Alfred North Whitehead – against dualism

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Alfred North Whitehead - against dualism

Roger Smith, Reader Emeritus in History of Science. Lancaster University. United Kingdom, Lancaster, LA1 4YW; Honorary Researcher. Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. Russian Federation, Moscow

Abstract

It is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical

A.N. Whitehead1

English-language philosophical debate about the relation of mind (or soul) and body, and in parallel, cultural debate about the relation of the humanities and the natural sciences in education, drew in the twentieth century, and draws again now, on the writings of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). The paper explains this. To do so, it describes Whitehead's project in systematic metaphysics (or speculative cosmology), best known from Science and the Modern World (1926). Whitehead required metaphysics to be self-consistent, to be informed by and in turn to inform modern scientific knowledge (evolutionary theory, the theory of relativity), and to conform to the intuitions of everyday perception. Trained in mathematics, his style of precise expression requires special comment; the conclusion was a "philosophy of organism" or "process philosophy". He was a philosophical realist. His understanding of what this entailed led to a radical critique of "scientific materialism", with all its philosophical failings, which, in his judgment, had been dominant in Western culture since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In four brief sections, the paper provides a background, describes the project in metaphysics, picks out the themes of causal efficacy in perception and of function for special discussion, and concludes with a summary of the importance of Whitehead to public debate about the direction of educated culture.

Keywords: A.N. Whitehead, metaphysics, mind-body dualism, scientific revolution, organism, process, humanities-science

Альфред Норт Уайтхед: против дуализма

Роджер Смит

Университет Ланкастера. Lancaster University, United Kingdom, Lancaster, LA1 4YW; Институт философии РАН. Российская Федерация, г. Москва

Спор в англоязычной философии о соотношении сознания (или души) и тела и параллельный ему спор о соотношении наук о духе и наук о природе в области образования опирался на протяжении всего XX в. и опирается сейчас на работы А.Н. Уайтхеда (1861-1947). Это обстоятельство объясняется в предлагаемой работе. Конкретно, в работе описывается проект систематической метафизики (или спекулятивной космологии) Уайтхеда, представленный в наиболее известной форме в его работе "Наука и современный мир" (1925). Согласно позиции Уайтхеда, метафизика должна быть внутренне непротиворечивой, просвещенной, но также и просвещающей современную науку (в частности, эволюционную теорию и теорию относительности), согласуясь при этом с интуициями обыденного восприятия. Поскольку Уайтхед был по образованию математиком, его рассуждения требовали пояснений. Как бы то ни было, из этих рассуждений следовала "философия организма" или "философия процесса". Как философ, Уайтхед был реалистом. Его понимание реализма порождало радикальную критику "научного материализма" и всех его философских недостатков, которые, по мнению Уайтхеда, преобладали в европейской культуре со времен научной революции XVII в. Данная работа состоит из четырех разделов, представляющих тот контекст, в котором разрабатывался метафизический проект Уайтхеда, его основные характеристики с отдельным рассмотрением причинной эффективности в области восприятия и проблемы функционирования, и, наконец, заключение, в котором резюмируется проект Уайтхеда и его значимость для общественной дискуссии о направлении развития просвещенной культуры.

Ключевые слова: А.Н. Уайтхед, метафизика, дуализма сознания и тела, научная революция, организм, процесс, науки о духе и науки о природе

Prologue

Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy has a reputation in Russia for very precise but philosophically unproductive analysis of the logic of language use. If this was indeed the dominant style in the mid-century, there was nevertheless considerable diversity, and, in the interwar years (the 1920s and 1930s), there was a significant continuation of synthetic, systematic philosophy. A number of philosophers educated in Victorian times continued at work, including, for example, G.F. Stout, the Editor (1892-1920) of the leading philosophical journal, Mind. F.H. Bradley continued to uphold absolute idealism, was respected for his penetrating logic and critical work, and his major book, Appearance and Reality was republished in 1930 and again in 1969 (many years after the first edition, 1893). Another of the philosophers whose name remained well known later, and who indeed at the beginning of the twenty-first century unexpectedly acquired a new audience, was Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)There is an excellent guide to Whitehead's work and Whitehead scholarship: Desmet, R. & Irvine, A.D. "Alfred North Whitehead", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition) [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/whitehead/, accessed on 11.11.2019]. Also: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. La Salle, IL, 1941; a clear summary in Russian, Yulina, N.S. "Whitehead", Novaya filosofskaya entsiklopediya [New Philosophical Encyclopedia], [https://iphlib.ru/library/collection/newphilenc/document/HASH8a533695622572095 c348a/, accessed on 11.11.2019]; biography in Lowe, V Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 Vols. Baltimore, 1985-1990. As his biographer observed, Whitehead's public reticence about what he judged private matters led him to make sure all his papers, letters and drafts were burned. He thought public philosophical discourse should be concerned with the logic of argument. He read extremely widely, in poetry in addition to philosophy and natural science, and he well appreciated the traditions of thought to which his arguments belonged.. Moreover, Whitehead had a reputation in the university world in the humanities disciplines generally, rather than specifically in philosophy departments. There are reasons for this, which this paper will discuss. One large reason was that Whitehead provided an analysis of the mind-body question in the context of the scientific worldview which spoke to "the concern" that civilized culture had lost its way. Whitehead knowingly used a Quaker term, "concern", to express the manner in which individual feeling and purpose intuitively related to value transcending the particular momentWhitehead, A.N. Nature and Life. Cambridge, 1934, p. 93.. In the words of later writers: "The Cartesian split between the mental and physical life of individuals has become a split in Western culture between scientific `objectification' of a meaningless external world and a subjective and largely individualized world of meaning, sensibility, value, and action, to which the concepts of reality and truth have become almost inapplica- ble"Arbib, M.A. & Hesse, M.B. The Construction of Reality. Cambridge, 1986, p. 160 (cited in Russian translation in Smith, R. Byt chelobekom: istoricheskoe znanie i cotvorenie chel- ovecheskoi prirody [Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature]. Moscow, 2014, p. 313).. This paper introduces this concern in Whitehead's influential writings.

The first section provides background information; the second links Whitehead's metaphysics to his analysis of the problem of knowledge and the mind- body question; the third section then takes this discussion a bit further in relation to the linked concepts of causality and of function; the concluding section explains the intellectual and cultural importance the philosophical arguments have had, and continue to have. philosophy education consciousness

There is a personal dimension: when as a student I began to study the history and philosophy of science, I was told to read Whitehead - not because he provided a guide, let alone a textbook, but because it was he who had demonstrated in intellectual terms why the history and philosophy of science mattered and was not just another specialized subject areaThe Cambridge tutor who advised me to do this was Robert M. Young, in the second half of the 1960s newly appointed to teach the history of biology; he developed a new approach to Darwin studies which he integrated with a Marxian understanding of science: Young, R.M. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge, 1985; Idem, "Persons, Organisms... and Primary Qualities", History, Humanity and Evolution. Cambridge, 1989, pp. 375-401; Idem, "The Mind-Body Problem", Companion to the History of Modern Science. London, 1990, pp. 702-711. Young went on to found in London a small press, called, alluding to Whitehead, Process Press; and much later I published, Smith, R. The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History. London, 2019, with this press. (A Russian translation is in progress.) Discussing the sense of movement (kinaesthesia), I provided a broad intellectual background for understanding Whitehead's way of thinking in non-dualistic philosophies of mind in nature, and I draw on the book in this article. Young frequently alluded to White - head, along with the comparable criticism of the philosophical consequences of the scientific revolution in Burtt, E.A. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay, 2^nd ed. London, 1932. Prefacing his major work, Process and Reality (New York, 1957, p. ix), Whitehead stated `that all constructive thought, on the various special topics of scientific interest, is dominated by some such scheme [for the interpretation of experience], unacknowledged, but not less influential in guiding the imagination. The importance of philosophy lies in its sustained effort to make such schemes explicit, and thereby capable of criticism and improvement'. This might have served as a manifesto for the disci - pline of the history and philosophy of science as I was taught it when a student at Cambridge in the late 1960s.. Expressed in the most general way, Whitehead's readers searched for philosophical reasons to believe human action had meaning in the kind of world revealed by advances in natural science. He utterly opposed the doctrine of "vacuous actuality", belief that science showed there was no meaning in concrete experience of lifeWhitehead, A.N. Process and Reality, p. vii.. This I will explain. In conclusion, I will use this explanation to suggest reasons for recent interest in Whitehead.

Whitehead was a brilliant mathematician, and it was he, who as a tutor at Trinity College in Cambridge University, recognized the talent of his student and then colleague, Bertrand Russell. Appreciating the common direction of their projects to state the logical foundations of arithmetic, algebra and geometry, they worked on what became the Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910, 1912, 1913). Even while completing this massive study, which aimed at comprehensive self-consistency, the authors became aware of the problems being raised by logicians about the very viability of such a project. Whitehead moved from Cambridge to London and became a senior academic administrator in London University and, during World War One, took part in policy debates about the future direction of higher education. He also served as professor of applied mathematics and studied both the special and general theories of relativity; he was one of very few non-physicists able to debate the mathematical and physical understanding of the theories. He published An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), given a more publicly accessible form in The Concept of Nature (1920). This marked a turn to full-time philosophical study, and in 1924, not wishing to retire, he accepted a professorship in philosophy at Harvard University and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he worked from first principles systematically constructing a metaphysics, publishing Science and the Modern World (1926), Process and Reality (1929) and Adventures of

Ideas (1933)M.A. Kissel edited the Russian translation of the first and last of these books, along with two chapters, including the important introductory chapter, of Process and Reality, and also included Essays in Science and Philosophy (1947): Whitehead, A.N. Izbrannye raboty po filosofii [Selected Works on Philosophy]. Moscow, 1990; the editor contributed an introductory article. A.N. Tumanova also translated Adventures of Ideas: Whitehead, A.N. Priklucheniya idei [Adventures of Ideas]. Moscow, 2009.. The first of these books reached a large audience across the natural science and humanities faculties alike, and it was this work that continued to be widely read and was an inspiration in the field of the history and philosophy of science. Whitehead called his philosophy "a philosophy of organism", or, alternatively, "process philosophy". As he stated, "the most concrete fact capable of separate discrimination is the event", not some thing, but processWhitehead, A.N. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, 2015, p. 120.. At Harvard, he gained the reputation and garnered the affection of a sage, a wise old gentle - man; he was, for instance, never known to be discourteous, let alone to express anger.

This paper discusses the wider appeal of Whitehead's work. It outlines the nature of the project in metaphysics and not the earlier work in mathematics or the interpretation of the new physics. Nor do I assess his ventures into social commentary, which now appear the most dated aspect of his activity. Further, I do not include an assessment of the use theologians, influenced by the philosopher of religion and metaphysician Charles Hartshorne, made of Whitehead's metaphysics ("process theology"). Whitehead has been used in attempts to re-establish rational argument not so much for the existence, but for the coming-into- being of God in the coming-into-being in the self-constitution of the worldFor Hartshorne (pronounced Harts-horne), Dombrowski, D. "Charles Hartshorne", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition) [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2020/entries/hartshorne/, accessed on 11.08.2020].. Hartshorne kept alive a powerful discussion of Whitehead's work during the period when many analytic philosophers completely ignored it. I concentrate, however, on what Whitehead wrote about the philosophical consequences of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, especially those embedded in presuppositions about the conscious mind and its relation to the material world. This will explain Whitehead's appeal to people who are not specialist metaphysicians. He decisively rejected a mechanistic view of nature and laid the basis for rational thought about actual existence in terms that described mind (here we may also use the word "soul") as self-creating agency, participating with all the intuitively known qualitative values that went with being mind (or soul) in existence.

Whitehead categorically rejected the separation of mind and physical nature, and he instead worked out a constructive metaphysics in terms of which it was rational to understand sensuous, purposeful, moral, aesthetic and spiritual awareness as developments in nature. "It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in is most intense form the plasticity of nature. Plasticity is the introduction of novel law"Whitehead, A.N. Adventures of Ideas. New York, 1933, p. 99. I do not discuss the notion of "novel law", used in interpretations linking Whitehead to philosophies of emergence.. He constructed an ontology in terms of which actions had living meaning and were not the epiphenomenal, contingent consequences of dead nature, the motions of particles and waves, without meaning. The ontology also stressed novelty in time. Whitehead emphatically declared it a "failure of science to endow its formulae for activity with any meaning. The divergence of the formulae about Nature from the appearance of Nature has robbed the formulae of any explanatory character"11. He indicted natural science for abstraction from the actual qualitatively rich world known to everyday intuition. Whitehead criticized the knowledge achieved in natural science, when ascribed the status of truth, for "misplaced concreteness". This was to be his most quoted and famous expression:

The expression of more concrete facts under the guise of very abstract logical constructions... is an error... the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It is an example of what I will call the "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness". This fallacy is the occasion of great confusion in philosophyWhitehead, A.N. Nature and Life, p. 65. Whitehead, A.N. Science and the Modern World. Cambridge, 1953, p. 64. The Russian translation (Whitehead, A.N. Izbrannye raboty po filosofii [Selected Works on Philosophy], p. 107) was "oshibkoi podmeny konkretnovo"..

He supported this declaration with a historical account of the source of the fallacy in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The achievement of the new science culminating in Newton's work, he argued, was a disaster for philosophy:

The seventeenth century had finally produced a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians. The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth centuryWhitehead, A.N. Science and the Modern World, p. 70. The Russian translation (Whitehead, A.N. Izbrannye raboty po filosofii [Selected Works on Philosophy], 1990, p. 113) was "neumestnoi konkretnosti"..

This was an argument many scholars in the humanities wanted to hear: it appeared to raise the qualitative and evaluative subject matter of their fields of inquiry - literature, philosophy, history, Classics - to the status of knowledge without abstraction. It erected a rational justification for the humanities in the face of the increasing power and status of the natural sciences in the universities and in cultural life generally. It supported belief that the preoccupation in the humanities with meaning, and hence with interpretation, as opposed to empirical facts, was rationally legitimate. This was then used as a defence against a tendency in modernity to think that the humanities were the remnant of theistic worldviews and dependent on (outdated) sentiment not reason.

Whitehead's metaphysics, which he also called "speculative cosmology", and which he developed with logical rigour, described the relatedness of all things in coherent unity. The scheme, if successful, would have made it possible to derive from its principles the meaning of any particular "occasion" (a specially defined word) or actual, concrete moment of existence. By contrast, he argued, in modern culture the progressive assembly of scientific facts, assembled in the framework of demonstrably incoherent metaphysics, was leading civilization towards intellectual, moral and aesthetic meaninglessness. The argument was general in scope, but it applied specifically and pointedly to the sciences of mind- brain interaction - neurophysiology, psychology and, we would now add, neuroscience. The incoherence of the philosophical framework in terms of which scientists pursued knowledge in these disciplines, Whitehead argued, made it impossible for these sciences to achieve meaningful knowledge of human experience. Human experience came with values, or "worth": "At the base of our existence is the sense of `worth'... It is the sense of existence for its own sake, of existence which is its own justification"Whitehead, A.N. Modes of Thought. Cambridge, 1938, p. 149.. Any cosmology had to take account of "worth", but natural science had left values to poetry, to the arts, to expressions of moral and spiritual sensibility, and thereby left them without foundation. The natural sciences and the humanities, so to say, had drifted free of each other, and while the sciences were afloat because of their technological effectiveness, the humanities were threatening to drown, lacking any supportIt was not Whitehead's argument, but it was an obvious step, taken by a number of cultural critics on the political Left (e.g. R.M. Young, see note 5), to argue that this led to all values being vulnerable to the capitalist pursuit of profit, to the translation of "occasions" deprived of meaning into reified commodities..

One further introductory point: Whitehead's language was well known for it difficulty. Yet, as the quotations about misplaced concreteness suggest, he also made statements that were accessible and had broad appeal. Readers who were not philosophers were attracted to his work but then found that they could not understand, or did not choose to spend the time training to understand, the content of the metaphysics. Or they shook their heads in despair at chapters on mathematics and the theory of relativity. Whitehead's style in writing, I think, followed from his earlier work on the logical expression of the foundations of mathematics, and though he did not believe in the possibility of logical perfection, he went a great deal further in seeking it than most readers were prepared to follow. In his systematic work, especially in Process and Reality, he introduced a specialized vocabulary, defining words with the kind of precision that only a logician can manage, and then setting out his original arguments in these terms without further explanation. Richard Rorty even asserted that Whitehead's "critique of alternative cosmologies [to his own] is so radical as to transform systematically the meaning of almost every traditional philosophical term"Rorty, R. "Matter and Event", Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy. New York, 1983, p. 74. In Whitehead, A.N. Process and Reality, pp. 421-429, there is thus an index of terms, not an index of concepts.. The writing that resulted has perplexed readers. Whitehead combined accessible description of the failure of what he called "scientific materialism" to satisfy reason and emotion alike with a seemingly inaccessible new metaphysical languageWhitehead, A.N. Science and the Modern World, p. 22.. In some lectures and some sections of his books, Whitehead made what he thought were plain, common-sense observations and appealed to ordinary thought, or to the knowledge of the poet as opposed to the knowledge of the scientist, using conventional language. But elsewhere he referred, for instance, to "concrescence" (meaning the actualization of the potential of elements to combine as a unity) or to "creatures" (meaning actual entities of all kinds), adopting specialized languageHe held (Whitehead, A.N. Process and Reality, p. 27): "That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Thus actual entities are creatures. [I]n the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities - actual and non-actual - acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials".. As a consequence, readers who wanted to use his work in order to criticize the natural science worldview did so selectively. At times, reference to his work was more emblematic of humanistic opposition to the scientific worldview than appreciative of his cosmology. Nevertheless, his philosophy was, and is now again, cited for its authoritative account of the failure of natural science to accommodate mind (or soul), meaning and value in knowledge.