We used to think, but now we know
Perhaps the sentence most often quoted (and, often enough, misquoted) from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical writing is this:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition 1979, p. 39).
I think that there’s some truth in that statement, especially given its opening caveat. But I wish that those who quote it — and especially those who misquote it! — would include the sentences immediately following it:
I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.
The claim that European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato is not nearly as extravagant as some of Whitehead’s critics have made it out to be; he’s not saying that Plato did it all and that everyone else has merely added annotations. Instead, he says, Plato’s writing is suggestive, offering multiple and even inconsistent lines of reflection that his successors have explored.
Whitehead presented what became the book Process and Reality as the Gifford lectures in 1927-1928, only three years after joining Harvard University’s philosophy department. The Harvard appointment in philosophy followed his long and productive career in British universities as a mathematician. During that time, he published important books in mathematics, science, and logic — the most significant of which is Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with his student Bertrand Russell. In Process and Reality, Whitehead developed what he called his Philosophy of Organism, now known more commonly as process philosophy. The project is ambitious, and he makes some rather bold and innovative claims. But he offers a significant qualifier in the preface, noting “how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (p. xiv).
I think it’s fair to say that Whitehead had in mind both his own efforts and those of Plato here.
His inclination toward such cautionary fallibilism was shaped by his intellectual experience in the study of mathematics and physics. Lucien Price, in his Dialogues of Alfred North Whithead, remembers something Whitehead said in conversation in 1939:
I have lived three distinct lives …; one from childhood to the first world war; one from 1914 to my residence in America in 1924; and a third here since 1924. The first seems the most fantastic; in those years from the 1880’s to the first war, who ever dreamed that the ideas and institutions which then looked so stable would be impermanent? … Fifty-seven years ago it was, when I was a young man in the University of Cambridge. I was taught science and mathematics by brilliant men and I did well in them; since the turn of the century I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of both set aside; not, indeed, discarded, but of use as qualifying clauses, instead of as major propositions; and all this in one life-span — the most fundamental assumptions of supposedly exact sciences set aside. And yet, in the face of that, the discoverers of the new hypotheses in science are declaring, Now at last, we have certitude — when some of the assumptions which we have seen upset had endured for more than twenty centuries (p. 131).
…after one such experience in a lifetime of the impermanence of the most solid-seeming ideas, one is chary of overconfidence, and in the last words I have written I have said “The exactness is a fake” (p. 216).
That stark claim — the exactness is a fake — is the concluding sentence of his Harvard Ingersoll lecture, delivered in 1941 and reprinted as the concluding chapter of The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers. It’s a follow-up to this claim: “The conclusion is that Logic, conceived as an adequate analysis of the advance of thought, is a fake. It is a superb instrument, but it requires a background of common sense.”
My reading Whitehead’s Process and Reality the first time, now almost 50 years ago, was a formative experience for me, and I still think that process metaphysics offers a much more adequate understanding of the fundamental nature of things than any other position I’ve read. But I’m even more impressed by his caution to acknowledge that we should be open to questioning even our most fundamental beliefs.
As I read these days, It’s not at all unusual for me to find an author drawing a contrast between what we know today and what people once believed in the past. And, I confess, sometimes I catch myself making the same sort of claim. Better, I think, to be more cautious, saying something like “People used to think such and such, but now we have some reason instead to think thus and so. How might we test that hypothesis?” I think we’d all be better off.
