BERTRAND RUSSEL AND ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
by Andrew Irvine and Richard Lubbock. Extracts.
In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and political theory, as well as to the history of philosophy. Underlying these various projects was not only Russell's use of logical analysis, but also his long-standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. "There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions."
More than this, Russell's various contributions were also unified by his views concerning both the centrality of scientific knowledge and the importance of an underlying scientific methodology that is common to both philosophy and science. Russell became famous for his defense of the "new realism" and for his "new philosophy of logic", emphasizing as it did the importance of modern logic for philosophical analysis. The underlying themes of this "revolution", such as his belief in pluralism, his emphasis upon anti-psychologism, and the importance of science, remained central to Russell's philosophy for the remainder of his life.
Russell's methodology consisted of the making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence (hence Russell's comment that he wished to emphasize the "scientific method" in philosophy), together with a rigorous analysis of problematic propositions using the machinery of first-order logic. It was Russell's belief that by using the new logic of his day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the underlying "logical form" of natural language statements. A statement's logical form, in turn, would help philosophers resolve problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language.
Russell's emphasis upon logical analysis also had consequences for his metaphysics. In response to the traditional problem of the external world which, it is claimed, arises since the external world can be known only by inference, Russell developed his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description". He then went on to argue that the world itself consists of a complex of logical atoms (such as "little patches of color") and their properties. Together they form the atomic facts which, in turn, are combined to form logically complex objects. What we normally take to be inferred entities (for example, enduring physical objects) are then understood to be "logical constructions" formed from the immediately given entities of sensation, viz., "sensibilia". It is only these latter entities that are known non-inferentially and with certainty. According to Russell, the philosopher's job is to discover a logically ideal language that will exhibit the true nature of the world in such a way that the speaker will not be misled by the casual surface structure of natural language. Just as atomic facts (the association of universals with an appropriate number of individuals) may be combined into molecular facts in the world itself, such a language would allow for the description of such combinations using logical connectives such as "and" and "or". In addition to atomic and molecular facts, Russell also held that general facts (facts about "all" of something) were needed to complete the picture of the world. Famously, he vacillated on whether negative facts were also required.
Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education, in this broad sense, and social progress. At the same time, Russell is also famous for suggesting that a widespread reliance upon evidence, rather than upon superstition, would have enormous social consequences: "I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration," says Russell, "a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true."
In one of his many definitions Whitehead frames philosophy as a rational system. "Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience - everything of which we are aware, which we enjoy, perceive, will or think - can be interpreted."
Whitehead says that the first thing you've got to understand is that science is deluded: the world isn't made of atoms, electrons, gravity, or whatever. There is only one kind of entity; and even that perishes as soon as it comes into being. That entity is an aesthetic moment of choice, of feeling. Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions. Only feelings exist...
Whitehead's cosmos suggests a musical performance; a freewheeling jazz festival; an ensemble of countless players, some good, some bad, all improvising as hard as they can go. They play, not for the glory of God, or to celebrate some spiritual ideal of Art; they play only because they enjoy it. Unfortunately the musicians don't always agree on which chords to strike, and they even disagree about what tunes they want to play. And so ugly fights frequently break out amongst the artists, and they smash their instruments over each others' heads. Often they smash each others' heads. But rising like a wraith among the screeches, squawks and thwacks, you will hear the cadences and counterpoint of supernal music, almost too lovely to bear. It is the proper task of the true philosopher to lead you to experience that intangible beauty, to understand it, and to intensify it.
Around 1900, Whitehead and Russell joined forces for their collaboration on the three-volume Principia Mathematica. Russell discovered his paradox shortly before the work on Principia began. The problem had slept for 2,500 years, like a cerebral aneurysm waiting to burst within the skull of mathematics, ever since Epimenides the Cretan had declared that all Cretans were liars. Was Epimenides himself a liar? "Nobody treated that as anything but a joke," wrote Russell; but he found that this hoary parlor puzzle struck at the very root of arithmetic. He had the bright idea of applying Epimenides's reasoning to logical classes, which form the basis of numbers. In particular, he ruminated on the class of those classes that are not members of themselves. To his dismay he found both that it belonged to itself, and that it didn't: an intolerable result.
Whitehead drew from it the metaphysical lesson that we must never stretch an idea beyond its proper scope. But how are we to decide what the proper scope might be? If pure reason ties itself in knots at its limits, we'd be unwise to lean too much on moral reason, either. Pascal, perhaps, offered the soundest advice for both metaphysicians and moralists when he declared, "Two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason".
The doctrine of The Jewel Net of Indra forms the core of Hua-Yen Buddhism. It teaches that the cosmos is like an infinite network of glittering jewels, all different. In each one we can see the images of all the others reflected. Each image contains an image of all the other jewels; and also the image of the images of the images, and so ad infinitum. The myriad reflections within each jewel are the essence of the jewel itself, without which it does not exist. Thus, every part of the cosmos reflects, and brings into existence, every other part. Nothing can exist unless it enfolds within its essence the nature of everything else. The same thought runs through Whitehead's philosophy, although he avoids the gorgeous imagery of the Orient. He prefers to present his ideas in obscure, gray, academic terminology.
He states that the cosmos is a network of 'actual occasions', which are pulses of feeling and acts of choice. Every factor of experience must call on all the others in order to express itself. Each occasion is a process which perishes as soon as it has asserted itself. Once dead, it forms the base, and sets the limits, for the deeds of its successors. The nodes of Whitehead's solidarity network are active, and the pattern never ceases to change. (His) assumption, that process is the ultimate reality, has become a commonplace, even among scientists.
Science today grants that 'substance' is a dubious concept: our minds, for instance are abstract patterns drawn by moving atoms. But the atoms themselves are also patterns, woven by subatomic particles. And the sub-particles - the electrons, muons and quarks - they are patterns, too, but patterns in what? Positivistic science refuses to let us ask. Our curiosity insists that we do. We seem to be running into an infinite regress of patterns. In order to stop the rot, Whitehead proposes a primordial First Stuff. He sets up a Category of the Ultimate; and he names just three members of the ultimate: The Creativity, the Many and the One. 'Creativity' is his name for the ultimate process. It's the wave of goings-on that turns everything into something else. The Creativity has no properties of its own. His creative ultimate is the bare desire to enjoy something new. Creativity is passion, but as yet without a pattern. Whitehead puts it this way: "'Creativity' is the principle of novelty. It is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. The many become one and are increased by one. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle's category of 'primary substance'".
Creativity is the bare desire to advance towards greater beauty, probing everywhere. It is pure feeling: it is curiosity, alertness, aliveness and ardor; but without shape. It seeks satisfaction indiscriminately. But until it's got a blueprint or recipe to work on, it is nothing at all; it's not even space or time; it's mere formless yearning. It needs a direction, or it will get nowhere; it must take instructions, or be nothing. "Creativity is without a character of its own," Whitehead writes, "exactly in the same sense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own. It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality." There's your primary substance, the stuff that makes up the world, the aliveness that makes things go.
We can't know the roots of the world by reason; but only through our aesthetic sense. As the late Richard Feynman put it, physical science comes down to a question, not of logic, but of taste. Whitehead's cosmology rests on an aesthetic setup beyond reason, which makes sense of everything else. He said: "In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is capable of characterization only through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed 'creativity'; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident."
To support this assertion, Whitehead relies on Plato's definition of being: "I hold that the definition of being is simply power". Without God, the creativity would twitch vainly, like a fibrillating heart. God supplies the eternal, objective values that lesser creatures must aim at. God is an accident; but since the creativity is nothing without him, he's a necessary sort of accident.
This 'Primordial Nature of God', as Whitehead calls it (he likes to capitalize the names of his concepts), is a far cry from the omnipotent creator and universal king of the Jerusalem tradition. Whitehead says: "In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian or Chinese thought, than to western Asiatic, or European thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate."
Whitehead's doctrine of the ultimate declares that God did not create the world on one occasion, ex nihilo. The world goes on forming itself forever, always rising anew out of chaos. To what end? Whitehead gives a simple reply, "The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty". Whitehead's God is not the same as the world, and nor is the world a part of God, but they are both forms within the process of enjoyment and desire. The primordial aspect of God, which Whitehead also terms 'the Realm of Eternal Objects', ranks logically prior to the lesser creatures; they choose their forms from it; and then they must perish and fade back into the infinitely complex wave of primitive feeling. Process destroys everything. All that endures is form; and form comes from God, whose mind may change, though it never contradicts itself.
Whitehead flatly denies that God is the omnipotent creator and tyrant before whom mankind's first duty is to offer up fulsome metaphysical compliments. Though not omnipotent, God is necessary. Further, Whitehead asserts that God must be unique. What's more, Whitehead's God, although unique, appears to be not One, but Two. The first part of God is the Realm of Eternal Objects. I call this the Alpha-God, and it is unconscious, resembling Plato's world of ideal forms, Aristotle's world of potentia, and Steven Hawking's wave function of the entire universe. One is even tempted to identify this Alpha-God with the Tao. The second part of Whitehead's God is the 'Consequent Nature', the Omega-God, which is conscious, in the same sense that we are conscious.
For Whitehead, the actual world we inherit, woven out of the creativity, eternally perishes. God and the process are eternal, but the world is eternally perishing. When Whitehead lays out this tangled relationship between God, the world and the ultimate creativity, one fact stands out: the philosophy of organism is a one-substance doctrine. The process alone is reality.
Russell, you will remember, upheld the doctrine of logical atomism: the world is a heap of separate things. Therefore an entity for Russell is exactly what it is, and it would still be the same even if there were nothing else in the universe. A dog is simply a dog, and would still be a dog even if crocodiles didn't exist. Whitehead rejects Russell's position: In his view the essence of each entity is determined by its relation to everything else.
Whitehead groups his occasions into 'societies'. The most typical 'society' of his occasions is the human soul, as it grows in time. One pulse of enjoyment follows another, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call the soul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from its predecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy the past: in the act of self-creation it refreshes the design of the past, thereby inventing its novel present, and preparing for its possible futures. Whitehead calls these takeovers 'prehensions'.
Alongside our physical prehensions, we perform another kind of take: we prehend concepts. These make up the mental pole of an occasion of feeling. At the mental pole we prehend the infinite world of what-might-be. Conceptual prehensions allow the objective scale of values, given by the primordial nature of God, to enter our decision. In other words, our minds are in direct touch with God. In this mental function, Whitehead's psychology revives the Christian concept of the synteresis: the divine spark at the core of the mind. His doctrine also resembles Eastern thought, which teaches that Atman, the Self, is identical with Brahman, the spirit of the cosmos.
Whitehead insists that unless we take account of the absolute, final enjoyments, or values, volunteered by God, we cannot make sense of our objective experience. Every pulse of the mind gobbles up all the fixed, objective facts that have been, along with all the eternal values that might-be, and digests them. Whitehead pictures the mind as a society of free agents. Each agent, itself a society of lesser agents, specializes in a certain type of decision. In a timeless moment the whole society of mind (as Marvin Minsky calls it) weighs its options, and satisfies its desires by choosing just one target. In so choosing, the subject must sacrifice an infinite number of might-have-beens.
Whitehead offers no general ethical doctrine. No logical code can chart the realms that open before a member of the Jewel Net at each decisive moment. Instead of ethical prescriptions, Whitehead offers five prime qualities of Civilization for us to aim at. He calls his five targets: Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace.
By Truth, he means the conformation of appearance to reality. Objective reality cannot be true: it is simply itself; but appearance can conform to reality to a greater or lesser degree, and in different ways. By Beauty he means the quality that arises when the members of a society of occasions act so as to conform and contrast harmoniously with one another's purposes. To create and enjoy beauty is the final cause and purpose of every society. Art is the unending human effort to produce the appearance of truthful beauty; and a work of art is a finite fragment of that effort. Our chief cause is to aim at and enjoy truthful beauty. He adds Adventure as a prime quality because he believes civilization will fade into tameness and vapidity unless we seek freedom, discord and risk in the search for novel enjoyments. His fifth value, Peace, deserves special comment. By 'Peace' Whitehead means neither tranquillity, nor the absence of war. Whitehead's Peace comes to us from the final element in his cosmos: the Consequent Nature of God. This is the Omega-God, personal and conscious. God is a unique type of actual occasion. The Consequent Nature of God is the one subject that never perishes: he is everlasting but never complete. His body is the sum of all the stubborn, brute facts that we, and the other worldly creatures, are forever laying down within our countless occasions. His soul is the eternal form of his primordial realm of ideal values. His gift is redemption. The Omega-God takes up the coarse patchwork of hopeful events we bequeath to him; he marries them to his primordial realm of value; and he returns to us the intuition that, in the light of his providence, the deeds we offer up may become beautiful. That is the persuasive, transcendent vision of peace we should pursue.
He is aware that he is seeking to articulate the ineffable: "The metaphysician is seeking, amid the dim recesses of his ape-like consciousness, and beyond the reach of dictionary language, for the premises implicit in all reasoning. The speculative methods of metaphysics are dangerous, easily perverted. So is all Adventure; but Adventure belongs to the essence of civilization". Many critics complain that Whitehead's metaphysic is hard to understand. To me his writings clearly describe a cosmic net of mutually creative moments. Every moment flows to its own purpose; everything perishes; each spark of experience relies on the whole net for its value; the final cause of the cosmos is beauty in action.