Adventures of Ideas

Overview

About three hundred pages, published in 1933, a study of how certain general ideas have shaped Western civilisation, written as a companion to Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. Part I, on sociology, follows the idea of the human soul from Plato to the abolition of slavery and traces the ideal of freedom and the role of persuasion against force. Part II considers the cosmologies of the Greeks and the moderns. Part III restates Whitehead’s philosophy of organism in brief.

Part IV proposes that a civilised society is marked by truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace, and defines each.

What happens

The human soul. Whitehead follows the idea that every human being has a soul of infinite worth from Plato and the Stoics through Christianity to the abolition of slavery, showing how a general idea works slowly against institutions until it becomes one.

Persuasion and force. He argues that societies are held together and changed by two agencies, force and persuasion, that the Greeks discovered persuasion, and that the history of freedom is the history of persuasion gaining ground.

Aspects of freedom and foresight. Chapters on the ideal of freedom, on the role of commerce and of foresight, and on the humanitarian ideal close the first part, with a warning that a civilisation that loses its capacity for adventure decays.

Cosmologies. Part II compares the Greek picture of the world, with its laws immanent in things, to the modern picture of laws imposed from outside, and follows the history of the ideas of nature, of the laws of nature, and of objects and subjects.

The philosophy of organism. Part III restates Whitehead’s metaphysics, in which the ultimate realities are occasions of experience, each taking up its past and adding something new, so that process rather than substance is the nature of things.

Civilisation. Part IV defines the five qualities of a civilised society: truth, as the conformation of appearance to reality; beauty, as the mutual adaptation of the elements of an experience; adventure, as the pursuit of new perfections; art, as the deliberate production of beauty; and peace, as a trust in the efficacy of beauty beyond anxiety.

How to read it

Read the history of the idea of the soul as the book’s philosophy of history in action, a general idea taking two thousand years to become an institution.

Pay close attention to the contrast of persuasion and force, and to the book’s date, between two wars in which force seemed to have won.

Notice that Part III is the most accessible summary of Process and Reality, and use it as a way into the metaphysics before or instead of the larger book.

Consider the five qualities of civilisation, and especially the definition of peace as a trust in the efficacy of beauty beyond anxiety, and ask whether Whitehead has described something real.

Read this book alongside Hegel’s Philosophy of History to compare two accounts of ideas moving through time, one by necessity and one by persuasion.

Questions it raises

• Do ideas really move history, slowly and by persuasion, or does Whitehead’s example of the soul and slavery describe an idea that followed institutions rather than making them?
• Is the contrast between persuasion and force a philosophy of history or a hope, and what has the century since 1933 done to it?
• Can the philosophy of organism be understood from the summary in Part III, or does the summary depend on a reader who already knows the larger book?
• Are truth, beauty, adventure, art and peace the marks of a civilised society, and what is missing from the list?
• What does Whitehead mean by peace as a trust in the efficacy of beauty, and can such a trust be argued for or only felt?
• Why did a mathematician and logician end his career with a book about civilisation, and what does his route there give the book that a historian’s would not?