Whitehead

fit for our era as his own philosophy of organism allows them to take shape and be articulated. The notions of beauty, truth, adventure, zest, Eros, and peace are given a content drawn from the technical understandings elaborated in Process and Reality. But in Adventures of Ideas a less technical language is used, a language reminiscent of the poetic imagery found in the style of Plato’s Republic, a language making the ideas accessible to readers who have not mastered Process and Reality, but at the same time far richer and more meaningful to those who have. Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas that Plato’s later thought ‘circles round the interweaving of seven main notions, namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The Receptacle. These notions are as important for us now, as they were then at the dawn of the modern world, when civilizations of the old type were dying.’ Whitehead uses these notions in quite novel and modern ways; one who is unfamiliar with his metaphysics can get something of what he means as he speaks of the Eros of the Universe, but if one is familiar from Process and Reality with the notions of the Primordial Nature of God and the Consequent Nature of God then one sees much deeper into the meanings present in Adventures of Ideas. Whitehead was not religious in any narrow, doctrinal, sectarian sense. He explicitly likened his stance to that of Aristotle, dispassionately considering the requirements of his metaphysical system as they refer to the question of the existence and nature of God. Whitehead’s thoughts on these matters are most fully developed in Chapter 11 of Science and the Modern World, in the final chapter of Process and Reality, and in Religion in the Making (1926). These thoughts are expressed at a high level of generality. Perhaps because of this, a large part of the interest generated by Whitehead’s thought has been within the community of theologians. His ideas fairly beg for elaboration and development in the context of particular modes of religious understanding. It is as though many modern theologians, recalling the relation between the theology of Aquinas and the metaphysics of Aristotle, cannot resist the temptation to play Aquinas to Whitehead’s Aristotle. Process theology, or Neo-Classical Theology as it is referred to by Hartshorne, one of its leading practitioners, has been the arena within which a great deal of clarification and development of Whitehead’s ideas has occurred. Whitehead was a gentle man, soft-spoken, never overbearing or threatening. He constantly encouraged students to step out on their own, to develop their creative capacities. His concern not to inhibit students made him a notoriously easy grader; it was said that an A-minus in one of his courses was equivalent to failure. Lucien Price’s Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead chronicles many evenings of discussion in the Whitehead household. He there described Whitehead as follows: his face, serene, luminous, often smiling, the complexion pink and white, the eyes brilliant blue, clear and candid as a child’s yet with the depth of the sage, often laughing or twinkling with humour. And there was his figure, slender, frail, and bent with its lifetime of a scholar’s toil. Always benign, there was not a grain of ill will anywhere in him; for all his formidable armament, never a wounding word. See also LEIBNIZ , METAPHYSICS , PROCESS THEOLOGY, RUSSEL. D.W.S.

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