Whitehead Revisited
By STEPHEN TOULMIN IN the history of recent British philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead stands quite alone. As a metaphysician, he had no direct ancestors, nor any effective descendants. Admired by curious amateurs, but ignored by most of his English colleagues, his great 'philosophy of organism' has already the air of an historical monument. Turn to it once more, browse through the books in which he set out his mature ideas—better still, take up the 900-page anthology in which two Americans have now collected the substance of his works*—and we enter a half-forgotten world. As we train') the long corridors of thought, clamber up spiral staircases of ideas to unexpected floors, and gaze down from ornamented balconies across the gloomy exhibition-hall in which our every- day conceptions are dissected and displayed, we cannot help being struck by the style, the elaboration, and above all the scale ofi the building. Set beside it, the most esteemed works of the present day look like prefabricated houses, or, at best, like neatly turned out young factories. Whitehead's system, by contrast, recalls those ranges of Victorian Gothic buildings which dignify the University campuses of the Eastern USA. You may shut your eyes to it, but you cannot overlook it; and its air of antiquity is misleading—Whitehead's career as a metaphysician, hard though this is to believe, began only thirty years ago.
The fate Whitehead has suffered is understandable but not entirely deserved, for he has been the victim of his own history. Not until he was sixty-three did he leave a chair of applied mathematics in London to be Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, and his final trilogy (Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas) was the work of a man rising seventy. Before that lay a distinguished career, with an FRS, as a mathematician and logician. For a long time he was a mathematics don at Trinity. Ten years Bertrand Russell's senior, he first taught him and then worked with him on Principia Mathentutica, which has become the 'Euclid's Elements' of mathematical logic. After this, he turned to physics, mastered the theory of relativity, and developed some forcible criticisms of Einstein's General Theory : his own line of thought made resort to non-Euclidean geometry unnecessary and may yet prevail. From here, Whitehead was led at once into philosophy, for the philosophical theories of space and time were a scandal which, since Kant's day, had been not cleared up so much as hushed up. Once launched into philo- sophy. he never looked back : it became his _ambition to use the logical insights behind the theory of relativity as a means of resolving the confusions of traditional epistemology. The programme was a reasonable one; his attacks on Hume—the central figure of modern epistemology—concentrated on the central dogma and weakness of empiricism; and his positive suggestions could have led to something if they had not fallen on deaf ears. But it was too late for him to make himself heard : he was out of touch. Born in 1861, he was a con- temporary of Bergson. Croce and Husserl. His style of philosophising. the elaboration of his expression, and the scale of his exposition were out of tune with the times. So he went to America, delivered several series of public lectures, and became a Sage.
This story is reflected in his writings. Many of the first 350 pages of the new anthology are technical : Whitehead is trying to extend to physics, particularly to relativity theory, the new techniques of formal analysis developed in Principia Mathematica. But he also notices, by the way, other
• Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology. Selected by F. S. C, Northrop and Mason W. Gross. (G.U.P. 75s.)
deficiencies in the tradition of physics and philosophy beside9 those that Einstein has uncovered. The classical picture of ths Universe, as a large box containing little solid bits of matter which move independently except when they collide, will fi° longer serve even within physics. Still less, then, he reflects, , should it retain a foothold in philosophy, where it nevcr belonged anyway. Yet the whole of modern epistemolog from Descartes onwards has been shaped by classical physie,,s:. Descartes and Kant were both mathematical physicists, Loe" was the friend and admirer of Newton, Hume his follower and emulator. Extend the classical picture of nature ill; physics to philosophy. Whitehead argues, and of course till traditional problems will all arise. The picture of life an' mind as isolated singularities in a world of matter in niotiofi; our understandings mewed up within the internal cinemas 0,,, our sensoria; the distinction between primary and second qualities, with its unwelcome moral that not just beauty, bfi, warmth, colour and fragrance too exist only in the mind ,e1 the beholder—all these' embarrassments are inevitable, suggests, if we make the first-fruits of Newtonian physics ofi' guide in tackling the problems of philosophy.
Whitehead's contemporaries paid little attention. occupied as they were by these old, traditional problems, nc): posed in the new terminology of ' sense-data,' they had no tial; to consider his suggestion that the problems themselves Or. misconceived. Only since he died have his objections beconwt widely shared by younger men who have found them 0,11. again independently. Whitehead himself, cut off from owo philosophical conversation of- his compatriots, went ofl.I Harvard and to fame. The oracular phase began. This second, belated career of Whitehead's is represent°. by the remaining 550 pages of the anthology. From them OA" can see the penalties of isolation, and of Sagedom. Whitehesuo in America recalls Kant at Konigsberg. The languatt becomes progressively more difficult: the sharp, precise thoug of his earlier critical work hides itself behind a relentlessl, opaque terminology. Left to himself, he develops a distract habit of writing for effect: "The creativity of the world ,1 the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a transcendent fact." Worst of all, he over-reaches hintseut There is so little time left, and so many large problems n9,, be solved : perhaps he can solve them at a single stroke. So " writes about God, and Morals, and History, and Symboltsfibe and Civilisation. The audiences at the public lectures lovt it, of course: the intelligible bits are good sense, and the rest at any rate sounds profound. But the fact is, one does Ift, make fundamental new discoveries about these things at tud age of sixty-five after a lifetime spent on other things; at, as soon as we look beyond the opening chapters, we find At," same arguments—carried over from his earlier periou„0 reasserting themselves. His chief concern is still to resc'e, , epistemology from its infatuation with Newton, but the leOtuo , must seem to be about Larger Things, so as to satisfy wto Lowell or Gifford Trustees, or encourage the Harvard Gradfia,, School of Business Administration. From now on, the noisseur's interest becomes, not to learn from Whitehead,yrii to discover how the transition back to the old problems W"' be achieved. iS One standard device, shared with other metaphysicians,,,, arbitrary redefinition. How can he undo, for instance. 'divorce of nature from aesthetic values' which led Slle"°,17 and Wordsworth to reject the scientists' picture of things, Here is how he does it: " ' Value ' is the word I use for to,n° intrinsic reality of an event. . . . Realisation therefore IS .:„ itself the attainment of value. . . . The endurance of an Orli represents the attainment of a limited wsthetic success, th011g..,s . . . it may represent the conflict between a lower succeD„ and a higher failure. The conflict is the presage of disruption! (Science and the Modern World, Ch. V.) This amounts onlY
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