Whitehead

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947). Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and John Dewey (1859-1952), was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half.

I’ve started reading the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947). Whitehead, like his almost exact contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and John Dewey (1859-1952), was famous and highly esteemed during his lifetime, in the first half of the twentieth century, but was almost entirely forgotten during the second half…

Of late, there has been something of a Bergson revival, thanks to Gilles Deleuze‘s interest in him; as well as a Dewey revival, thanks to the efforts of Richard Rorty. But Whitehead still remains obscure; as far as I can tell, in the English-speaking world he is mostly read by liberal theologians. Perhaps Whitehead is also due for a revival; Deleuze was interested in him, but wrote very little about him (just one chapter, as a sort of sidenote, in his book on Leibniz). A book taking Whitehead seriously, and looking at him in depth, has just appeared in France: Penser avec Whitehead, by Isabelle Stengers, a Belgian philosopher of science who (among other things) was close to Deleuze. I’ve just started reading it, together with several of Whitehead’s own books: I just finished Adventures of Ideas, and I plan to go one two one or two other shorter works of Whitehead’s, and then tackle his magnum opus, Process and Reality.
From what I’ve read thus far, I can say that Whitehead is indeed an interesting thinker. Like Dewey and especially Bergson, he is interested in process and temporality, in change and in events and processes, rather than in substances, essences, and absolutes. He’s as anti-essentialist as Wittgenstein or Heidegger or any other major philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, but with his own particular twists.
Whitehead criticizes classical empiricism, and modern positivism, for being reductionist in their isolation of immediate sensory data from all other forms of mental and physical experience; he insists on a wider definition of “experience” that includes past and future, memory and anticipation, as well as a full range of bodily reactions in addition to those of the immediate sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc). But he remains an empiricist under this wider definition of empirical actuality, rather than going the routes either of Anglo-American linguistic analysis or of Continental dialectics. He’s not a deconstructionist by any means – if anything, he seems to believe quite sincerely and unproblematically in things like Truth, Beauty, and Progress – and yet, because he sees these ideals in terms of ongoing processes rather than regarding them as fully established principles, he can be as withering as any pomo thinker could be on the stupidity of conservative and essentialist pieties. “The defense of morals,” he writes, “is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.” And, “it is really not sufficient to direct attention to the best that has been said and done in the ancient world. The result is static, repressive, and promotes a decadent habit of mind” (this from someone who knew his classics backwards and forwards – take that, Allan Bloom!).
All these remarks are much more withering in context, than they are when you read them in isolation, as I have just cited them. For they arise in the course of an almost excessively even-handed and commonsensical discourse. Whitehead never seeks to outrage and shock the reader, the way Nietzsche does (or Heraclitus seemingly did); if anything, he seeks to reassure and calm his readers. (Stengers says that he is the most “serene” of philosophers). But, all the while keeping a tone that is bland and fuddy-duddy-ish, he says things that are truly startling, and radical. For he presents a view of the world in which nothing is fixed, but everything is in flux; in which there are no final unities, so that notions like “subject” and “object” are relative and always shifting; in which, in its own odd way, Beauty is more important, and more substantial, than Truth; and in which there is no certainty, but only Adventure.
Whitehead offers the sort of synthesis that postmodern thinkers have been striving after but unable to attain: a view of the world that is radically anti-foundationalist, but at the same time not corroded by ultra-skepticism and total rejection of scientific objectivity; and that has a kind of cosmic irony to it, while at the same time insisting that “reality” is not just an illusion inside our heads or our language. It’s not a matter of buying the details of Whitehead’s metaphysics, but of seeing how he does it, and thereby being encouraged to create a metaphysics of one’s own: a ramshackle construction, not an assertion of absolute truths, and which stands outside the duality with which recent theoretical thought has so often blackmailed us. Whitehead rejects both the conceited certainties of Allan Bloom or Alan Sokal, and the exacerbated narcissistic vicious circles of Paul De Man or Jean Baudrillard. This makes him a salutary read, if not always an entertaining one.