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Introductory Notes About Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is considered to be a prominent multidisciplinary figure in the scientific and philosophical panorama of the twentieth century, with intellectual interests extending over mathematics, philosophy of science, history of science, education, religion, and metaphysics. The evolution of his fields of interest in the course of his lifetime can also be linked to his academic trajectory that can be roughly divided into three periods, respectively, associated to his assignments in Cambridge (UK), London (UK), and finally Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA). Whitehead was born in Ramsgate (UK) on February 15, 1861; after receiving his degree at Trinity College in Cambridge, he became a professor there from 1884 to 1910, where mathematics was his primary field of work, with a strong emphasis on symbolic logic. In 1910 he moved to London to join the Imperial College, where his concerns for philosophy and history of science gained momentum, always in parallel to a continued interest in mathematics and mathematical physics, spurred by the contemporary rise of relativity theory and quantum physics. In 1918 Whitehead was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London, and this position gave him the chance to develop his well-defined philosophy of education. In 1924, when he would have been forced to retire by British law, he took a position as professor of philosophy at Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The peculiarity of his academic evolution appears clearly in his own words (Whitehead and Price 1954/2001, p. 146):

All my life […] I had been a lecturer in mathematics. At the age of sixty-three in 1924, I came to Harvard to lecture on philosophy for the first time.

This final period of his life was ripe with results in metaphysics and religion: the philosophical framework constituting Whitehead’s main contribution, identified as process philosophy, emerged here in all its breadth. This is where the concept of the possible, potential, and possibility acquires definitive substance. Alfred North Whitehead died in Cambridge (Massachusetts) on December 30, 1947.

Whitehead’s Multidisciplinary Contributions

Whitehead was a prolific writer who produced nearly 30 books, notwithstanding the fact that his approach to the transformation of ideas into written text was quite unique (Whitehead and Price 1954/2001, p. 146): “I do not think in words. I begin with concepts, then try to put them into words, which is often very difficult.” If a common thread were to be found in Whitehead’s work across diversified disciplines, this would have to be the quest for universal connectedness, which can be found in all his theoretical frameworks. In the following, Whitehead’s main contributions to the fields of mathematics, philosophy of science, philosophy of education, religion, and metaphysics are synthetically described, in this order. More extended information is provided, in particular, by Desmet and Irvine (2018).

In mathematics, first in his A Treatise on Universal Algebra with Applications (Whitehead 1898), and later, collaborating with his former disciple Bertrand Russell, in the famous trilogy entitled Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell 1910, 1912, 1913), Whitehead pursues a systematization of the entire field of mathematics through the use of symbolic logic as a universal approach. It is to be noted that, although the two authors collaborated closely in the development of this monumental endeavor (yet unfinished, as a fourth volume would have been foreseen), their vision on the ultimate significance of logic diverged. While Whitehead saw mathematical logic merely as an instrument to guide intuition and generalization into patterns, Russell held an objective to show the supremacy of logic over other forms of mathematical thought. In this view, Whitehead was closer to his contemporary Henri Poincaré (Corazza and Lubart 2019) than to Russell. Later on, the layout of Whitehead’s process philosophy, based on the foundation of a world composed of interweaved processes and events and in which isolated objects cannot exist, resulted to be in complete opposition to the doctrine of logical atomism theorized by Russell.

Considering Whitehead’s contributions to the philosophy of science, one of his first works entitled An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Whitehead 1919/1982) already contains the initial elements of what he would develop as a harsh critique of Newton’s notion of dimensionless points and time instants, a notion upon which classical physics is fundamentally based. In Whitehead’s mind, in order for a natural phenomenon to exist, space and time must enable interconnection, without falling into the trap of affording a status of reality to ideal point-like abstractions. In other words, instead of considering space and time as dimensions that afford a disconnected description of reality, the emphasis should be placed on the ways in which all essences are ultimately connected. Possibilities stem out of interconnections. It should be underlined that Whitehead derived these positions not from abstract thought but by observation, adhering to his intuitive grasp of nature. In this sense, his approach to the philosophy of science could be classified as evolutionary naturalist. Interestingly, Whitehead recognized in Leonardo da Vinci a forerunner in the observation of nature as a means to scientific understanding (Northrop and Gross 1953, p. 401):

Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon and the whole modern point of view was the artist Leonardo da Vinci, who lived almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrated the theory which I was advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an important ingredient in the formation of our scientific mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely a man of science than was Bacon…

Several years later, in Nature and Life (Whitehead 1934/2011), Whitehead would confirm this point of view but also extend his critique to the pure sense-based empiricism of Hume, which to Whitehead is also not capable to accommodate and explain the visualization capabilities of the human mind. While Whitehead recognizes that both Newton and Hume proposed valid descriptions within the limits of their assumptions, both omitted the intuitive mode of understanding. On the other hand, the nineteenth century had also seen the rise of the theory of electromagnetism, based on the fundamental results provided by the solutions to Maxwell’s equations. The concept of electromagnetic fields, according to which a source of an electromagnetic phenomenon impacts the entire space without any a priori limitation, appeared to Whitehead as the perfect conceptual model to counter Newton’s scientific materialism of isolated things. The universe should be thought of as a field of forces, in which every point influences every other point without pause. For Whitehead this was the way to overcome the “fallacy of single location” he attributed to Newton, that is, the idea that nature can be described as a collection of self-sufficient isolated agglomerates of matter in specified positions at specified times. In Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1926a/1967, p. 91), Whitehead advances the explicit proposition that the adoption of the field-based approach entails the abandonment of “simple location [as] the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times.” It could be argued that the subsequent development of process philosophy was fundamentally inspired by the lessons Whitehead learned about electromagnetism, as exemplified in Nature and Life (Whitehead 1934/2011), where he discusses how the concepts of activity and process are the fundamental building blocks, because nature is a theatre where ever-changing activities play interrelated parts in one universal process and where it is not possible to identify (if not through an approximation) self-contained activities in limited regions of space.

Even when Whitehead was burdened by administrative responsibilities in his role as Dean of the School of Science at the University of London, he never stopped producing original thought. Indeed, these were the years in which Whitehead’s philosophy of education was developed, based on the idea that the only subject matter for all education is one: life itself, in all its interrelated ramifications. Therefore, in the field of education, his idea of universality takes on an epistemological declination, whereby literary, scientific, and technical subjects should be interwoven in the design of all educational curricula, as discussed in The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Whitehead 1929a). An education system should contain all three curricula, the literary, the scientific, and the technical, but each one should contain elements of the other two, in a sort of beneficial cross-illumination. Further, for Whitehead the mind of a student should never be seen as a box to be filled with chunks of knowledge, alien ideas, or scraps of information. Rather, it should be stimulated in its growth, in a similar way as a living organism would develop under the inputs of the surrounding environment, following a natural “rhythm of education” (Whitehead 1929a). This rhythm consists essentially of repeating cycles of three fundamental phases of a periodic process: in the first phase of “romance,” a subject should be freely explored, facilitating all possible occasions for awe and wonder. Once the curiosity level has built up, the phase of “precision” must be opened, in order for the student to acquire methodologies, techniques, and detailed knowledge in a disciplined way. But this is not the end; once mastery of the discipline has been acquired to a sufficient level, then a third phase of “generalization” should be facilitated, to allow the formation of interdisciplinary associations, through the application of domain-specific concepts to domain-general questions. It is interesting to note the similarity of this cyclic educational approach to the modern concept of agile development of software (Martin 2002). Whitehead’s critique of classic educational approaches, in particular for mathematics, is that teachers typically omit phase one and never reach phase three, leaving the student with a collection of aridly disconnected notions. On the other hand, it could be argued that a Montessori approach (Montessori 2013) focuses primarily and successfully on the romance of phase one but may come short at developing precision and generalization. Whitehead’s approach appears to provide the well-designed balance needed to achieve thoughts of high quality, enriched by “receptiveness of beauty and humane feeling” (Whitehead 1929a, p. 1).

Apparently, Whitehead’s concern for morality and religion did not emerge explicitly in his works until his transfer into the United States, even though the fact that his father Alfred was a reverend might allow presuppositions about his implicit concern for these subjects. Indeed, his philosophy of science was completely devoid of issues of spirituality or morals. But when time was mature, Whitehead’s process philosophy was conceived to include spiritual matters as a never-ending search, as portrayed in Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1926a, pp. 191–192):

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes all apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

However, Whitehead always maintained a clear distinction between the ideal vision of religion described above and its use by mankind, which can reach extremes of good and evil. While religion maintains fundamental importance in being transcendent, in Religion in the Making (Whitehead 1926b/1996), he clarifies that the history of religions is unfortunately rich of horrors, including human sacrifice, cannibalism, hatred, war, and bigotry. Still, religion must be considered as a force with upward trend justifying an optimistic view of the future, despite its cycles of fading and resurrection. Perhaps the most important aspect of Whitehead’s contribution to religion is his dipolar definition of God, which can be found in Process and Reality (Whitehead 1929b/1978): God is both primordial and consequent. The primordial God is the necessary entity that gives the original input to the process of organic evolution of the universe, without predetermining it. The actual entities and the actual occasions maintain a form of freedom, while God tenderly presents ultimate values and operates to persuade for their pursuit. Then, God is consequent in its judgment of the world, which can only take place if freedom has been granted to the universe, allowing God to tenderly save the world by offering its vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Arguably, Whitehead produced his works of highest impact in the field of philosophy and in particular of metaphysics, where all his contributions to mathematics, science, education, and religion find a final and coherent systematization. His philosophical production was based primarily on the transcription of cycles of lessons he held. While Science and the Modern World (Whitehead 1926a/1967) was based on the prestigious Lowell Lectures at Harvard, his major work Process and Reality (Whitehead 1929b/1978) was derived from the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh (1927–1928). These two books where conceptually completed in a sort of trilogy by Adventures of Ideas (Whitehead 1933/1967). Not surprisingly, Whitehead held strong positions against all forms of disconnection into dichotomies and in particular against the bifurcation between the objectivity of the world of matter of fact and the subjectivity of the world of moral, aesthetic, and religious values. Integration of all disciplines into one cosmology was perhaps his main concern. This harmonization should embrace the abstractions of both science and art, morals and religion, and poetry and mystical visions. Central to this vision of the universe is creativity, which is considered by Whitehead as the ultimate principle of metaphysics, bringing together the multitude of the many into the single ever-changing unity. Creativity leads to potentiality and possibility, as pure potentials are “eternal objects” the realization of which in the world become the “actual objects.” The essential elements of Whitehead’s process philosophy, drawing from both Process and Reality (Whitehead 1929b/1978) and Modes of Thought (Whitehead 1938/1968), are discussed next.

Whitehead’s Process Philosophy

Process and Reality (1929b/1978) is undoubtedly Whitehead’s major work, containing all the fundamental conceptual elements of his process philosophy, a cosmological view on the universe dominated by creativity, potentiality, possibility, connectedness, and teleological value. All forms of life are interpreted as expressions of organisms, a term which is endowed with an extended applicability, encompassing also physical systems of pure matter. This conceptual framework is filled with original elements but not in isolation, as Whitehead spends meticulous effort in positioning his thought within the history of philosophy. In particular (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. xi):

“These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume. The philosophic scheme which they endeavour to explain is termed the ’Philosophy of Organism” […]. In order to obtain a reasonably complete account of human experience considered in relation to the philosophical problems which naturally arise, the group of philosophers and scientists belonging to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been considered, in particular Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant.”

However, to the above list of referential figures, two Greek philosophers must be added, namely, Plato and Aristotle, to whom Whitehead evidently recognizes the fundamental ignition to all Western thought. Anecdotally, it has been said that Whitehead thought of the European philosophical tradition as a “series of footnotes to Plato.” As a matter of fact, Whitehead considers that two cosmologies have dominated European thought: Plato’s Timaeus and the seventeenth-century cosmology developed as a collaborative effort between Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Locke. Given his aim to produce his own framework, he believed “that perhaps the true solution consists in a fusion of the two previous schemes, with modifications demanded by self- consistency and the advance of knowledge” (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. xiv).

In process philosophy there are three ultimate notions (Whitehead 1929b/1978, pp. 21–22): creativity, many, and one. The term “one” stands for the singularity of an entity. The term “many” conveys the notion of “disjunctive diversity,” and there is a multitude of beings in disjunctive diversity. “Creativity” is the universal of universals, by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. In process philosophy, creativity is nothing less than the ultimate principle of metaphysics. Whitehead observes that it lies in the nature of things that the many enter into a complex unit, through creativity. Creativity is the principle of novelty, thanks to which an actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. A “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to the conjunction of elements of the universe to originate novel situations, identified as “actual entities” or “actual objects.” But an actual entity is not a static object: it evolves through the “production of novel togetherness,” which is the ultimate notion embodied in the term “concrescence” (growing together). Thus an actual entity has a threefold character (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. 87): “(i) it has the character ‘given’ by the past, the collection of its elements; (ii) it has the subjective character aimed at in its process of concrescence; (iii) it has the superjective character, which is the pragmatic value of its specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity.”

It appears then that process philosophy has many elements in common with pragmatism and with the original panta rei doctrine by Heraclitus. In fact, Whitehead states that: “The ancient doctrine that ‘no one crosses the same river twice’ is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice” (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. 29). The application of creativity has the effect of producing vivifying novelty, in a process where the old meets the new, which is in a sense “selected” from the multiplicity of yet unexpressed potentiality (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. 164). In Whitehead’s cosmology, creativity serves to place God and the World at extreme opposites. In each actuality two concrescent poles of realization can be identified: the “physical” and the “conceptual.” For God the conceptual is prior to the physical; for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles (Whitehead 1929b/1978, p. 384).

In process philosophy, realized temporal matter is transcended by “possibility.” The actual world, intended as a community of entities which are settled and actual, imposes conditions and limits to the potentiality for creativity beyond itself. This is a limitation to the general potentiality provided by eternal objects, which can however be overcome through novel realizations. Thus, relatively to any actual entity, there is a “given” world of settled actual entities and a “real” potentiality, which is the possibility for creativity beyond that state of the art. To Whitehead, this exemplifies the metaphysical principle that every “being” is a potential for a “becoming.”

In Modes of Thought (Whitehead 1938/1968), Whitehead elaborates on the intelligence of mankind basing his discussion on three fundamental notions: importance, expression, and understanding. The notion of importance is dominant in civilized thought, and it can be defined as “Interest, involving that intensity of individual feeling which leads to publicity of expression” (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 8). Importance to Whitehead is that aspect of feeling whereby a perspective is imposed upon the universe of things. The two notions of importance and perspective are thus closely intertwined. The generic aim of the creative process is therefore the attainment of importance or a new perspective on the world. Expression is then necessary to diffuse throughout the environment something which will make a difference, due to its importance (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 20). While importance is derived from the immanence of the infinitude into the finite, expression represents the immanence of the finite into the multitude on fellows beyond oneself. Taken together, importance and expression are witnesses to both the monistic aspect of the universe (through its overarching importance) and its pluralistic character (through the multitude of expressions). In Whitehead’s words (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 20): “Importance passes to the world as one to the world as many; whereas, expression is the gift from the world as many to the world as one.”

Expression becomes the very reason of individual differences. While the laws of nature represent large average effects, whereby impersonality reigns, there is nothing average about expression. If average dominates, expression fades. Through human expression (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 26):

nature seems to have burst through another of its boundaries. The conceptual entertainment of unrealized possibility becomes a major factor in human mentality. In this way, outrageous novelty is introduced, sometime beatified, sometime damned, and sometimes literally patented or protected by copyright. The definition of mankind is that in this genus of animals the central activity has been developed on the side of its relationship to novelty.

Therefore, according to Whitehead mankind is distinguished by its capacity for the introduction of novelty. This requires a conceptual power which can imagine and a practical power that can effect. In turn, this conceptual power is enormously increased by “language,” which Whitehead sees as the triumph of human ingenuity, surpassing even the complexity of modern technology. Language is the systematization of expression, and human civilization is an outgrowth of language: freedom of thought is itself an outgrowth of language. Whitehead raises language to a mystical role by stating that The souls of men are the gift of language to mankind. […] He gave them speech, and they became souls (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 41).

Finally, mankind can strive to interpret the universe in a quest for “understanding.” However, this goal is not reachable with our finite limitation, as “a complete understanding is a perfect grasp of the universe in its totality. We are finite beings, and such a grasp is denied to us. […] We can know anything in some of its perspectives. The totality of perspectives involves an infinitude beyond finite knowledge” (Whitehead 1938/1968, p. 42). This fact should not discourage us, as for Whitehead the essence of great experience is penetration into the unknown, the unexperienced.

Whitehead’s Legacy

Following Whitehead’s death, all of his papers were destroyed according to his explicit instructions. This element adds to the difficulty of assessing his influence and legacy, considering also the fact that during his lifetime he had many students but was not able to found a school of thought. Certainly, his determination in working on metaphysics was one of the main reasons why his thought was considered anachronistic at the time. However, Whitehead’s ideas in the third millennium are being revisited ad revalued, and therefore his influence is presently undergoing a positive derivative (Mesle 2008).

Process theology, as derived from process philosophy, was perhaps the first item in the revival of Whiteheadean thought, thanks in particular to the activity of the Claremont School of Theology, as well as of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Charles Hartshorne, a prominent intellectual in the Divinity School in the years 1928–1955, considered that Whitehead had been a scientist at the level of Einstein and a philosopher at the level of Plato. A few tens of years later, the theologian John B. Cobb, Jr. embraced wholeheartedly the work of Whitehead and founded the journal of Process Studies in 1971 along with Lewis Ford, as well as the Center for Process Studies in 1973, in collaboration with David Griffin, in Claremont. A biannual International Whitehead Conference has been organized since 1981, the last edition of which (at the time of writing) was hosted by the University of Brasilia in August 2019. Recently, the most rapid trend of growing interest in Whitehead’s work can be traced in China, in an effort to blend its traditional philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism with the postmodern process philosophy. Multiple university centers for the study of Whitehead’s philosophy are being built in China.

However, it is important to underline that Whitehead’s influence today is far from being limited to the domain of religious-philosophical studies. For example, in the world of physics, the explanatory framework proposed by Rovelli (2017) is very much in line with a Whiteheadean interpretation, given that for Rovelli in the framework of quantum mechanics, there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects but a world of events. In the field of sociology, Halewood (2013) maintains that perhaps Whitehead was the most sociological of philosophers, due to his visions of things as “organisms” and thus “societies.” Finally, in the field of creativity and innovation studies, it can be stated that Whitehead’s approach to creativity as the fundamental construct of process philosophy, whereby potentiality is the eternal object and actual entities are dynamic instantiations, is in accordance to the dynamic definition of creativity (Corazza 2016): “creativity requires potential originality and effectiveness.” Also, the interconnectedness of all creativity episodes in the history of the world to form an active ensemble leads to the definition of the “dynamic universal creativity process” (Corazza 2019), conformant to Whitehead’s view of creativity as the ultimate principle of metaphysics. Certainly, Alfred North Whitehead and his process philosophy should be granted a central role in the study of the possible.