Whitehead

 Was Whitehead simply a crank? Surely not. There are long sections in his lecture series, Science and the Modern World, in which he proves that he can write clearly when he wants to. He demonstrates that he is more than capable of articulating a coherent thought if he chooses. To be sure, these passages tend to appear when he is explaining some philosophical problem. When he is setting up the difficulty for us, he makes it all perfectly lucid. But then, when it comes time to reveal the solution, he suddenly becomes downright Delphic in his inscrutability. 

In the course of the lectures, after all, Whitehead addresses most of the familiar problems of modern philosophy. He points to Hume's problem of induction, for instance. He observes that it is rather odd that, at the very dawn of modern science, Hume managed to refute the very premises on which inductive science is based. He says that it is perhaps ironic that modern scientists have all embraced Hume's philosophy—and admit his objections to the philosophical foundations of empirical inquiry to be unanswerable—and yet have proceeded on their way as if these objections did not exist. 

This is indeed ironic. But it is no more than Hume himself encouraged us to do. He did not ask that we abandon our common sense of reality; but rather that we proceed as if all our ordinary notions of the world still obtained, and simply recognized as we did so the fundamentally "whimsical condition of mankind" that these problems disclose to us. And Whitehead, for all he is correct in pointing to the contradiction at the heart of modern science—and the way in which it has been forced to divorce itself from philosophy, ever since it proved unable to answer Hume's objections—is not able to do any better. 

Whitehead argues that scientists have in fact been acting all this time on "faith." They have proceeded as if there were a verifiable fixed law of nature—i.e. that events occur in discernible patterns of regularity in the natural world—even though Hume long ago showed that such a belief has no ultimate foundation. Whitehead suggests that modern scientists have essentially carried over this faith from the medieval philosophers, without acknowledgement. This choice to proceed according to certain arbitrarily posited rules of thumb, without trying to justify one's procedures through philosophy, is—according to Whitehead—what marks modern science out as fundamentally anti-intellectual and anti-rational. 

All of which is fair enough—and an interesting point, because it is runs counter to our typical modern concepts of the scientist's role. But what's less clear is what course Whitehead would recommend as an alternative. He suggests that scientists could somehow get around Hume's problem of induction by altering their metaphysical conceptions. But when he attempts to describe how, exactly—that is where his till-now lucid prose becomes Delphic. He starts talking about "prehension" and "organism." 

We must stop thinking of the world of reality as composed of material objects existing in a fixed time and place, Whitehead argues (for this notion leads us to the problem of induction—for what light can an object fixed in one time and place shed on future objects in different times and places?). Instead, he argues, we must think of objects as "events." And what is an "event," for Whitehead? It is, famously, a "process." But it is many other things too. It is also "the grasping into unity of a pattern of aspects." He goes on: "The effectiveness of an event beyond itself arises from the aspects of itself which go to form the prehended unities of other events."

There are many more pages of that sort of thing. Available for your consumption, if that is your cup of tea. I dutifully read them all—despite Whitehead's generous suggestion at the beginning of Chapter X that "those readers who find metaphysics, even in two slight chapters, irksome, will do well to proceed at once to the Chapter on 'Religion and Science[.]'" I did not take him up on that suggestion, because I did not think of myself as someone for whom metaphysics, as such, is necessarily "irksome," but simply as someone who demands that metaphysics, if they are to be propounded, should make some kind of sense. Proceeding on this basis, I read every word of Whitehead's book. But I remain just as baffled as before.  

The same occurs when Whitehead comes to address the problem of realism vs. idealism—which he reframes as an argument between "objectivism" and "subjectivism"—i.e., between those who hold the world to exist outside our minds and those who maintain the opposite. Whitehead rejects the position of Berkeley and the other idealist or "subjectivist" philosophers, who insist that the world can be conceived of as existing only in our minds, in favor of a position that Whitehead calls "provisional realism." But what is the basis of his preference for realism as at least the more probable of the alternative worldviews? 

One of the reasons he provides is, as he puts it, "based on the particular content of experience." He explains: "Our historical knowledge tells us of ages in the past when, so far as we can see, no living being existed on earth. Again, it also tells us of countless star-systems, whose detailed history remains beyond our ken. [...] What is going on within the interior of the earth, and on the far side of the moon! Our perceptions lead us to infer that there is something happening in the stars [....] But all these things which it appears certainly happened, are either unknown in detail, or else are reconstructed by inferential evidence. In the face of this content of our personal experience, it is difficult to believe that the experienced world is an attribute of our own personality." 

But this, surely, is a petitio principii. He has assumed that which he was supposed to be proving. For the idealist or "subjectivist" hypothesis is simply that the far side of the moon does not exist outside of our perceptions of it. One may object: "but we form ideas of it." Quite so. What exists, then, for the idealist, is the idea we form of it. The same could be said of the Earth's pre-history—prior to the arrival of human intelligence. The fact that we appear to "know" things about this pre-history proves nothing more than that the ideas of such knowledge exist presently in our minds. To say that they also necessarily correspond to "real" objects that exist outside of the mind is to multiply entities unnecessarily, and thereby to violate the law of logical parsimony. The phenomenon—the perception in our minds—can be explained without recourse to secondary objects that correspond to these perceptions, so we do not need to posit the latter's existence (here I am just channeling Bishop Berkeley). 

Kant, of course, posited the hypothetical existence of a "thing-in-itself" that exists outside our perception, in the "noumena." But his point was that we can know nothing of it, even if it does exist, since all our perceptions of it are mediated through our minds. And the next step from this realization—and here I am more in line with Berkeley than Kant—is simply to say that—if we can know nothing of it—then we are not really justified in talking about it. Indeed, it is a completely unnecessary extra entity that adds nothing to our understanding of the world. And so, following Occam's Razor, we should dispense with it. 

Of course, I, like most people, proceed day to day on the assumption that the phenomena in my brain correspond to real entities that exist outside of it. Just as I live my life according to the law of induction, even if I cannot produce a logical foundation for it. These facts, however, are not proof that such principles are true. 

Yet, if we are not to admit the reality of fixed, universal laws and an ultimate order of nature, Whitehead protests, then everything that exists would do so "arbitrarily." True enough, we say—but does the fact that such a conclusion is emotionally repugnant make it untrue? 

White seems to suggest as much—and not only in this place. Take, for example, his discussion of evolution. "Evolution, on the materialistic theory," he writes, "is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations between portions is as good as any other set of external relations. There can be merely change, purposeless and unprogressive." 

Indeed, that's exactly how modern biologists conceive of evolution—it does not have foresight, teleology, or trajectory; it is just a factual description of the self-evident truth that different heritable traits are passed on to future generations with different frequencies under different conditions, due to differential rates of survival and reproduction. 

"But," Whitehead protests, against this vision of arbitrary change toward no fixed outcome, "the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms." 

Well, no it isn't. Admittedly, I can't be sure what Whitehead means by something being the "whole point" of evolutionary theory, but certainly no modern version of Darwinian evolutionary teaching holds that there is a teleological progression through time toward greater complexity. After all, the world still has as many prokaryotes in it as ever. They do not appear to be dying out inevitably in the face of competition from more "complex" organisms. Complexity only evolves under conditions in which it secures an adaptive advantage. Where simple prokaryotes are still perfectly well adapted for their environment, they persist—as they have persisted to this day.

But no, Whitehead still protests. We cannot admit these skeptical hypotheses, cries Whitehead—for otherwise, the validity of the scientific enterprise itself would collapse into contradiction!  We cannot admit the problem of induction, the idealist notion of reality, or the vision of an arbitrary and ultimately purposeless recombination of matter through time. 

Fair enough—we might say. Many of us find these notions distasteful as well. We often have to proceed as if they were not true, in order to act at all. But does that mean they are ipso facto untrue? And what vision of the world would Whitehead supply in their place? I can only refer you back to the passage quoted above, about "prehensions" (*cough* pretensions?), "events," "processes," "unities," and the like. As opaque as that passage may appear to you now, I can only add that it never became any clearer to me, despite reading all the rest of the book. 

If it means anything at all, perhaps Whitehead is saying that events should simply be redefined as things that have reference to future events of the same sort—and therefore, there is no problem of induction. But, this is begging the question once again. It is assuming what it set out to prove. It "solves" the problem of induction simply by positing as true exactly that characteristic of events—namely, regularity—that the problem calls into question. And this is, in truth, no solution at all. At best, it is just another way of taking the regularity of nature "on faith"—or assuming it to be true as a working hypothesis—which I'm happy to do. But then, Whitehead is doing exactly what he has already criticized modern scientists for doing. 

Perhaps, of course, I simply didn't understand this point because I am too dim. But why should I be able to understand Whitehead's prose perfectly well when he is setting up the philosophical problems? Why should he only become incomprehensible to me when he is offering his solutions? Indeed, why should all the philosophers, down through the ages, be so much easier to understand when they are first framing the difficulties they mean to surmount, than when they finally purport to surmount them? Why should they all become suddenly poetic and vague and mystical, as soon as it comes time to pull the rabbit out of the hat? Perhaps it is because there is something in the very nature of the universe that makes truth less lucid and comprehensible than the skeptical hypotheses of our minds. 

Or, perhaps, it is because those solutions are simply not there. Perhaps the philosophical problems have outlasted every proposed solution, through the centuries, because they are real and the solutions are not. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, the philosophers are actually forced to concede that they have no solution. That the laws of nature may indeed be ones of arbitrary and purposeless change; that we really don't have any ultimate foundations for many of the common sense beliefs we take for granted, and we do indeed exist under conditions of philosophical absurdity. Perhaps, as Bertolt Brecht once wrote: "When the errors have been used up/ As our last companion, facing us/ Sits nothingness" (Hamburger trans.) 

Perhaps, then, the inscrutability of the philosophers, as soon as it comes time to reveal their grand solution, has the simple explanation that they realize too late that they have no solution to reveal. Perhaps they thought one would come to them as they wrote. But there they are, on stage, their hands feeling around the felt liner of the hat, and they come up empty. Everyone is watching. The audience is seated there expectantly. But there is no rabbit in the hat. And so, the philosophers do what any good stage magician would do. They keep up the patter. They deflect. They seek to vanish in a puff of smoke. Perhaps, in other words, to quote James Thomson, it is simply the case:

That all the oracles are dumb or cheat

    Because they have no secret to express;

  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain

  Because there is no light beyond the curtain;

    That all is vanity and nothingness.