Alfred North Whitehead – against dualism

Biological knowledge does not consist only of long lists of simultaneous and successive physico-chemical states. Biological knowledge describes what states are for, that is, it gives priority to statements about function. Biological language treats events in nature as doing something for an end: the heart, for example, circulates oxygenated blood and thereby maintains cell metabolism. The description specifies the human significance of the heart: it maintains life. The language conveys the meaning that "maintaining" and "life" count, have a place, a purpose, in the human world. It might appear, in principle, possible to list a series of physical and chemical changes and say, this is a heart beat. This, however, would not be knowledge but a list; moreover, by saying that the list describes "a heart beat", the speaker would re-engage discourse about what matters for human purposes, that is, discourse that life mattersFor penetrating comment on the language of function dissolving the is/ought distinction, Barnes, B. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London, 2000, p. 131. Each step of the present argument raises questions. Structuralist modes of thought, for instance, proposed to eliminate reference to function because this language was indeed linked to human purposes, and the hope was instead to ground science on the formal structure of language and thought. Post-structuralist theory, though often perceived to be equally "anti-humanist", demonstrated the limits of structuralism.. The continuing use of the language of function tacitly acknowledges this. Moreover, any reference to function, as well as referring to a purpose, also has "an underlying tendency to instill into every other meaning of the word an active principle of some sort, a `doing', `performing', `fulfilling' principle", that is, the language perpetuates reference to active principles in the worldRuckmich, C.A. "The Use of the Word Function in English Textbooks of Psychology", American Journal of Psychology, 1913, Vol. 24, p. 122.. Yet scientists do not dismiss the language of function as a remnant of primitive thought or as a pre-scientific, anthropomorphic figure of speech; the language is in everyday use, unremarked in science and ordinary life alike. For Whitehead, this usage followed naturally, and logically, from awareness of participation in relations in the doings of the world. Awareness was organically related to what went on, and thus what went on could legitimately be said to have a function.

For Whitehead, the language of function in living processes opened an alternative to the language of mind-body dualism. It was language of organic relations in "occasions". The referral of what took place in life to mind or to body was the contingent outcome of historical events, events the historian of science could trace in the history of studies of life since the seventeenth century. (This judgment I quoted in the epigram.) If the huge number of writers on the mind- body question, drawn to the question in the course of the development of physiology, psychology, and scientific medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thought they were doing philosophy, they were, ultimately, misguided. They were actors in a form of cultural life in which references to mind or to body symbol - ized historically embedded value judgments. For Whitehead, the development of a science overcoming historical contingency required a return to metaphysics.

Metaphysics and culture

The concluding section says something about the place of Whitehead's writing in public discussion of cultural life. His philosophy has been significant in the English-speaking world because of vociferous public debate about the relations of what are commonly known as "the arts" (humanities) and "the sciences" (natural sciences). There has recently also been some French-language reference to his metaphysics.

Modern physical science, Whitehead wrote, has abstracted from the awareness that ordinary people have of being in the world in all its qualitative plurality. The modern culture of science has thereby instituted an intolerable "bifurcation of nature", evident in discussion of "the human" separate from discussion of "nature"Whitehead, A.N. The Concept of Nature, pp. 18-32. These lectures (1919), which argued for a realist understanding of physical knowledge (including the general theory of relativity), laid the basis for Whitehead's subsequent elaboration of his metaphysics. "Bifurcation" has been translated as ``udvoenie": Yulina, N.S. Op. cit.. This separation has become embedded institutionally in the distinction between humanities and natural science disciplines - with the psychological and social sciences awkwardly placed in between and divided about their proper identity. This "bifurcation" has had major consequences. It has made it impossible to answer the basic question of a theory of knowledge: how is knowledge possible? It has produced a picture of nature grossly at odds with everyday perception of the reality of all kinds of qualities. It has burdened philosophy and science with the intractable mind-body problem. It has even called into question the future of civilized culture, because it has led to the isolation of the emotions from the intellect, dividing subjective feeling from objective reason, rendering feeling as an irrational force and intellect as a cold, purely utilitarian or instrumental tool. This was writing that resonated with critics concerned with the dehumanization of the modern world, and with critics of a perceived split between the aims of the humanities and the goals of the sciences in education. In Science and the Modern World, in essays published in The Aims of Education (1929), in his teaching and social engagements in London and then at Harvard, Whitehead directly contributed to these debates. He gained a reputation as an intellectually innovative, profound and humane - one might say, wise - participant. His writings and sayings became linguistic resources for scholars asserting humanistic values in higher education.

It is important to recall that Whitehead had spent a decade contributing, if behind the scenes, to debates at the University of London on the future direction of national education. His social involvement had begun earlier, in Cambridge, where, for example, he promoted, unsuccessfully, the cause of academic equality for women. He helped maintain the momentum of a half-century of pressure to upgrade the position of the natural sciences in the teaching curriculum in schools and universities alike. This pressure relied on two arguments: science was needed in the national and imperial economic and political interest; and scientific education was well suited to creating the kind of informed and rational citizens needed in a democracy. Conservative opponents feared for the loss of the civilized qualities an education in the Classics was said to develop, and they feared the consequences of replacing gentlemanly virtues by utilitarian calculation. Speaking in broad terms, the resolution of this argument in the English-speaking world took the form of a slow enlargement of natural science education, along with the replacement of Classics by the more accessible study of English literature as the vehicle of education in moral and aesthetic culture. In the twentieth century, however, there was commonly a sharp divide in the actual education students received, and hence a divide in outlook among academics and professional people between those educated in the humanities and those educated in the sciences. Through the interwar years, and even into the 1950s, it was common for both senior scientists and senior humanists to pinpoint the split between the arts and the sciences as the central problem facing intellectual culture. The split, for instance, was one motive in the establishment of the history of science as a dis - cipline. The advocates of this discipline believed that it would demonstrate the profound contribution of natural science to humanistic culture, thus healing the science-arts splitMayer, A.-K. "Moralizing Science: The Uses of Science's Past in National Education in the 1920s", British Journal for the History of Science, 1997, Vol. 30 pp. 51-70; Idem, "Setting Up a Discipline: Conflicting Agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee, 19361950", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2000, Vol. 31, pp. 665-689; Idem, "When Things Don't Talk: Knowledge and Belief in the Inter-War Humanism of Charles Singer (1876-1960)", British Journal for the History of Science, 2005, Vol. 38, pp. 325-347.. Given all this, Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, and to a lesser extent his other writings, particularly Modes of Thought (1938), were highly valued over a long period of time.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Britain, the same issues were prominent once again, this time in relation to what everyone knew as "the two cultures" debate. This expression was the title of a lecture by a physicist, who was also a novelist and later a politician, C.P. Snow, in 19 5 9 Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge, 1993. For the cultural history of the debate: Col- lini, S. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930. Oxford, 1991; Idem, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford, 2006; Ortolano, G. The Two Cultures: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain. Cambridge, 2009.. The debate concerned the purposes of education in a society thought to be in need of modernization but also worried about preserving its moral culture. It was also the time of a major expansion of the university system. In this setting, Whitehead's critical discussion of science, and especially of the relation of "scientific materialism" to values, was perceived to be highly relevant. Indeed, Whitehead appeared the most serious philosophical resource available in addressing the issues raised in "the two cultures" debate. Whatever the difficulties of his language, Whitehead also gave expression to the ordinary person's experience - much vaunted in the culture of the individual in which he wrote - of being active, of being an agent with value.