Whitehead, Alfred North

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WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH

WHITEHEAD, ALFRED NORTH (1861–1947), English mathematician and philosopher, much of whose influence has been on theology. Whitehead grew up in a vicarage in the south of England and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he subsequently became a fellow and taught mathematics. In 1890 he married Evelyn Wade. The couple had three children, Eric, North, and Jessie. After 1914 Whitehead taught mathematics at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in Kensington. In 1924, at the age of sixty-three, Whitehead moved to Harvard University, where he taught philosophy until 1936. The death of his son Eric in World War I is reported to have deepened Whitehead's religious interests.

Whitehead did not make any major contribution to mathematics as such. His early writings were chiefly on the philosophy of mathematics (Treatise of Universal Algebra, 1898) and logic (with Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1910–1913). Later he involved himself increasingly in the rethinking of the natural world required by developments in physics, publishing An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922). His writings also expressed still broader interests, as, for example, in The Organization of Thought (1922), which was largely included with other writings in The Aims of Education (1929). After moving to Harvard he developed a full-fledged cosmology in such works as Science and the Modern World (1925), Religion in the Making (1926), Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (1927), The Function of Reason (1929), Process and Reality (1929), Adventures of Ideas (1933), and Modes of Thought (1938).

Whitehead's cosmology may be understood best by contrasting it with the doctrine of mechanism. The world appears to contain both living, self-activating entities, such as birds and dogs, and inanimate, passive objects, such as stones and drops of water. Mechanism took the latter as fundamental and analyzed everything into inanimate and passive units. In classical atomism the ultimate entities are indestructible bits of matter. Contact imparts motion, but otherwise the atoms do not affect one another. Whitehead described his position as a philosophy of organism, arguing that not only living cells but also molecules and subatomic entities are internally interconnected with their environments.

All philosophies must explain both enduring things and events. Most Western philosophies have taken enduring things as basic and have explained events as the interaction of these. Mechanists see events as changing spatial configurations of unchanging material substances. Whitehead proposed that events are fundamental and that the relatively unchanging entities are "societies" of events exhibiting constancy of pattern.

A particular problem for mechanism is conscious experience. Some mechanists hold that this lacks full-fledged reality. Others accept a dualism of mind and matter. Whitehead rejected both positions, holding that an instance of human experience is an organic event and that it provides the model for discerning the basic structure of all individualized events.

Whitehead believed that cosmology and religion are bound closely together, whether or not the cosmology is theistic. Some who respond religiously to Whitehead's vision of the world want to separate it from talk of God, either because they are offended by such talk or because they are committed to other doctrines of God. Whitehead, on the other hand, believed that his cosmology was incomplete without God, although the God of organic events is quite different from that of the world machine. Instead of imposing laws of motion, God is the source of novelty, purpose, and freedom. God radically transcends each creature, but it is the divine presence that directs and enables each to reach toward richness in its own immediacy and in those future events to which it contributes. This cosmic urge to life is called by Whitehead the "primordial nature" of God.

Whitehead holds that God is not an exception to the principle of interrelatedness of actual things. Just as God is effective in the world of temporal events, so temporal events in turn enter into the divine life. What perishes in the world is everlasting in God. This aspect of God Whitehead calls God's "consequent nature." Apart from the consequent nature of God the utter transitoriness of events would undercut the human sense of meaning and importance.

Whitehead described God as lure for adventure and ideal companion in polemical contrast to a supernatural will untouched by the suffering of creatures. His doctrine also differed systematically from the understanding of God as being itself developed especially by Thomas Aquinas. Since the ideas of sovereign will and being itself have shaped much of Christian theology, some have denied that Whitehead's doctrine can be accepted by Christians. Others have been attracted to Whitehead's idea of a conscious, all-loving, all-knowing, everlasting actuality from whom creatures derive all that is good. His image of God as "the fellow sufferer who understands" has gained increasing acceptance.

Whitehead's thought played an important role in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago from the late 1920s. Charles Hartshorne systematically developed Whitehead's dipolar theism. Elsewhere, however, Whitehead's influence was sharply circumscribed by dominant intellectual trends. Analytic philosophy and positivistic science rejected the cosmological enterprise. Neo-Thomist Catholics reemphasized the idea of God as being itself. Neoorthodox Protestants stressed God's sovereign will. However, beginning in the mid-1960s, analytic philosophy and positivistic science lost their hegemony; Vatican II, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, and the rise of liberation theology generated a dynamic openness among Roman Catholics; and a somewhat chaotic pluralism replaced the neoorthodox consensus among Protestants. In this new context Whitehead's influence has grown among philosophers, scientists, and humanists, as well as among theologians. His Christian followers employed his conceptuality in reformulating many Christian doctrines. They led in discussions of problems of religion and science, especially with regard to ecology. They found allies among feminists and points of contact with Teilhardians and liberation theologians. They have helped shape interreligious dialogue.

Although most of Whitehead's influence has been among North American Protestants, he has a following among Catholics and Jews as well. There is also increasing interest in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. His influence is institutionalized in the Society for the Study of Process Philosophies, the European Society for Process Thought, the Japan Society for Whiteheadian and Process Thought, the Center for a Post-Modern World in Santa Barbara, and the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California, and its journal, Process Studies.