Science and the Modern World

Overview

Thirteen chapters, about two hundred and ten pages, from the Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in February 1925. Whitehead had spent his career in England as a mathematician, teaching at Cambridge and then at Imperial College, and had just moved to Harvard at sixty-three to be a professor of philosophy, having never held a philosophical post.

The date is the whole context. Relativity was twenty years old and general relativity ten; quantum mechanics was being invented that same year, with Heisenberg’s paper appearing a few months after these lectures. The physics of Newton, which had looked like a permanent description of the world, had failed in two directions at once. Whitehead’s question is what this means for philosophy, and his answer is that the failure was implicit in the original abstraction.

He is a hard writer. Not obscure exactly, but he invents terms, uses ordinary words in special senses, and moves between the history of science, the analysis of poetry and metaphysics without changing gear. This book is the accessible entry to him; Process and Reality, four years later, is much harder.

The argument

Chapters 1 to 3: where science came from. Whitehead begins with a historical claim that has been argued about ever since. The rise of modern science required a prior conviction that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, and that conviction was not derived from experience, because experience suggests no such thing. It came from medieval theology, from centuries of insisting on the rationality of God, which left as a residue the unspoken faith in the order of nature.

He adds a second ingredient: the Greek tragedians’ sense of inexorable fate, which he says is the same idea in another key.

Then the seventeenth century, which he calls the century of genius, and which produced in a hundred years Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Boyle, Leibniz, and the scheme of scientific ideas that lasted until 1900.

That scheme is scientific materialism: the world consists of matter, spread through space, with simple location, meaning that each bit of it is just where it is and its being there implies nothing about anywhere else, moving according to fixed laws, senseless, valueless, purposeless.

Whitehead’s point is not that this was wrong but that it was an abstraction, and an extraordinarily effective one, which was then taken for the concrete truth.

Chapter 4: the fallacy. The name arrives here. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the error of mistaking an abstraction for the concrete reality it was abstracted from.

The clearest case is simple location. The idea that a bit of matter is simply here, in this volume, at this instant, with no essential reference to other times and places, is convenient and false. Nothing can be described that way once you take relativity and fields seriously, and it was never a fair description of an organism.

He also turns the analysis on the doctrine of substance and quality, and on the bifurcation of nature into the objective world of physics and the subjective world of secondary qualities, where the greenness of a tree is in your head and the wavelength is in the world. Whitehead’s judgement, in a famous passage, is that on this account nature gets the credit which should in all propriety be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for his song, the sun for his radiance, and the poets are entirely mistaken and should address their lyrics to themselves.

Chapter 5: the Romantic reaction. The chapter that most people find the most surprising, and the reason the book turns up on literature syllabuses.

Whitehead takes Wordsworth and Shelley seriously as witnesses. Their complaint against science, that we murder to dissect, that the mechanical account leaves out something present in every experience of a landscape, is treated not as sentiment but as evidence. Wordsworth, he says, is always insisting on the presence of the whole in every part, which is exactly what simple location denies. Shelley, who loved chemistry, presents nature as continuous change and becoming rather than as substance persisting.

The argument is that a philosophy of nature which has to write off the direct testimony of the most attentive observers of nature is in trouble.

Chapters 6 to 10: the philosophy of organism. Whitehead’s own position, sketched rather than developed.

The fundamental things are not bits of matter but events, or occasions, each of which takes account of the whole universe from its own standpoint. An enduring object is a pattern of such events repeating, and what we call a thing is a process with a history.

From this, organism. An electron inside a living body is different from an electron outside it, because the pattern of the whole conditions the parts. Whitehead calls this organic mechanism, and it is his attempt to have both the reality of wholes and the applicability of physical law.

He also introduces eternal objects, the forms or possibilities which particular occasions realise, which is his version of Plato’s forms adapted to a process metaphysics, and abstractive hierarchies, which is the hardest chapter in the book.

Chapters 11 to 13: God, religion and society. God enters as the principle of concretion or limitation: the reason why this order of nature obtains rather than another. It is not the God of the Bible and Whitehead says so, and later, in Process and Reality, he develops a dipolar God who is affected by the world.

The religion chapter argues that religion and science are not in conflict as systems of doctrine and that both have repeatedly had to revise their formulations, and it contains the sentence about solitariness that gets quoted everywhere without its context, which is an argument that religion begins in what a person is when alone and becomes social afterwards.

The last chapter turns practical. Whitehead worries about a professionalised education that produces minds grooved into specialities, about the loss of general views, about aesthetic value as something a society either cultivates or destroys, and about industrial civilisation’s treatment of the environment. He ends with the line about the business of the future being dangerous, and the sentence about the pure conservative fighting the essence of the universe.

How to read it

Read chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5 first. The history, the account of scientific materialism, the fallacy and the Romantic chapter are the accessible and durable part, and they are about eighty pages.

Do not be defeated by chapters 8 to 10. Abstraction, eternal objects and abstractive hierarchies are the metaphysical machinery, and they are hard on a first reading. Skim them and come back.

Watch the vocabulary. Whitehead uses organism, event, occasion, prehension and eternal object in specific senses, and reading them as ordinary English produces nonsense. Most editions have no glossary, so keep notes.

Take the historical thesis as arguable. The claim that science grew out of medieval theology’s insistence on divine rationality has been developed by historians since and also contested, and Whitehead states it more confidently than the evidence supports.

Read the Romantic chapter beside the poems. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey and Shelley’s Mont Blanc are the texts Whitehead has in mind, and the argument is much more persuasive with them in front of you.

And keep 1925 in view. Whitehead is writing at the precise moment when the mechanical worldview has broken and its replacement has not yet arrived. Much of the book’s force comes from being written in that gap.

Questions it raises

• Did modern science really need a prior faith in the rationality of nature, and where else could it have come from?
• Is simple location merely a convenient fiction, or is Whitehead asking physics to carry a metaphysical burden it need not?
• The poets’ testimony about nature is treated as evidence. What kind of evidence is it?
• If value is genuinely in the world and not only in us, what follows for science?
• Whitehead’s God is a principle of limitation. Is that a religious idea or the ghost of one?
• He warns against minds grooved into specialities. Has the century since proved him right?