Alfred
North Whitehead
British mathematician and philosopher
born Feb.
15, 1861, Ramsgate, Isle of Thanet, Kent, Eng.
died Dec. 30, 1947, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.
Main
English mathematician and philosopher, who collaborated with
Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and,
from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and
developed a comprehensive metaphysical theory.
Background and schooling.
Whitehead’s grandfather Thomas Whitehead was a self-made
man who started a successful boys’ school known as Chatham
House Academy. His father, Alfred Whitehead, an Anglican
clergyman, in turn headed the school and later became vicar
of St. Peter’s in Thanet. His mother, born Maria Sarah
Buckmaster, was the daughter of a prosperous military
tailor. Alfred North Whitehead was their youngest child.
Because they considered him too frail for school or active
sports, his father taught him at home until he was 14, when
he was sent to Sherborne School, Dorset, which was then one
of the best schools in England. Whitehead received a
classical education, showing a special gift for mathematics.
Despite his over-protected childhood, he showed himself a
natural leader. In his last year at school, he was head
prefect, responsible for all discipline outside the
classroom, and was a highly successful captain of games.
In 1880
Whitehead entered Trinity College, Cambridge, on a
scholarship. He attended only mathematical lectures, and his
interests in literature, religion, philosophy, and politics
were nourished solely by conversation. It was not until May
1884, however, that he was elected to an elite discussion
society known as the “Apostles.” Whitehead did well in the
Mathematical Tripos (honours examination) of 1883–84, won a
Trinity fellowship, and was appointed to the mathematical
staff of the college. His interest in James Clerk Maxwell’s
theory of electricity and magnetism (the subject of his
fellowship dissertation) expanded toward a scrutiny of
mathematical symbolism and ideas. Stimulated by pioneering
works in modern algebra, he envisaged a detailed comparative
study of systems of symbolic reasoning allied to ordinary
algebra. He did not begin to write his Treatise on Universal
Algebra (1898), however, until January 1891, one month after
his marriage to Evelyn Willoughby Wade. She had been born in
France, a child of impoverished Irish landed gentry, and
educated in a convent. She was a woman with a great sense of
drama and a real and unusual aesthetic sensibility, and she
enriched Whitehead’s life immensely.
Shortly
before his marriage, his long-standing interest in religion
had taken a new turn. His background had been solidly tied
into the Church of England; his father and uncles had been
ordained; so had his brother Henry, who would become bishop
of Madras. But Whitehead, under the influence of Cardinal
Newman, began to consider the tenets of the Roman Catholic
Church. For about eight years he read a great deal of
theology. Then he sold his theological library and gave up
religion. This agnosticism did not survive World War I, but
Whitehead was never again a member of any church.
Whitehead
was at work on a second volume of his Universal Algebra from
1898 to 1903, when he abandoned it because he was busy on a
related, large investigation with Bertrand Russell. He had
spotted young Russell’s brilliance when he examined him for
entrance scholarships at Trinity College. In 1890 Russell
was a freshman studying mathematics there, and Whitehead was
one of his teachers. Gradually the two men became close
friends. In July 1900 they went to the First International
Congress of Philosophy in Paris, where they were impressed
by the precision with which the mathematician Giuseppe Peano
used symbolic logic to clarify the foundations of
arithmetic. Russell at once mastered Peano’s notation and
extended his methods. By the end of 1900 he had written the
first draft of his brilliant Principles of Mathematics
(1903). Whitehead agreed with its main thesis—that all pure
mathematics follows from a reformed formal logic so that, of
the two, logic is the fundamental discipline. By 1901
Russell had secured his collaboration on volume 2 of the
Principles, in which this thesis was to be established by
strict symbolic reasoning. The task turned out to be
enormous. Their work had to be made independent of Russell’s
book; they called it Principia Mathematica. The project
occupied them until 1910, when the first of its three
volumes was published. The “official” text was written in a
notation, most of which was either taken from Peano or
invented by Whitehead. Broadly speaking, Whitehead left the
philosophical problems—notably the devising of a theory of
logical types—to Russell; and Russell, who had no teaching
duties, actually wrote out most of the book. But the
collaboration was thorough, and Russell gave Whitehead an
equal share of the credit. Whitehead’s only large published
piece employing the symbolism of the Principia is a masterly
speculative memoir, “On Mathematical Concepts of the
Material World” (1905).
Career in London.
In 1903 Trinity College had given Whitehead a 10-year
appointment as a senior lecturer, made him the head of the
mathematics staff, and permitted his teaching career to run
beyond the maximum of 25 years set by the college statutes.
Yet Whitehead’s future was uncertain: he had not made the
sort of discoveries that cause a man to be counted an
outstanding mathematician. (His interest was always
philosophical, in that it was directed more toward grasping
the nature of mathematics in its widest aspects and
organizing its ideas than toward discovering new theorems.)
There was, thus, little prospect of a Cambridge
professorship in mathematics for him at the expiration of
his Trinity lectureship. He did not wait for it to expire
but moved to London in 1910, even though he had no position
waiting for him there. His years of service at Trinity,
however, had made him a fellow for life, entitled to twice
the regular quarterly dividend paid to fellows. This was
scarcely enough to support his family, but Evelyn Whitehead
encouraged the venture.
In that
first London year, Whitehead wrote the first of his books
for a wide audience, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911),
still one of the best books of its kind. In 1911 he was
appointed to the staff of University College (London), and
in 1914 he became professor of applied mathematics at the
Imperial College of Science and Technology.
In London
Whitehead observed the education then being offered to the
English masses. His own teaching had always elicited his
pupils’ latent abilities to the fullest. Perceiving that
mathematics was being taught as a disconnected set of
largely unfathomed exercises, Whitehead made occasional
addresses on the teaching of mathematics. He stressed
getting a living understanding of a few interrelated
abstract ideas by using them in a variety of ways so as to
develop an intimate sense for their power. Whitehead also
perceived that literature was so taught as to preclude its
enjoyment, that curricula were fragmented, and that teachers
were handcuffed by the system of uniform examinations set by
outside examiners. In 1916, as president of the Mathematical
Association, he delivered the notable address “The Aims of
Education: A Plea for Reform.” Whitehead reminded youth’s
keepers that the purpose of education was not to pack
knowledge into the pupils but to stimulate and guide their
self-development. “Culture,” he said, “is activity of
thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.
Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.”
Whitehead’s address became a classic in virtue of its
unequalled clarity, vigour, and realism and its
reconciliation of general with special education. It was
followed by penetrating essays on such topics as the rhythm
of freedom and discipline. Though Whitehead’s essays on
education had little effect on British practice, they
inspired many teachers in Great Britain, the United States,
and elsewhere.
From 1919
to 1924 Whitehead was chairman of the governing body of
Goldsmiths’ College, London, one of England’s major
institutes for training teachers. He also served as a
governor of several polytechnic schools in London. In the
University of London he became a member of the Senate,
chairman of the Academic Council, and dean of the Faculty of
Science. His shrewdness, common sense, and goodwill put him
in great demand as a committeeman.
Whitehead
was a pacific man but not a pacifist; he felt that the war
was hideous but that England’s part in it was necessary. His
elder son, North, fought throughout the war, and his
daughter, Jessie, worked in the Foreign Office. In 1918 his
younger son, Eric, was killed in action, and after that it
was only by immense effort that Whitehead could go on
working. To Whitehead, Russell’s pacifism was simplistic;
yet he visited him in prison, remained his friend, and, as
Russell later said, showed him greater tolerance than he
could return.
During
those years, Whitehead was also constructing philosophical
foundations for physics. He was led to this by the way in
which he wanted to present geometry—not as deduced from
hypothetical premises about assumed though imperceptible
entities (e.g., points) but as the science of actual space,
which is a complex of relations between extended things.
From perceivable elements and relations, he logically
constructed entities that are related to each other just as
points are in geometry. That was only the beginning of his
task, for Albert Einstein had revised the ideas of space,
time, and motion. Whitehead was convinced that these three
concepts should be based upon the general character of men’s
perception of the external world. In 1919 he published his
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge; it
was both searching and constructive but too philosophical
and too complicated to influence physicists.
Whitehead
had begun to have discussions of the perceptual basis of
scientific knowledge with philosophers in 1915, and he
followed up his Enquiry with a nonmathematical book, The
Concept of Nature (1920). Though he rejected Idealistic
views of the relation of nature to perceiving minds, neither
was he a Realist of the school led by Russell and G.E.
Moore. In maintaining that events are the basic components
of nature and that passage, or creative advance, is its most
fundamental feature—doctrines that foreshadowed his later
metaphysics—Whitehead was somewhat influenced by Henri
Bergson’s antimechanistic philosophy of change. Yet he was
something of a Platonist; he saw the definite character of
events as due to the “ingression” of timeless entities.
Career in the United States.
In the early 1920s Whitehead was clearly the most
distinguished philosopher of science writing in English.
When a friend of Harvard University, the historical scholar
Henry Osborn Taylor, pledged the money for his salary,
Harvard early in 1924 offered Whitehead a five-year
appointment as professor of philosophy. He was 63 years old,
with at most two more years to go in the Imperial College.
The idea of teaching philosophy appealed to him, and his
wife wholeheartedly concurred in the move. Harvard soon
found that it had acquired more than a philosopher of
science; it had acquired a metaphysician, one comparable in
stature to Gottfried Leibniz and Georg Hegel.
Early in
1925, he gave a course of eight lectures in Boston,
published that same year (with additions—among them his
earliest writing about God) as Science and the Modern World.
In it he dramatically described what had long engaged his
meditation; namely, the rise, triumph, and impact of
“scientific Materialism”—i.e., the view that nature consists
of nothing else but matter in motion, or a flux of purely
physical energy. He criticized this Materialism as mistaking
an abstract system of mathematical physics for the concrete
reality of nature. Whitehead’s mind was at home with such
abstractions, and he saw them as real discoveries, not
intellectual inventions; but his sense for the fullness of
existence led him to urge upon philosophy the task of making
good their omissions by reverting to the variety of concrete
experience and then framing broader ideas. The importance of
this book was immediately recognized. What perhaps impressed
most readers was Whitehead’s appeal to his favourite poets,
William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, against the
exclusion of values from nature.
In 1926,
the compact book Religion in the Making appeared. In it,
Whitehead interpreted religion as reaching its deepest level
in humanity’s solitude, that is, as an attitude of the
individual toward the universe rather than as a social
phenomenon.
In January
1927 the University of Edinburgh invited him to give a set
of 10 Gifford Lectures in the ensuing academic year. For
this, Whitehead drew up the complex technical structure of
“the philosophy of organism” (as he called his metaphysics)
and thought through his agreements and disagreements with
some of the great European philosophers. It was
characteristic of him to insist, against David Hume, that an
adequate philosophical theory must build on “practice” and
not be supplemented by it. The lectures reflected
Whitehead’s speculative hypothesis that the universe
consists entirely of becomings, each of them a process of
appropriating and integrating the infinity of items
(“reality”) provided by the antecedent universe and by God
(the abiding source of novel possibilities). When, in June
1928, the time for delivering the lectures arrived and
Whitehead presented this system in its new and difficult
terminology, his audience rapidly vanished, but the
publication of the lectures, expanded to 25 chapters, gave
Western metaphysics one of its greatest books, Process and
Reality (1929).
Whitehead
had an unwavering faith in the possibility of understanding
existence and a superb power to construct a scheme of
general ideas broad enough to overcome the classic dualisms.
But he knew that no system can do more than make an
approach, somewhat more adequate than its predecessors, to
understanding the infinitude of existence. He had seen the
collapse of the long-entrenched Newtonian system of physics,
and he never forgot its lesson. Henceforth dogmatic
assurance, whether in philosophy, science, or theology, was
his enemy.
Adventures
of Ideas (1933) was Whitehead’s last big philosophical book
and the most rewarding one for the general reader. It
offered penetrating, balanced reflections on the parts
played by brute forces and by general ideas about humanity,
God, and the universe in shaping the course of Western
civilization. Whitehead emphasized the impulse of life
toward newness and the absolute need for societies stable
enough to nourish adventure that is fruitful rather than
anarchic. In this book he also summarized his metaphysics
and used it to elucidate the nature of beauty, truth, art,
adventure, and peace. By “peace” he meant a religious
attitude that is “primarily a trust in the efficacy of
beauty.”
Except for
an insufficient familiarity with Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud, Whitehead was at home in both the scientific and the
literary cultures of his time. Young people flocked to
“Sunday evenings,” which his wife skillfully managed. Here
the spare, rosy-cheeked man, who might have been of average
height if he had not been so stooped, talked to them in a
high-pitched but gentle voice—talked not about his system
but about whatever was on their minds, sharply illuminating
it from a broad and historical perspective.
In his
Harvard lectures, as in his books, Whitehead liked best to
explore the scope of application of an idea and to show how
intuitions that were traditionally opposed could supplement
each other, which he did by dint of his own ideas. Most
students found attendance at his lectures a great
experience. Harvard did not retire him until 1937.
In his
first years in the United States, Whitehead visited many
eastern and midwestern campuses as a lecturer. Though he
loved Americans, he remained always very much an Englishman.
A Fellow of the Royal Society since 1903, he was elected to
the British Academy in 1931. In 1945 he received the Order
of Merit. After his death his body was cremated, and there
was no funeral. His unpublished manuscripts and
correspondence were destroyed by his widow, as he had
wanted.
Assessment.
Whitehead has not had disciples, though his admirers
have included leaders in every field of thought. His
educational and philosophical books have been translated
into many languages. His metaphysics has been keenly
studied, in the United States most of all. What is now
called Whitehead’s “process theology” is easily the most
influential part of his system; this is partly due to the
influence of the U.S. philosopher Charles Hartshorne.
Whitehead’s
habit of helpfulness made him universally beloved. Though
his courtesy was perfect, there was nothing soft about him;
never contentious, he was astute, charitable, and quietly
stubborn. He had a realistic, well-poised mind and a fine
irony free of malice. Whitehead combined singular gifts of
intuition, intellectual power, and goodness with firmness
and wisdom.
Victor Lowe
