Life
Whitehead was born in
Ramsgate,
Kent,
England. Although his grandfather, Thomas Whitehead, was known for having founded
Chatham House Academy, a fairly successful school for boys, Alfred North was educated at
Sherborne School,
Dorset, then considered one of the best
public schools in the country. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports, mathematics and was head prefect of his class.
In 1880, Whitehead matriculated at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was fourth
wrangler and gained his BA in 1884.
[1] Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write mathematics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Russell, on the first edition of
Principia Mathematica.
[2]
In 1910, he resigned his position at Trinity College to protest the dismissal of a colleague because of an adulterous affair. He also ran afoul of a Cambridge by-law limiting the term of a Senior Lecturer to 25 years.
In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman reared in France; they had a daughter and two sons. One son died in action while serving in the
Royal Flying Corps during
World War I. Meanwhile, Russell spent much of 1918 in prison because of his
pacifist activities. Although Whitehead visited his co-author in prison, he did not take his pacifism seriously, while Russell sneered at Whitehead's later speculative
Platonism and
panpsychism. After the war, Russell and Whitehead seldom interacted, and Whitehead contributed nothing to the 1925 second edition of Principia Mathematica.
Whitehead was always interested in
theology, especially in the 1890s. His family was firmly anchored in the
Church of England: his father and uncles were vicars, while his brother would become bishop of
Madras. Perhaps influenced by his wife and the writings of
Cardinal Newman, Whitehead leaned towards
Roman Catholicism. Prior to
World War I, he considered himself an
agnostic. Later he returned to religion, without formally joining any church.
Concomitantly, Whitehead developed a keen interest in
physics: his fellowship dissertation examined
James Clerk Maxwell's views on
electricity and
magnetism. His outlook on mathematics and physics was more philosophical than purely scientific; he was more concerned about their scope and nature, rather than about particular tenets and paradigms.
The period between 1910 and 1926 was mostly spent at
University College London and
Imperial College London, where he taught and wrote on physics, the philosophy of science, and the theory and practice of education. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903 and was elected to the British Academy in 1931. In
physics, Whitehead articulated a rival doctrine to
Einstein's
general relativity.
His theory of gravitation is now discredited because its predicted variability of the gravitational constant
G disagrees with experimental findings.
[3] A more lasting work was his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), a pioneering attempt to synthetize the philosophical underpinnings of physics. It has little influenced the course of modern physics, however.
Whitehead's Presidential address in 1916 to the Mathematical Association of England The Aims of Education in the book of the same title (1929a) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it."
In 1924,
Henry Osborn Taylor invited Whitehead, who was then 63, to implement his ideas and teach
philosophy at
Harvard University. This was a subject that fascinated Whitehead but that he had also not previously studied or taught. The Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. He retired from teaching in 1937. When he died in 1947 in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
U.S., there was no funeral, and his body was cremated.
Whitehead had wise and witty opinions about a vast range of human endeavour. These opinions pepper the many essays and speeches he gave on various topics between 1915 and his death (1917, 1925a, 1927, 1929a, 1929b, 1933, 1938). His Harvard lectures (1924–37) are studded with quotations from his favourite poets,
Wordsworth and
Shelley. Most Sunday afternoons when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Whiteheads hosted an
open house to which all Harvard students were welcome, and during which talk flowed freely. Some of the
obiter dicta Whitehead spoke on these occasions were recorded by Lucien Price, a Boston journalist, who published them in 1954. That book also includes a remarkable picture of Whitehead as the aged sage holding court. It was at one of these open houses that the young Harvard student
B.F. Skinner credits a discussion with Whitehead as providing the inspiration for his work
Verbal Behavior in which language is analyzed from a
behaviorist perspective.
[4]
A two volume biography was written by
Victor Lowe (1985) and Lowe and Schneewind (1990); Lowe studied under Whitehead at Harvard. A comprehensive appraisal of Whitehead's work is difficult because Whitehead left no
Nachlass; his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. There is also no critical edition of Whitehead's writings.
Process philosophy
The genesis of Whitehead's
process philosophy may be attributed to his having witnessed the shocking collapse of
Newtonian physics, due mainly to
Albert Einstein's work. His metaphysical views emerged in his 1920 The Concept of Nature and expanded in his 1925 '''Science and the Modern World''', also an important study in the
history of ideas, and the role of science and mathematics in the rise of
Western civilization. Indebted as he was to
Henri Bergson's philosophy of change, Whitehead was also a
Platonist who "saw the definite character of events as due to the "ingression" of timeless entities."
[5]
The main tenets of Whitehead's metaphysics were summarized in his last and most accessible work, Adventures of Ideas (1933), where he also defines his conceptions of beauty, truth, art, adventure, and peace. He believed that "there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
[8] Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to be
libertarian without the label. He wrote:
Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of two forms, force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.[9]
On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of the
New Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that "...there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals."
[10]Whitehead and Heraclitus
Funded by the
Gifford endowment, Alfred North Whitehead wrote voluminously using concise abstract nouns and phrases given special and innovated meanings that cannot be understood as ordinary English. He believed the starting point of his philosophy was the flux of
Heraclitus modified and supplemented by the thought of
Aristotle but he does have an undefined: the referent of the English word process. Although he expands at great length on the concept he nowhere attempts to define what it is.
Whitehead did not see himself as a process philosopher but believed he was updating Heraclitus in the light of the mathematics and mathematical philosophers of his time. The key lecture is reproduced in Process and Reality.
[11]
Using "all things flow" as the starting point for a "metaphysics of 'flux'", which he sees as implicit to various degrees in the philosophies of
John Locke,
David Hume and
Immanuel Kant (but not
Hegel), Whitehead does not present it as a mutually exclusive alternative to the "metaphysics of 'substance'" but as complementary. The latter "spatializes the universe" (according to
Henri Bergson) but this is "the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy" such as the
Analytic Geometry of
Descartes. The substance metaphysics is of less interest to Whitehead. Proclaiming that
Newton "brusquely ordered fluency back into the world" with his Theory of Fluxions (the
derivatives of
differential calculus) Whitehead launches into an innovative elaboration of Heraclitus' upward-downward way, relying especially on Aristotle's
theory of act and potency.
The way becomes the simultaneous occurrence of two processes: "concrescence" (in place of the upward) and transition (in place of the downward). The former is the unification of "particular existents" into new particular existents also termed "actual occasions" or "actual entities." In this process the
final cause of the new unity is predominant. Transition is the "perishing of the process" (concrescence) in such a way as to leave the new existent as an "original element" of future new unities. This latter process is the "vehicle of the
efficient causes" and expresses the "immortal past."
As in Heraclitus, a concrescence never reaches the unity of its final cause, hence Whitehead uses the term "presupposed actual occasions", which are "falsifications." An object therefore is identified with its concrescence; there is no other. The process of transforming "alien" entities into "data" for a new concrescence is termed a "feeling." Whitehead thus builds up statements that are scarcely less obscure, if at all, than those of Heraclitus: "... an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings."
In contrast to the becoming of Aristotle, a concrescence never results in the static act toward which it tends, but it does reach a "culmination" in which "all indetermination as to the realization of possibilities has been eliminated." This "evaporation of all indetermination" is the "satisfaction" of the feeling.
To explain the passage of the actual moment through time (the upward-downward way) Whitehead thus resorts to a unique blend of Heraclitus' flow and Aristotle's act and potency. The potency of Aristotle is the substrate in which all possibility resides, from which comes the actual, or determinate and specifically empowered beings by a process called "to become." Whitehead refers to the potency under the aegis of the future, or yet to come, as "reality." The reduction of the potential to the actual occurs in two processes: macroscopic, "the transition from attained actuality to actuality in attainment" and microscopic (concrescence), the "conversion of conditions which are merely real into determinate actualities." The past is "a nexus of actuality", which grows into what is currently the future. In summary:
The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production.
Whitehead calls all entities (the real in reality), actual occasions of experience. They normally act in groups with a common purpose. This is called a society. This merging of occasions can form a rock, a plant, an animal or any other "thing". Think of an atom of iron -- it could be part of a rock or a blood cell in a human body. Depending on how the society is formed the experience can be quite different. In a rock the society is fairly stable for millions of years while in the blood there is change over tenths of seconds. In a rock there is little organization and so each entity's power is mostly lost. In a more organized society, such as a human being, sub-societies (such as of blood or bone) bring their substance and experience together in a coordinated way that creates a higher form of society. In the way that a culture (a society) is made up of people, people are made up of biological and social societies with each contributing societies made up of other coordinated societies... and so on. It is societies that endure over longer periods of time and what we see as objects. Of course, the occasions of experience that constitute societies are alone real. As each actual occasion is both a member of a society and part of a society, all entities are interconnected. Whitehead calls this interdependence Internal Relations.
