And what a fascinating walk through the reality shops! It makes it very clear that the issue is in the interpretation of the evidence.
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British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a philosopher of flux and change, and of continuity as well. He is considered by many to have produced the most impressive metaphysical statement of the 20th century. He brought to this task a tremendous knowledge of mathematics, logic, physics and other sciences, as well as “a sensitive appreciation for the varied aspects of human culture.”1 Whitehead, in addition to his prodigious work in mathematics and logic – with Bertrand Russell he wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica [1910] -- produced both a “natural philosophy,” or history of science, and a metaphysics. The last is remarkable for incorporating his mathematics/logic and also his natural philosophy. There are aspects of his thought that are strongly evocative of ancient Greek philosophy, especially that of the philosopher of flux and constancy, Heraclitus; and also Plato. At the same time, Whitehead’s insights strongly anticipate the breakthroughs of quantum physics that would follow in the first quarter of the 20th century.
I had hoped to be able to give a very general account of Whitehead’s life and thought in the space of a very short paper. Unfortunately, given the sheer vastness of the subject matter, it seems I must be more selective than I like. So only to touch on certain main points will be my limited aim here.
We begin with Whitehead’s Cambridge days, and his collaboration with his brilliant student Bertrand Russell. The two men were proponents of Logicism, the theory that mathematics in some fundamental sense is completely reducible to logic. As A. D. Irvine points out, Logicism “consists of two main theses: The first is that all mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of the vocabulary of logic. The second is that all mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems of mathematics constitute a proper subset of the theorems of logic.”2
Unfortunately for Logicism, however, one stormy night she came up hard against the rocky shoals of the famous Russell Paradox, foundered, broke up, and was sunk. Russell’s Paradox reared its ugly head in the course of Whitehead’s and Russell’s collaboration, and was formally elaborated in the Principia. Yet actually, the paradox is quite an ancient one. As Richard Lubbock writes,
Russell discovered his paradox shortly before the work on Principia began. The problem had slept for 2,500 years, like a cerebral aneurism waiting to burst within the skull of mathematics, ever since Epimenides the Cretan had declared that all Cretans were liars. Was Epimenides himself a liar? “Nobody treated that as anything but a joke,” wrote Russell; but he found that this hoary parlour puzzle struck at the very root of arithmetic. He had the bright idea of applying Epimenides’s reasoning to logical classes, which form the basis of numbers. In particular, he ruminated on the class of those classes that are not members of themselves. To his dismay he found both that it belonged to itself, and that it didn’t: an intolerable result. He later said that he thought at first there must be some error in his thinking. He “inspected it under a logical microscope”, without finding any mistake. In the end he mailed the bad news to Whitehead, who scrutinized it, and replied with a cheerless telegram, quoting Browning: “Never glad confident morning again”.3
In short, Russell’s Paradox lands us in the same logical limbo as Heisenberg’s uncertainty (indeterminacy) principle, and Cantor’s incompleteness principle. Who knows? Perhaps this experience was a factor in Whitehead’s finding himself increasingly drawn by philosophical questions over his life. In the progression of his work,
He took his starting point from the sciences, but for him science was merely one of the resources of philosophy, along with aesthetics, history, religious experience, and the deliveries of common sense….
His program in regard to natural philosophy, or philosophy of science, was to deduce scientific concepts from the simplest elements of our perceptual knowledge…. [T]he object of the analysis is nature, and by nature Whitehead means the world presented to our awareness. And although he speaks of percipient events, meaning the relevant bodily states of observers, individual minds are regarded as outside nature, and so outside the scope of philosophy of science. Man and value are excluded from the study. Philosophy of science, or natural philosophy, is therefore vastly different from metaphysics, which must include such considerations.”4
On first view, this statement seems to affirm the “legitimacy” of the alleged “Cartesian split” between science and philosophy. It seems to support the premises of methodological (and metaphysical) naturalism, which in turn would tend to validate the premises of scientific materialism according to which all derivations of “the natural” would seem to depend these days. But do not count on it. For as Whitehead asserts,
“There persists … [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.”5
As Lubbock points out, “Many Victorians had cherished the proud hope that they could soon dissolve all the world's problems in a blaze of universal scientific reason.”6 Indeed, this supposition still has ardent defenders in our own time:
“During his 1998 American tour, Stephen Hawking stated while visiting the President at the White House that in a very few years scientists will be able to describe all the natural laws and processes that govern the behavior of every natural system that exists within the universe and use these laws to predict correctly such behavior. This is the basic philosophy of science that drives many scientist[s].”7
Suffice it to say, Whitehead has no reliance on such suppositional certainties:
“There persists,” says Whitehead, “[a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.”
For Whitehead, as Lubbock writes, “There are no fundamental ‘things,’ or ‘objects’ in the world…. Whitehead’s ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only processes. Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions. Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same form: that of the human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise later.”8
The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when addressing issues of teleology and when trying to develop a comprehensive, intergrated picture of the universe as a whole. According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is therefore essential, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand modern physics as from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology. Says Whitehead, “Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events.” … The end result is that Whitehead concludes that “nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process,”9
That is, for Whitehead reality is not constituted by the present configuration of discrete particles of “blind” matter moving according to the strict dictates of the physico-chemical laws only. That would be the description provided by the “least action principle” of physics, which is essentially a conservation principle. There is certainly a conservation principle at work in reality (see later discussion). But nature assumes ever new forms of manifestation not by a process of “least action,” but by constant “creative” and “adventuresome” striving, and (emotional) desiring for the fullest completion or manifestation of its own possibilities, by choosing; and by choosing, constituting a “past” which then becomes the base for the immediate present, and from thence the indefinite future. The medium of this process, which Whitehead calls the extensive continuum, bears all the hallmarks of a universal, atemporal (that is, infinite) field. Because it seems we are dealing with a universal field, we have to allow for non-local and superpositioned or “entangled” effects. The “event” or “occasion” “does not passively copy the past: in the act of self-creation it refreshes the design of the past, thereby inventing its novel present, and preparing for its possible futures. Whitehead calls these takeovers ‘prehensions’. The verb ‘to prehend’ means to engulf, perceive and transform.
“So the soul of a man, or of an electron, or of a bacillus, is a sequence of prehensions, or takeovers, each of which prehends all its predecessors.”10
In their own way sub-atomic particles copy the action of the human subject. Quantum theorists describe how the electron consults its table of transition possibilities, chooses one actual value, and makes it real. The electron’s decision, like the human being’s, is free and unpredictable, although limited by objective fact. Just as non-local effects modify the electron, so do non-sensuous and conceptual prehensions enter our own decisions.”11
Whitehead states that “the cosmos is a network of ‘actual occasions’, which are pulses of feeling and acts of choice. Every factor of experience must call on all the others in order to express itself. Each occasion is a process which perishes as soon as it has asserted itself. Once dead, it forms the base, and sets the limits, for the deeds of its successors. The nodes of Whitehead's solidarity network are active, and the pattern never ceases to change.”12
Which leads Whitehead to the concept of “a society” – which pertains to “the soul of a man, or of an electron, or of a bacillus,” as well as to what we normally think of when we use that word.
For Whitehead, Lubbock writes: “All societies display some mental qualities, because every occasion seeks emotional delight. You stand little chance of catching a rock in a spontaneous act, though you may watch it for ages. The decisions of the rock's atoms are all chained together in the crystals; and even if a single crystal could make up its mind to tunnel somewhere else, it would have to persuade all its fellow-crystals to go with it. Most of the world appears to be dead because in non-living societies, the members' mental desires cancel each other out.”13
Time and space prohibit a fuller consideration here of Whitehead’s view of “societies,” though hopefully the hints given will spur the reader to investigate the matter further. Suffice it to say collections of entities collaborate in given events, and their collaboration is motivated by emotional, creative desire for self-actualization which becomes in due course a part of the “evolutionary record” going forward in time. But if we are to speak of desire, and creative fulfillment of potentialities, we must recognize that there can be no desire without an end or goal or purpose in view. What, in nature, is available to specify such creative ends as desirable in the first place?
It is here that Whitehead becomes for many moderns, controversial; for he here presents us with a view of God that neither secular philosophers nor scientific materialists are disposed to like. In fact, probably a whole lot of, say, Christian believers, would have little use for it either.
It seems to me that Whitehead handles “the problem of God” in the classical, Platonic manner: God is “Beyond” the cosmos, but his attributes are not only in the cosmos, but actually govern it – by way of providing eternal objects of creative desire towards which both living and non-living systems aspire. For Plato, the divine attributes are summed up in the Agathon -- the vision of Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Love, and Justice. Whitehead’s “agathon” is apparently composed of: Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace.
As to what Whitehead’s particular religious views might have been, we can only conjecture from the known facts about his life. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman; he married a devout (and high-spirited) Roman Catholic, with whom he explored in depth Thomas a Kempis, and the great Doctors of the Church. It is said he came within a hair’s breadth of converting to Rome. But then, by about age 37, he decided to chuck the whole “Christianity business” and become a Freethinker. From that point forward, his "spiritual history" goes silent.
Yet what seems clear is that Whitehead regards God as the source of the endless fecundity of possibilities in the universe, the source of “plenitude,” or of “cosmic exuberance.” “Whitehead gives us no advice for prayer, and suggests no scripts for ritual.”14
What he does do is to posit (1) the primordial nature of God; and (2), the consequent nature of God.15
The first accounts for the fact that the world never runs out of possibilities; it is the source of all novelty, of all emergence of the new in the universe. The second refers to the “retention of the novelties achieved as the contingent future becomes the actual present and the immortal past.”16
Thus Whitehead, seemingly following Plato, does not support the idea of the inception of the universe as a divine creation ex nihilo, but rather the idea of an “eternal universe.” Notwithstanding, Whitehead’s eternal universe (like Plato’s) is absolutely contingent on God. And this is not the same view as that of the eastern mystic, for though “beyond” the universe, God is still “in it” as its foundational and overarching teleological rule:
Whitehead flatly denies that God is the omnipotent creator and tyrant before whom mankind's first duty is to offer up fulsome metaphysical compliments. Though not omnipotent, God is necessary. Further, Whitehead asserts that God must be unique. What’s more, Whitehead’s God, although unique, appears to be not One, but Two. The first part of God is the Realm of Eternal Objects. I call this the Alpha-God, and it is unconscious, resembling Plato’s world of ideal forms, Aristotle's world of potentia, and Steven Hawking’s wave function of the entire universe. One is even tempted to identify this Alpha-God with the Tao. The second part of Whitehead’s God is the ‘Consequent Nature’, the Omega-God, which is conscious, in the same sense that we are conscious.17
Thus Whitehead’s God does not stand impassively “outside” the “All that there is.” Rather, he suffers and rejoices with the world.18 And this view, oddly enough, clearly resonates with the core principle of Christianity.
Must close for now; but not before citing Lubbock’s own beautiful conclusion to his outstanding essay on Whitehead [see link below]:
Many critics complain that Whitehead’s metaphysic is hard to understand. To me his writings clearly describe a cosmic net of mutually creative moments. Every moment flows to its own purpose; everything perishes; each spark of experience relies on the whole net for its value; the final cause of the cosmos is beauty in action.19
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ENDNOTES:
1W. L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought. New Jersey:Humanities Press, 1980; p. 622.
2 A. D. Irvine, Whitehead’s Philosophical Influence
3 Richard Lubbock, Alfred North Whitehead for the Muddleheaded
4Reese, p. 623.
5Irvine.
6Lubbock.
7 Robert A. Herrmann, The Wondrous Design and Non-random Character of ‘Chance’ Events
8Lubbock.
9Irvine.
10Lubbock.
11Lubbock.
12Lubbock.
13Lubbock.
14Lubbock.
15Reese, p. 624f.
16Reese, p. 624f.
17Lubbock.
18Reese, p. 625.
19Lubbock.