Alfred North (1861–1947), English mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, and metaphysician. Educated first at the Sherborne School in Dorsetshire and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, Whitehead emerged as a first-class mathematician with a rich general background. In 1885 he became a fellow of Trinity College and remained there in a teaching role until 1910. In the early 1890s Bertrand Russell entered Trinity College as a student in mathematics; by the beginning of the new century Russell had become not only a student and friend but a colleague of Whitehead’s at Trinity College. Each had written a first book on algebra (Whitehead’s A Treatise on Universal Algebra won him election to the Royal Society in 1903). When they discovered that their projected second books largely overlapped, they undertook a collaboration on a volume that they estimated would take about a year to write; in fact, it was a decade later that the three volumes of their ground-breaking Principia Mathematica appeared, launching symbolic logic in its modern form. In the second decade of this century Whitehead and Russell drifted apart; their responses to World War I differed radically, and their intellectual interests and orientations diverged. Whitehead’s London period (1910–24) is often viewed as the second phase of a three-phase career. His association with the University of London involved him in practical issues affecting the character of working-class education. For a decade (1914–24) Whitehead held a professorship at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and also served as dean of the Faculty of Science in the University, chair of the Academic Council (which managed educational affairs in London), and chair of the council that managed Goldsmith’s College. His book The Aims of Education (1928) is a collection of essays largely growing out of reflections on the experiences of these years. Intellectually, Whitehead’s interests were moving toward issues in the philosophy of science. In the years 1919–22 he published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity – the third led to his later (1931) election as a fellow of the British Academy. In 1924, at the age of sixty-three, Whitehead made a dramatic move, both geographically and intellectually, to launch phase three of his career: never having formally studied philosophy in his life, he agreed to become professor of philosophy at Harvard University, a position he held until retirement in 1937. The accompanying intellectual shift was a move from philosophy of science to metaphysics. The earlier investigations had assumed the self-containedness of nature: ‘nature is closed to mind.’ The philosophy of nature examined nature at the level of abstraction entailed by this assumption. Whitehead had come to regard philosophy as ‘the critic of abstractions,’ a notion introduced in Science and the Modern World (1925). This book traced the intertwined emergence of Newtonian science and its philosophical presuppositions. It noted that with the development of the theory of relativity in the twentieth century, scientific understanding had left behind the Newtonian conceptuality that had generated the still-dominant philosophical assumptions, and that those philosophical assumptions considered in themselves had become inadequate to explicate our full concrete experience. Philosophy as the critic of abstractions must recognize the limitations of a stance that assumes that nature is closed to mind, and must push deeper, beyond such an abstraction, to create a scheme of ideas more in harmony with scientific developments and able to do justice to human beings as part of nature. Science and the Modern World merely outlines what such a philosophy might be; in 1929 Whitehead published his magnum opus, titled Process and Reality. In this volume, subtitled ‘An Essay in Cosmology,’ his metaphysical understanding is given its final form. It is customary to regard this book as the central document of what has become known as process philosophy, though Whitehead himself frequently spoke of his system of ideas as the philosophy of organism.
Process and Reality begins with a sentence that sheds a great deal of light upon Whitehead’s metaphysical orientation: ‘These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume.’ Descartes, adapting the classical notion of substance to his own purposes, begins a ‘phase of philosophic thought’ by assuming there are two distinct, utterly different kinds of substance, mind and matter, each requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. This assumption launches the reign of epistemology within philosophy: if knowing begins with the experiencing of a mental substance capable of existing by itself and cut off from everything external to it, then the philosophical challenge is to try to justify the claim to establish contact with a reality external to it. The phrase ‘and ended with Hume’ expresses Whitehead’s conviction that Hume (and more elegantly, he notes, Santayana) showed that if one begins with Descartes’s metaphysical assumptions, skepticism is inevitable. Contemporary philosophers have talked about the end of philosophy. From Whitehead’s perspective such talk presupposes a far too narrow view of the nature of philosophy. It is true that a phase of philosophy has ended, a phase dominated by epistemology. Whitehead’s response is to offer the dictum that all epistemological difficulties are at bottom only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. One must return to that moment of Cartesian beginning and replace the substance metaphysics with an orientation that avoids the epistemological trap, meshes harmoniously with the scientific understandings that have displaced the much simpler physics of Descartes’s day, and is consonant with the facts of evolution. These are the considerations that generate Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical category, the category of an actual occasion. An actual occasion is not an enduring, substantial entity. Rather, it is a process of becoming, a process of weaving together the ‘prehensions’ (a primitive form of ‘apprehension’ meant to indicate a ‘taking account of,’ or ‘feeling,’ devoid of conscious awareness) of the actual occasions that are in the immediate past. Whitehead calls this process of weaving together the inheritances of the past ‘concrescence.’ An actual entity is its process of concrescence, its process of growing together into a unified perspective on its immediate past. (The seeds of Whitehead’s epistemological realism are planted in these fundamental first moves: ‘The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. . . . For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world.’) It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is ‘all window.’ It is as though one were to take Aristotle’s system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its position of preeminence by the category of relation – the result would, mutatis mutandis, be an understanding of being somewhat on the model of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. In moving from Descartes’s dualism of mental substance and material substance to his own notion of an actual entity, Whitehead has been doing philosophy conceived of as the critique of abstractions. He holds that both mind and matter are abstractions from the concretely real. They are important abstractions, necessary for everyday thought and, of supreme importance, absolutely essential in enabling the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to accomplish their magnificent advances in scientific thinking. Indeed, Whitehead, in his philosophy of science phase, by proceeding as though ‘nature is closed to mind,’ was operating with those selfsame abstractions. He came to see that while these abstractions were indispensable for certain kinds of investigations, they were, at the philosophical level, as Hume had demonstrated, a disaster. In considering mind and matter to be ontological ultimates, Descartes had committed what Whitehead termed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The category of an actual occasion designates the fully real, the fully concrete. The challenge for such an orientation, the challenge that Process and Reality is designed to meet, is so to describe actual occasions that it is intelligible how collections of actual occasions, termed ‘nexus’ or societies, emerge, exhibiting the characteristics we find associated with ‘minds’ and ‘material structures.’ Perhaps most significantly, if this challenge is met successfully, biology will be placed, in the eyes of philosophy, on an even footing with physics; metaphysics will do justice both to human beings and to human beings as a part of nature; and such vexing contemporary problem areas as animal rights and environmental ethics will appear in a new light.
Whitehead’s last two books, Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938), are less technical and more lyrical than is Process and Reality. Adventures of Ideas is clearly the more significant of these two. It presents a philosophical study of the notion of civilization. It holds that the social changes in a civilization are driven by two sorts of forces: brute, senseless agencies of compulsion on the one hand, and formulated aspirations and articulated beliefs on the other. (These two sorts of forces are epitomized by barbarians and Christianity in the ancient Roman world and by steam and democracy in the world of the industrial revolution.) Whitehead’s focal point in Adventures of Ideas is aspirations, beliefs, and ideals as instruments of change. In particular, he is concerned to articulate the ideals and aspirations appropriate to our own era. The character of such ideals and aspirations at any moment is limited by the philosophical understandings available at that moment, because in their struggle for release and efficacy such ideals and aspirations can appear only in the forms permitted by the available philosophical discourse. In the final section of Adventures of Ideas Whitehead presents a statement of ideals and aspirations