| Introduction |
| Close to the statue of Newton in the entrance to the chapel
at Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a wall-plaque to the
memory of Alfred North Whitehead. It was this statue of Newton
that Wordsworth, who studied here a century after Newton and
a century before Whitehead, famously described as: |
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
|
| And we might quite appropriately borrow his imagery to speak
of the mind of Whitehead. For Whitehead also was embarked on
an intellectual voyage that often took him out of sight of most
of his contemporaries. Even now, he remains an isolated figure,
at least in the world of academic philosophy, the subject of
some specialised interest but otherwise respected rather than
read. If students of philosophy are aware of him at all, it
is usually as the co-author, with Bertrand Russell, of Principia
Mathematica; or perhaps, if they have an interest in the
philosophy of religion, they may know him as the primary inspiration
of Process Theology. And since neither of these is likely to
be at all central to their course, his name appears only rarely
on their reading lists. |
| But as a result, they lose something that is potentially of
the highest value across a whole range of intellectual concerns,
including central philosophical disciplines like the theory
of knowledge, the philosophy of science and the philosophies
of mind and language. One role of the original thinker in any
field - and arguably the most important role - is to be a source,
not so much of new answers to existing questions, but rather
of new conceptual equipment in terms of which questions and
answers alike can be reformulated. And when we consider the
whole range of Whitehead's writings, the one thing that can
scarcely fail to strike us is their originality, the wealth
of conceptual novelty that they yield. It amounts indeed to
nothing less than a whole new way of thinking, a distinctively
Whiteheadian way of looking at the entire scheme of things -
at nature, humanity and God. |
| No doubt it is wise to be wary of originality on quite this
scale. And if it were simply a display of eccentricity, even
of eccentricity touched with genius, its interest and value
would be limited. For there would be no compelling reason why
anyone should make the effort to think in Whitehead's concepts,
or see how the world looks through his eyes. But a crucial part
of the whole enterprise is the endeavour to show us that we
need such a radical revision: it is not just a luxury or a kind
of second home for intellectual vacations. We need it, specifically,
in order to do justice to the advance of science in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, an advance which has, quite simply,
outstripped the conceptual resources of earlier times. But we
also need it, much more generally, to do justice to human consciousness
as such. Whitehead's point, briefly, is this. In science and
in our everyday thinking and speech alike, we have habitually
simplified, and abstracted from, the world that is given to
us in experience. This is of course convenient, and even necessary,
for many purposes; and no harm is done so long as we remember
that we are abstracting and simplifying. It is when we
forget this, and commit what he calls 'the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness' - mistaking the convenient abstraction for the
concrete actuality - that we create problems for ourselves.
And the task of philosophy in helping to resolve such problems
is, in essence, to be 'the critic of abstractions,' i.e. to
make us aware of the gap between our thought and experience,
and - so far as it is possible - to bridge that gap. |
| How Whitehead set about this task is our main concern in what
follows. But it is well at the outset to acknowledge at least
part of the price that has to be paid for originality, i.e.
that the medium for giving expression to a new way of thinking
is unavoidably a language that embodies another, older way.
Any existing language has already a certain way (or certain
ways) of thinking, in this sense, built into it; and hence it
is always to some degree an awkward and inappropriate vehicle
for an alternative. Whitehead manifestly has some heroic struggles
with the restraints imposed on him by the English language.
As he confesses at the beginning of Process and Reality:
|
Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality
foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements
of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors
mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.
|
| This is what accounts primarily for the famous, or notorious,
obscurity of some of his philosophical writings. It is certainly
not a matter of literary incompetence: in his expositions of
the history of ideas, for example, he writes lucid and often
elegant prose. The difficulty we encounter elsewhere is inherent
in the very nature of the philosophical task. |
| But, while this difficulty is genuine enough, it should not
be exaggerated. Words and phrases can be stretched a long way
and still remain meaningful; and even in rigorous intellectual
disciplines, more things are wrought by metaphor that the literal-minded
dream of. Most of us who are concerned with such things at all
are, in all probability, able to muster enough mental agility
to make the imaginative leap for which Whitehead asks. It is
primarily a matter of being persuaded of the value - or even,
as Whitehead would have it, the intellectual necessity - of
making such a leap. Or, to vary the analogy, it is a matter
of being persuaded that the promise of a new and panoramic view
from the summit offsets the rigours of the climb. |
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