Introduction to Whitehead

READING Alfred North Whitehead is like learning to swim. The instructor is kindly, helpful, puts one at his ease, and at the start one can always put his foot down and touch bottom. But he keeps getting us in deeper and deeper until we are in over our heads, swimming for our lives, astonished that, we can swim at all, and glorying in it.

People often ask, “What book of Whitehead could I understand?” One answer is, “Parts, and large parts, of them all ”; another answer is “Almost the whole of this one, Essays in Science and Philosophy (Philosophical Library, Inc. $4.75).” In it Whitehead himself has written the Introduction to Whitehead.

The first three chapters are personal history, highly picturesque and amusing, illumined by flashes of his lively humor. Here at the same time one sees the gathering of his forces, how he took in history as it were through his pores from living at elbows with its sites and architectural monuments of the past two thousand years. Being schooled in science and humanism by the nineteenth century, the scientific revolution between 1880 and 1900, while be was still a young man, shook the false certitudes of that century out of him and prepared his mind to ride the hurricanes of the twentieth.

From here the chapters go on into Philosophy, Education, and Science. Covering a span of thirty years though these writings do, they are surprisingly unified. Some are prophetic. “An Appeal to Sanity” (1939) has been reprinted without the alteration of a word. There was nothing to take back. Foresight so comprehensive can only mean that when a man’s thought goes up into a sufficiently high mountain, it can anticipate events. He knew and said in 1939 what others know in 1947. Probably this prophetic strain in him will be found to stretch over generations.

Like old friends or old violins, Whitehead’s thought must be lived with to be known. Not until it is taken into one’s bloodstream is it possessed. Reading his pages is at once process and reality: you grasp (or perhaps at first you don’t grasp) the idea tersely worded there, but that is only the start, almost the least of it; for at the same time an immense surrounding area of one’s own intellectual capability is being set in motion, and one is well aware of it, although only long afterward is it clear what the effects of that activation were. While he is creating in us the world of his thought, be is also making us create our own worlds.

This second process is so powerful that it often seems like a palpable substance. Whitehead thinks first in mathematical concepts, then translates them into the English language. His style has thus a conciseness, a concentration, and a force that are well-nigh unique. A single paragraph of seven sentences may contain seven ideas each of which could be expanded into a chapter. ( The reader is supposed to do the expanding.) Grecian and Latinist, Whitehead’s English is lucid, beautiful, witty, and as understandable to the layman as the matter permits. He himself considers that his books are well within the grasp of educated renders; but it is doubtful if the English language has often been made to work so hard for its living.

All the while, Whitehead is not impressed by the adequacy of language to express the complexity of our conscious thought, and still less by the adequacy of our conscious thought to convey the vast, world of our subconscious. “The curse of philosophy,” he has said, “has been the supposition that language is an exact medium. Philosophers verbalize an idea and then suppose it has been staled for all time. Even if it had been accurately stated, it would still need to be restated for each succeeding epoch. Plato is the only one of the lot who knew this and did not fall into the trap; and he, you will remember, began with mathematics. If civilization continues to advance in the next two thousand years, the overwhelming novelty in human thought will he the dominance of mathematical understanding.”

Two pitfalls which stand in the path of man Whitehead warns us against repeatedly. All truths, he would say, are half-truths, valuable as such, but when taken for whole truths they play the devil. The other is “stagnant thought,” “dead ideas,” the false certitude of dogmatism. Here let him say it himself: —

“ The hitman race consists of a small group of animals which for a small time has barely differentiated itself from the mass of animal life on a small planet circling around a small sun. The Uinverse is vast, Nothing is more ear ions than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Sceptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and sceptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure, The Universe is vast.”

Process and Reality is the book which cost Whitehead most and which he most wanted to write. It contains the heart of his thinking and at the heart of his thought is this sentence which will bear thinking about for the rest of one’s life; —

“ The process itself is the actuality,”