Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)

This book is famous for being one of the most difficult, yet still worth reading. I’d say this lived up to that reputation. Of the five parts, the first two were the hardest. Two reasons were the vocabulary and the style. Whitehead’s project was nothing less than a cosmology—a complete system that can explain everything (even day-to-day life, Whitehead insists; he finds most philosophies fail on this point). Anyone presenting a new philosophical system has to create new terms (for show more example, “prehension,” “concresence”) or use existing ones in new ways. Whitehead does some of both. One of the best things about the corrected edition is its uncommonly useful index, so that whenever I needed to, I could look up terms. The table of contents also includes detailed summaries of the topics covered in each chapter.

The other difficulty was that the first part is largely taken up with outlining Whitehead’s categoreal [sic] scheme. Its axiomatic style may have come from Whitehead’s career as a mathematician; it reminded me of Euclid. Whitehead doesn’t spend time arguing for the truth of these axioms; he simply states them. The justification for them comes, for the most part, in parts three and four.

Given these and other difficulties, I looked for ways to bootstrap myself into the book. I read two books reputed to be basic introductions, but found they weren’t as helpful as I’d hoped. I was also disappointed that each, despite being brief, wasted space on each author’s personal interests, with only a tenuous connection to Whitehead’s book. More helpful were relevant articles in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and discussion in Victor Lowe’s Whitehead biography.

Whitehead refers to God throughout the book, and I wondered if this were a necessary part of the system until I read part five, the briefest of the book, which showed me the notion of God wasn’t a remnant of Whitehead’s upbringing in a vicarage or a way of coping with the loss of one of his sons and many of his students in the First World War. God, as presented here, is the result of philosophical inquiry, not revelation. His necessity follows from the need of a connection for eternal objects (Whitehead’s term for what are usually called universals). Like everything else, this God has a dual nature, which Whitehead calls, in the case of God, primordial and consequent. The primordial nature is not preexistent, but coeval with the world. Although not conscious, it is the source of creativity, of novelty. It is the initial aim that gives the impetus for each event that forms. The consequent nature seems to be a storehouse of everything that has happened. “He [God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life.”

This consequent nature of God is a big reason why Whitehead’s posthumous influence seems to have been greater among theologians than philosophers. In a way, that is paradoxical, since the concept of a passionate God runs throughout the Hebrew scriptures. Those scriptures aren’t the only source of doctrine, and the idea of an impassible God, taken from Aristotle, has been a widely held dogmatic notion; thus many theologians have seen the consequent nature of God (“the fellow-sufferer who understands,” as Whitehead puts it) as one of the most important contributions of process thought.

I thought it fitting that this child of the manse, despite rejecting organized religion, found no better way of expressing the duality at the heart of existence, permanence and flux, than in the words of a beloved hymn: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide”.

The consequent nature of God relates to what Whitehead calls “objective immortality” (the only kind of immortality mentioned). Every actual event, when it reaches its final stage, which Whitehead calls “satisfaction,” perishes and becomes a “datum” (a given) in the world, available for new events to draw on. The perishing that follows satisfaction is as much a part of reality as the becoming that draws on it. Yet for Whitehead, this is not simply the way things are; he calls it “the ultimate evil in the temporal world”.

Throughout the book, Whitehead engages prominent philosophers of the past, at times idiosyncratically. For instance, he seems to agree with much of what Descartes wrote (albeit with changes in terminology), except for the one tenet most people associate with Descartes: the mind/body dualism. Whitehead’s take on mind was one of the many things I enjoyed; Whitehead repeatedly insists that consciousness is a late stage of development. Whitehead calls it “the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base”.

Whitehead calls his project the philosophy of organism, yet it is now commonly referred to as process thought, in part because of the book title. Process relates to one of Whitehead’s basic points: his replacement of what is called “substance” in most philosophical systems with “actual entities” or “occasions.” This reflected the latest developments in physics (relativity and quantum mechanics) at the time the book was written and captured the world’s constant transience. It is related to Whitehead’s preoccupation with perishing.

To propose a complete cosmology, with its unabashed interest in metaphysics, was definitely outside the mainstream of philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Its audacity is balanced by humility. In the Preface, Whitehead writes: “how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths of the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly”.

All in all, for all its difficulty, this book was a rewarding read. show less

This book is more ambitious than its title, which suggests a primer for youths interested in philosophy, might indicate. Then one comes to the final chapters and gains a full grasp of what the terms “adventure” and “ideas” signified for the author. Adventures of Ideas represents an integral part of Whitehead’s lifelong quest to reestablish metaphysics in a way that takes seriously challenges to previous metaphysics raised by sensationalist views of the human mind (Locke through show more Hume) and positivist views of society and history. This project was not pursued for its own sake, however. As Whitehead writes: “The point is, that speculative extension beyond direct observation spells some trust in metaphysics, however vaguely these metaphysical notions may be entertained in explicit thought. Our metaphysical knowledge is slight, superficial, incomplete. Thus errors creep in. But, such as it is, metaphysical understanding guides imagination and justifies purpose. Apart from metaphysical presupposition there can be no civilization” (p. 128). High stakes indeed. Still, he admits that the project cannot be crowned with any “triumphs of finality. We cannot produce that final adjustment of well-defined generalities which constitute a complete metaphysics” (p. 145).
Whitehead wrote at a time when unbridled capitalism and industrialism had been overcome; this seems poignant in light of recent developments. He confidently declares: “[N]o one now holds that, apart from some further directive agency, mere individualistic competition, of itself and by its own self-righting character, will produce a satisfactory society” (p. 35). One could not help but think of the post-2016-election society as the author diagnoses a civilization that has passed its zenith and reached the close of an epoch. He sees two possibilities. One is slow decline: “The prolongation of outworn forms of life means a slow decadence in which there is repetition without any fruit in the reaping of value.” The other is when a form of civilization has been exhausted, but not the creative springs of originality that were its basis. “In that case, a quick period of transition may set in, which may or may not be accompanied by dislocations involving widespread unhappiness” (p. 278). So which are we in for?
This book is said to be one of the author’s more accessible works, but I could have used some help bootstrapping my way into his thought-world. For a long stretch, the material seemed so disparate that I asked myself for whom the book was written or whether the book had an overall point. Then in the last three chapters, it all came together. Still, this reader would have found it helpful if the connecting tissue would have been more evident throughout. Also, I would have liked to see more sentences that began “for instance.”
When going back over the book a second time, I noticed that the author had given clues along the way of where he was heading. For instance, in Chapter 6, Foresight, he writes a description of philosophy that seemed to sum up his aim in this book:
“Philosophy is not a mere collection of noble sentiments. A deluge of such sentiments does more harm than good. Philosophy is at once general and concrete, critical and appreciative of direct intuition. It is not—or, at least, should not be—a ferocious debate between irritable professors. It is a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities. In philosophy, the fact, the theory, the alternatives, and the ideal, are weighed together. Its gifts are insight and foresight, and a sense of the worth of life, in short, that sense of importance which nerves all civilized effort. Mankind can flourish in the lower stages of life with merely barbaric flashes of thought. But when civilization culminates, the absence of a coördinating philosophy of life, spread throughout the community, spells decadence, boredom, and the slackening of effort.”
This claim seems to express the rationale behind Whitehead’s project. For him, nothing less is at stake than the progress of civilization, a teleological aim he sees threatened by a loss of the sense of adventure.
My copy could have been copy-edited more carefully. Not a significant number of typos overall, but more than a quality book should have. Some were amusing, though. On page 216, I’m fairly sure Whitehead meant “brain,” not “grain.” show less

A razão surge nessas três palestras como a contra-tendência de complexificação no universo cuja função é promover a arte da boa vida. Assim, Whitehead exulta-nos a considerar a ideia de finalidade como tendo tanta substância quanto a de acaso, circunstancialidade. A razão afinal, atesta ela mesma que possui essa potência e precisa se colocar como parte dos fatos a serem analisados, quando da evolução das espécies ou da fabricação de mundos e de fatos em geral. Assim, as show more ideias embarcam em aventuras, por não apenas reportarem-se a métodos e evidências, mas por constituirem especulativamente os mesmos, quando a razão, pelo seu impulso criativo a desdobrar-se em modos de viver e construir vivências, se lança sobre a existência. Ademais Whitehead insiste no papel da metafísica como cosmologia, isto é uma metafísica imbricada nas decisões científico-filosóficas e nos alerta contra um predomínio acrítico (dogmático no vocabulário dele) de concepções excessivamente abstratas da realidade (como o materialismo e várias posições científicas duras que não percebem que fatos são construídos ou aparecem em meio a processos que possuem componente intencionais e especulativos). show less

This book was part of the welcome packet for incoming students to Boston University’s School of Public Communication (as it was called then) a half-century ago. I recently reread it, and find it hard to reconstruct what I made of some of the more abstruse essays at the time. The ones that I got the most out of back then, to judge from my underlining, still speak directly to me. Some of the author’s proposals for education carried the day; I wish more of them had been adopted. Some of the show more other essays, such as “The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas,” are heavy going. Taken together, though, the lectures and articles collected here are evidence of a first-class mind at work. Of course, the oldest of these lectures were given more than a century ago. Whether you find his unexamined assumption that all scholars are male exasperating or merely quaint will depend on how tolerant you are of paragons of a bygone age. For others, the language may be off-putting; Whitehead writes as British dons did back then. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the scientific lectures seem more dated than those that deal with education. Taken however as texts that show a first-class mathematician and philosopher coming to terms with the then-new theory of relativity, they remain valuable. show less