Alfred North Whitehead

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Alfred North Whitehead walked into his Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 and lost his audience within a week. The astronomer Arthur Eddington had given the series the year before, and he had held a crowd of 600 people for every one of his talks. That same crowd turned up for Whitehead's opening lecture. By one eyewitness account, it was unintelligible, even to the most learned people in the room. By the end of the course, only about half a dozen listeners were still showing up.

  Those lectures became a book called Process and Reality, later compared to Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Its author was a mathematician with no advanced training in philosophy. How does a person like that end up writing one of the most baffling books in the Western canon? What did he believe the world was actually made of? And why do divinity schools, ecologists and Chinese universities keep coming back to him?

  61860

• 2. The Missing Archive

  ›

  Victor Lowe wrote the two-volume biography that remains the most definitive account of Whitehead's life. In his preface he admitted that "No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him." The problem was a missing paper trail. Whitehead left no personal archive, and his family carried out his instruction to destroy all of his papers after his death. He also wrote very few personal letters, and he held what is described as an "almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy."

  Ramsgate, in Kent, is where Whitehead was born in 1861. His father, also named Alfred, became an Anglican minister after serving as headmaster of Chatham House Academy. That boys' school had earlier been run by Whitehead's grandfather Thomas. Whitehead remembered both men as very successful schoolmasters, though he thought his grandfather the more "remarkable". His brother Henry became Bishop of Madras and wrote an ethnographic study called Village Gods of South-India.

  Sherborne, a prominent English public school, is where Whitehead excelled at sports and mathematics and served as head prefect. In 1880 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with Edward Routh as his academic advisor. His dissertation dealt with James Clerk Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. In 1884 he earned his B.A. as fourth wrangler, and Trinity elected him a fellow in the same year.

  In 1890 Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irishwoman who had been raised in France. They had a daughter, Jessie, and two sons, Thomas and Eric. Eric died in action at the age of 19 while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. Bertrand Russell, a close friend of the couple, later told of a night in 1901 when Evelyn seemed to be suffering a dangerous angina attack. Biographer David Ray Griffin suggests the danger was illusory, and that Russell exaggerated the drama.

  The year 1910 changed everything. Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship at Trinity and moved to London without another job lined up. The family also began spending time at a cottage in Lockeridge, near Marlborough in Wiltshire. After a year without work he became a lecturer at University College London, but he was passed over for the Goldsmid Chair he had hoped to win. In 1914 he became professor of applied mathematics at the newly chartered Imperial College London, where his old friend Andrew Forsyth had just been appointed.

  Administration came next. In late 1918 Whitehead was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London, a post he held for four years. He joined the university's Senate in 1919 and chaired its Academic Council from 1920. He used that influence to push for a history of science department and for a Bachelor of Science degree, since only arts degrees had been offered. He also worked to open the school to less wealthy students.

  Philosophy crept in late. After he published The Concept of Nature in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923. Henri Bergson was quoted as calling him "the best philosopher writing in English." Then in 1924 Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old to join Harvard University as a professor of philosophy, and the Whiteheads never returned to England. He published Science and the Modern World in 1925, and it was immediately hailed as an alternative to the Cartesian dualism then common in popular science. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him that year, and the American Philosophical Society followed in 1926. He retired from Harvard in 1937 and died on the 30th of December 1947 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  In 2017 the Edinburgh Critical Edition of his complete works finally began to appear. Its first volume, edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell, gathered The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924-1925.

  67111224

• 3. Page Eighty-Six

  ›

  Page 86 of the second volume of Principia Mathematica is where Whitehead and Bertrand Russell finally proved that 1+1=2. They accompanied the proof with a dry note: "The above proposition is occasionally useful." The delay shows how deep their foundations went. The two men, teacher and former student, set out to lay down axioms and rules of inference in symbolic logic. From those, all mathematical truths could in principle be proven.

  They expected the project to take a year. It took ten. The finished work ran to three volumes and more than 2,000 pages, and its audience was limited to professional mathematicians. Publication therefore lost 600 pounds. Cambridge University Press covered 300, the Royal Society of London paid 200, and Whitehead and Russell chipped in 50 each. Yet today there is likely no major academic library in the world without a copy. Modern Library ranked it 23rd on a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

  Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem of 1931 delivered an ironic verdict. It showed that any set of axioms and rules meant to capture mathematics must leave some true statements unprovable. So the book could never reach its stated goal. Gödel, however, could not have reached that conclusion without the book itself. The work also popularized modern mathematical logic and tied logic to epistemology and metaphysics.

  Before that came A Treatise on Universal Algebra in 1898. In it, the phrase universal algebra meant much what it means today: the study of algebraic structures themselves rather than particular examples. Whitehead credited William Rowan Hamilton and Augustus De Morgan as originators and James Joseph Sylvester as the coiner of the term. A reviewer named G. B. Mathews praised its "unity of design which is really remarkable." A planned second volume on Hamilton's quaternions was never finished because Principia Mathematica took over. Little further work followed until Garrett Birkhoff and Øystein Ore began publishing in the early 1930s.

  An Introduction to Mathematics appeared in 1911 and was written for a wider readership. It surveyed the nature of mathematics, its internal unity, and its usefulness in describing nature. Few people read it now. Still, it hints at the metaphysics to come. One more mathematical idea of his, "extensive abstraction", is now considered foundational for mereotopology, a branch of ontology and computer science that studies wholes, parts and the boundaries between them.

  373941233

• 4. Inert Ideas

  ›

  The year 1916 found Whitehead giving an address as president of the London Branch of the Mathematical Association. In it he attacked what he called "inert ideas", meaning scraps of information that connect to neither real life nor culture. His verdict was blunt: "education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful." The talk later gave its name to the essay collection The Aims of Education and Other Essays.

  Whitehead's alternative was to teach a handful of important concepts rather than small pieces of many subjects. Students could then link those concepts to many fields and see them at work in daily life. He wanted schooling to cross disciplinary lines and to carry values and general principles, which he thought gave students a bedrock of wisdom. His shortest summary was that "knowledge does not keep any better than fish."

  Examinations were his main target. He complained that every school, on pain of extinction, must train its boys for a small set of definite exams, leaving no headmaster a free hand. Any system of external tests aimed mainly at judging individual pupils, he said, could yield nothing but "educational waste." He argued that each school's own staff should design a curriculum for its own students. Otherwise the result would be stagnation, broken only by jumps from one batch of inert ideas to another.

  Imagination was the quality he prized most. In his essay "Universities and Their Function" he wrote that "Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts." It works, he said, by finding the general principles behind the facts and then surveying alternative possibilities consistent with them.

  Policy work gave these views an official platform. In 1921 Prime Minister David Lloyd George appointed Whitehead to a 20-person committee to examine the education system of the United Kingdom and recommend reforms. The Aims of Education and Other Essays arrived in 1929, collecting pieces published between 1912 and 1927.

  434428

• 5. Reality As Process

  ›

  In a class in 1927, a student noted Whitehead saying: "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized." By the 1920s, academics widely considered grand metaphysical systems a waste of time, because empirical tests could not check them. Whitehead was unmoved. Everyone makes metaphysical assumptions, he argued; the dangerous ones are simply never examined. Philosophers could never finally fix these first principles, but he thought they must keep reimagining them.

  His chief target appeared in Science and the Modern World. There he described a cosmology of "irreducible brute matter", which he called "senseless, valueless, purposeless". He labeled this assumption "scientific materialism" and challenged it as unsuited to modern science. One flaw was that it hides change. Treating a rock or a person as the same thing through time, with changes as secondary, ignores that nothing stays put. For Whitehead, "all things flow."

  A person, in this view, is a continuum of overlapping events. Whitehead called each moment an "occasion of experience", and a linked chain of them a "society". Mistaking the enduring object for the most real thing is what he named the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." A ten-year-old who turns thirty is in many ways not the same person at all. In his view, identities do not define people; people define identities. Everyday language keeps pulling thought back toward fixed objects, since nobody can give every moment of a life a separate name.

  Relations were his second complaint. Matter, as materialists picture it, is an inert clump related to other clumps only from outside. A student taking notes in the fall of 1924 recorded him saying that "Reality applies to connections, and only relatively to the things connected." An entity that made no difference to anything else, he held, could not be said to exist. Relations are not secondary to what a thing is. They are what the thing is.

  Creativity completes the picture. Every entity, whether human, tree or electron, has some novelty in how it responds to the others and is not fully fixed by mechanical law. Most entities have no consciousness. Still, an electron's unpredictability, in this account, reflects freedom rather than poor instruments. That freedom always works within limits, because each entity must conform to the settled conditions around it. Whitehead named the whole system the "philosophy of organism", though it became known as process philosophy. A system in which even electrons experience needed a new account of how anything perceives.

  5162495259

• 6. Seizing the World

  ›

  The Latin word prehensio, meaning "to seize", gave Whitehead his term "prehension". It describes a kind of perception that may be conscious or unconscious and applies to people and electrons alike. It also rejects representative perception, the theory that a mind holds only private ideas about other things. In Whitehead's account, the perceiver actually takes in aspects of what it perceives. Entities are therefore built out of their perceptions and relations.

  He divided perception into two modes. Causal efficacy is the felt sense of being influenced by the surrounding environment, with no help from the senses. Presentational immediacy is pure sense appearance, which can be delusive, as when a mirror image is mistaken for the real thing. Higher organisms fuse the two into "symbolic reference", linking appearance with causation so automatically that people and animals struggle to refrain from it.

  A chair makes the idea concrete. An ordinary person looks up, sees a coloured shape and concludes it is a chair. An artist, Whitehead supposed, "might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful colour and a beautiful shape." A dog, by contrast, would have jumped straight onto the chair. The dog's reaction shows causal relations dominating simpler minds, while pure sense perception marks a higher grade of mentality.

  Life itself puzzled him. Humans last about a hundred years, he noted, while rocks last eight hundred million. So he saw no survival reason for complex organisms to have evolved. In his words, "they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them." His answer was that higher life actively reshapes its environment, aiming at three things: living, living well, and living better. Without such a goal, he considered the rise of life unintelligible.

  To name his view, David Ray Griffin coined the word "panexperientialism", the idea that all entities experience. He used it to separate Whitehead's position from panpsychism, which holds that all matter has consciousness. If everything experiences and aims at something, the question of what ultimately gives that aim its direction comes next.

  6870717960

• 7. A God Who Is Changed

  ›

  "The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." That sentence is Whitehead's best-known swipe at the Christian picture of God as a divine king whose chief attribute is power. In its place he offered "the brief Galilean vision of humility". It dwells, he wrote, on "the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love."

  God entered his system for a practical reason rather than a devotional one. His metaphysics needed an order among possibilities, one that allows novelty and gives every entity an aim. He placed that order in what he called God's primordial nature. It is eternal and unchanging, a "lure for feeling" that pulls the universe toward possibilities not yet realized.

  The second pole, the consequent nature, is anything but fixed. It is God's reception of everything the world does. Whitehead wrote that God "saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life" in a judgment of "a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved." Whatever happens in the world therefore changes God. Creatures lend God actuality and change, while God lends creatures permanence.

  Whitehead set out the resulting paradoxes as a list of matched statements. "It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent." He wrote that God is one and the World many, and equally the reverse. He also wrote that God creates the World and the World creates God. The passage ends by calling God "the great companion" and "the fellow-sufferer who understands." That writing inspired the movement called process theology.

  Religion, for Whitehead, started in privacy: "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious." He did not assume religion was good, calling that belief a "dangerous delusion", since a faith could urge the violent extermination of a rival one. Yet solitude was only a beginning. Value, he argued, belongs to a community made of the interrelations of its members, so "Religion is world loyalty." That emphasis on a world bound together would later attract thinkers concerned with ecology.

  8990939899

• 8. Afterlives

  ›

  Shailer Mathews, a Chicago theologian, complained in print about Whitehead's 1926 book Religion in the Making. He found it "infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence." Even so, philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School sensed that something important was happening. In 1927 they invited Henry Nelson Wieman, one of America's few Whitehead experts, to lecture. His talk impressed them so much that they hired him. He taught there for twenty years, and the school stayed associated with Whitehead for at least thirty.

  Wieman's own review of Process and Reality in 1930 predicted a strange fate. "Not many people will read Whitehead's recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation." But its influence, he wrote, would "radiate through concentric circles of popularization" until ordinary people thought in its light without knowing its source. The prediction has largely held. The book is called arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century, yet it remains little read.

  Charles Hartshorne spent a semester at Harvard in 1925 as Whitehead's teaching assistant, and he is widely credited with building process theology out of Whitehead's philosophy. His argument was simple. People would not praise a human ruler untouched by the joys and sorrows of his followers, so why admire that trait in God? Other process theologians include Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, C. Robert Mesle, Roland Faber and Catherine Keller. Mesle even advocates a "process naturalism", a process theology without God.

  John B. Cobb, among the Chicago-trained scholars, carried the torch to Claremont, California. He began teaching at Claremont School of Theology in 1958 and founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin in 1973. His 1971 book Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology was the first single-authored book on environmental ethics. In 1989 he co-wrote For the Common Good with the ecological economist Herman Daly, which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

  China is where interest seems to be growing fastest. The Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centres for studying Whitehead, and books by Cobb and Griffin are becoming required reading for graduate students. Cobb ties this partly to Whitehead's stress on the interdependence of humanity and nature. He also points to Whitehead's call for an education that teaches values rather than bare facts.

  Outside such circles, the picture is mixed. Whitehead supervised Willard Van Orman Quine's dissertation and taught and collaborated with Russell, both central figures in analytic philosophy. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dryly called him "the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror." The sociologist Bruno Latour went further, naming him "the greatest philosopher of the 20th century." Both views are minority ones. The source suggests several reasons: counterintuitive claims such as matter being an abstraction, theistic elements, metaphysics falling out of fashion, and dense prose.

  Whitehead's physics fared worse. His theory of gravitation, which might be seen as a counterpart to Albert Einstein's general relativity, drew severe criticism. It has since been rendered obsolete by the discovery of gravitational waves. His process metaphysics, however, attracted quantum physicists such as Henry Stapp and David Bohm.

  One of the newest offshoots is the FEELS model, developed by Xie Bangxiu and used successfully in China. Its letters stand for Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions and Supportive-teacher. Its premise is that education exists to "help a person become whole," a goal the 1916 critic of inert ideas would have recognized.

  575654765