Guide to Whitehead
THIS little volume may well prove a godsend to those who have struggled manfully but unsuccessfully to keep pace
with the development of Professor VVItitehead's philosophy.
Those who have sought to understand him have had to encounter three formidable difficulties. There were, first, the inherent difficulty and novelty of Professor Whitehead's ideas. From those who have been intellectually nurtured in 'the orthodox, scientific climate of our age the acceptance of these ideas demanded a complete rearrangement of mental furniture, involving the destruction of a number of time-honoured antiques. We were bidden, for example, to divest ourselves of the notion of things existing in space at particular moments of time—" there are no instants, conceived as simple primary entities, there is no Nature at an instant."
" Matter, involving spatiality and the passive support of qualifications " together with " every single item in this general doctrine " must also be jettisoned. Instead, we were asked to substitute the notion of_ " process conceived as a complex activity with internal relations between its
various factors." Everything in, the universe (if I .may be
permitted for a moment to invoke the improper conception of thing ") is, in fact, suffused by and everything suffuses everything else, and the relations of things to other things, to their environment, for instance, to their past and to their future, and to the minds that know them, literally constitute part of the " being or essence of the thing." The cosmos, therefore, is a unity ; it is a " patterned process " of events, and the method of abstracting certain aspects of the unity and considering them in and by themselves, which is the method of science, useful no doubt for practical purposes, cannot but give a false picture of the nature of reality, since in the very act of abstracting it falsifies the nature of that which is abstracted. In this sense, the sense in which abstraction is vicious, science too is vicious. By making
divisions which " include some activities and exclude others.'
it " severs the patterns of process," confining its attention to " self-contained activities within limited regions." It is a fundamental weakness of our present stage of civilization that we are prepared to " welcome these detached fragments of explanation " with which science provides us.
Now all this is hard enough, and it is not in general made easier by Professor Whitehead's methods of exposition. These constitute the second great difficulty in the understand- ing of his philosophy. He may be a prophet, a genius, an inspired visionary—he has been called all these things— but he is an extremely bad expositor. His method is that of the sibyl rather than that of the lecturer : he announces oracles rather than defends propositions, and announces in a language all his own.
There is a fundamental though frequently ignored difference between the expression of obscurity and obscurity of expression. The first is pardonable, may, indeed, be inevit- able in the present state of our mental development. There is no necessary reason—at least I know of none—why the universe should be such as to be easily comprehensible to twentieth-century adult Nordic minds, and obscurity—.
obscurity, that is, to us—may well be part of the nature of things. But obscurity of expression is simply bad crafts- manship. The first duty of a writer on philosophy should be to make himself clear, and it is a duty which Professor Whitehead has culpably neglected.
The third difficulty is constituted by the constantly changing character of Professor Whitehead's thought. Each book hitherto published has propounded what are in effect fundamentally different ideas. Nor has he been at pains to assist the reader by pointing out that the ideas are different, or in what respect they differ from their predecessors. To keep pace with the development of his mind, as it has taken shape in his previous books, has thus been like walk- ing upon a moving staircase with the additional disadvantage of never knowing on what particular step one was at any moment standing.
The advantage of the present volume is that in it the second and third difficulties ire in large part removed. The. book, which consists of two lectures delivered in the University of Chicago in October, 1933, is much clearer than usual— Professor Whitehead-has evidently been trying to make him- self intelligible to a lay audience—and contains little that is new. What it, in fact, • does is to take the reader on a rapid tour over the whole Whitehead philosophy, giving him, as it were, a bird's-eye view of Whitehead's cosmos. At some of the implications of that philosophy, in so far as they affect Our conception of the physical world, I have already glanced. The outstanding feature of the present exposition is the fitting of life into the general scheme. " The status of life in Nature," Professor Whitehead announces at the beginning of his second lecture, " is the standing problem of philosophy and science." The problem has in his view arisen largely because of the vicious divorce between life and matter introduced by Descartes, a divorce which has " poisoned all subsequent philosophy." Descartes, in fact, left a world in which matter was just matter, life just life ; the two obviously interacted, but it was impossible either for Descartes or anybody else to see how on this radically dualistic basis the gulf between them could be bridged. Professor Whitehead looks for his solution to the general con- ception of interpenetration or suffusion,--."- prehension " is his name for it—to which reference has" already been made. "Life and nature are for him not two distinct things which have somehow to be brought together ; they are two interwoven threads in the pattern of active process which is the universe, threads which, distinguishable in common sense and scientific thought, are, nevertheless, not separable in fact. It is, in his view, the business of philosophical insight to restore the unity which science has shattered by its incurable depart. mentalism. Neither matter nor life can properly be grasped in isolation ; they must be " fused," if they are to be under- stood.
How far Professor Whitehead's solution of this fundamental problem is satisfactory is a matter of opinion. But there can be no two opinions about the extremely interesting and suggestive comments upon life that he contrives to make in the course of his exposition. When, for example, he tells us that the " key notion " for the interpretation of the universe is that " the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life "—the remark, like so many of his, reverberates up and down the chambers of the mind, starting the echoes of a hundred thoughts. It is this suggestive quality which to many is the greatest merit of Professor
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