he often remarked, he began another life. There he taught new subjects, made new friends, and in a space of less than a half-dozen years made himself known throughout the world as one of the greatest of speculative minds.

From 1925 to 1938 he wrote nine books. The most effective was his Science and the Modern World. We have not yet entirely recovered from the shock of its appearance. Brilliantly written, dotted with penetrating epigrams which serve to turn thought in new directions, it ostensibly traces the history of modern science, but actually states some of the most important original ideas it has been our generation’s fortune to hear. It is here That he made so evident the arbitrary, unreal character which Newton and his followers, of whom Einstein is one, supposed our universe to have; it is here that God is shown to have a place in a comprehensive scientific cosmology; it is here that Whitehead makes us see how all things are intermeshed without loss of individuality.

Whitehead’s next great book was his Process and Reality. It is his most difficult, but is also his most sustained; it is in fact the most comprehensive, original, systematic work in English philosophy that we have had since the days of Hobbes. Hardly read by his contemporaries and colleagues, not understood by reviewers and most of his pupils, it has nevertheless already attained the status of an indispensable work.

The awkwardness and obscurity of much of its style, the detailed technical discussions of which it is full, the abstractness of many of its issues, will prevent Process and Reality from ever directly affecting more than a small number of industrious and independent thinkers. But its indirect effect has been and will continue to be enormous. It should forever remain a landmark in the history of the intellect, a perpetual source of fundamental ideas, a monument in metaphysics, cosmology, and theology, a watershed separating twentieth-century from nineteenth-century thought.

According to Process and Reality, this universe is made up of a host of beings. Whitehead called them “actual occasions.” Each was a point where the finished met the possible, where the ideas of God joined history, where the physical was interwoven with the mental. Each, according to him, “prehended”—laid hold of and made internal to itself—all that lay beyond it in the world that had been and in the world that might be, to constitute a novel present unity. Each was the juncture of the whole of the past and the whole of the future.

Whatever had been and could be was relevant to each occasion. Nothing was simply located, here and not in some sense also there, without significance for anything beyond it. But just what meaning the rest of the universe had for this particular thing, only this particular thing could decide, and then only when and as it came to be. Each being, according to Whitehead, made itself be what it was. Each was an adventure in self-creation, an adventure which looked backwards for material and forwards for guidance, but which was finally performed in the solitude of absolute privacy. This was true both of those actual occasions we locate in men and of those we locate in stones or chemical compounds. We are all, the living and the dead, the human and the subhuman, part of one nature. We have different yet similar origins, careers, and destinies. Each of us is a cosmic artist making use of the whole welter of the actual and possible to create that private unity which is ourselves most truly.

An actual occasion exists for but an atomic moment, a short stretch of time which cannot be subdivided. It takes the whole of such a moment for an occasion to make itself be, and when that moment is over, the occasion passes away. Perishing is thus the inevitable accompaniment of creation.

But each thing is remembered in a sense by God, and each is “prehended”— taken account of and thus preserved — by all that comes thereafter. Each of us is naught but a series of somewhat closely related actual occasions. No one of us is permanent, no one of us is duplicatable, no one of us is forever without effect on everything there will be. We are internally richer, more intense, than other beings perhaps, and occasionally may have a flicker of a consciousness denied to others, but in principle we are like all other beings. Like all else we are focal points unifying the cosmos in a fresh and original way, offering ourselves as material to be unified by what else might follow, and together with all other things in this space-time world, interplaying with and complementing that supreme actual occasion, God. This is a cosmology in which there is no place for the hard, colorless, self-sufficient atoms of the past, but which grounds deep and firm the modern view that the fundamental realities are interrelated quanta events in a cosmic space-time.

Process and Reality will last as long as our scientific epoch does. His Adventures of Ideas, because not subject to the vicissitudes of scientific fashions, is a more enduring book. But not for that reason alone. It will, I believe, be read, pondered and discussed long after all of us are gone. It is a classic of our time, a wise book, a mellow one. Whitehead felt that it was his best. At once profound and lucid, original and erudite, comprehensive and detailed, it deals equally with the soil, the life, the roots, and the fruits of cosmology, religion, art, ethics, and civilization. In a hundred different ways it points up the limitations of language, of scholarship, of traditional science and religion, and gently but surely leads one to see that the history of civilization is but a special case of the history of a cosmos in which ideas can and sometimes do “persuade” the brute facts of life and experience to be harmonized, muted, and ennobled. There is a faint but sure drive in things towards excellence which deserves to be encouraged, nursed, supported. We are civilized to the degree that we refuse to allow this bias toward excellence to be blocked by force or quieted by a dogmatic supposition that the richness of the ideal has already been exhausted.

Throughout, but perhaps no better than in the final words of this book, there is summarized a lifetime of thought and a lifetime of civilized living. “At the heart of the nature of things, there are always the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy. The adventure of the universe starts with the dream and reaps tragic beauty. This is the secret of the union of zest with peace — that the suffering attains its end in a harmony of harmonies. The immediate experience of this final fact, with its union of youth and tragedy, is the sense of peace. In this way the world receives its persuasion towards such perfections as are possible for its diverse individual occasions.”