What Did Whitehead Mean By That?

"Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross. "

One of the things that Alfred N Whitehead tried to capture in his philosophy was the depth of human experience. Whitehead thought that science had limits, that there were certain things that science simply couldn't explain or fully account for. But Whitehead wanted his philosophy to be a philosophy OF science, he wanted to find a way to more adequately undergird the scientific account of the world. Whitehead simply thought that the worldview of the 17th century had run it's course...the philosophical picture of the world which began with Newton's scientific revolution had been wonderfully useful, and had helped pushed humanity very far indeed. But the revolutionary insights of the turn of the 20th century, especially regarding things like quantum mechanics, meant that we had outstripped that worldview. A new way of looking at the world had to be developed.

Among the limits the Newtonian vision of the world had encountered was values themselves. The promise of the enlightenment had been a unified picture of the world, a way of looking at the universe that would help us make sense of the world AND live in it. People like Immanuel Kant tried to apply the rigors of the scientific method to the world of morality. In the end, all of these projects seemed to have failed. Logical positivists like Bertrand Russell (Whitehead's co-author of the important work Principa  Mathematica), had come to the view that values and talk of values was essentially meaningless, since it corresponded to no particular piece of sense data. Simply put, Russell and others like him thought that if you couldn't see, taste, touch, hear, or smell it, it didn't exist. This certainly had become the prevailing view among scientists at the time, and it continues to have great influence today.

But Whitehead thought that this very idea under-minded science. The key to this insight was Whitehead's wife, Evelyn Wade. She must have been a particularly remarkable woman, as Bertran Russell himself apparently fell in love with her, and once said that his love for her was the closest thing he ever had to a mystical experience.

It was Evelyn's beauty both internal and external that inspired Whitehead to seek a philosophy of science which could also account for those things outside the purview of science. For Whitehead's experience of Evelyn's beauty and virtue seemed to him to be as real palpable as anything that could be detected by the senses. A philosophy which suggested that this experience was illusory or that discourse about it was meaningless seemed to him to undermine those experiences for which that philosophy did account. In other words: if people were told that science's truth implied the falseness of their experiences of a life of depth, then they were just as likely to give up their trust in science as their trust in those experiences.

Life, for Whitehead, includes experiences that cannot be described in ultra-precise language. Religious experience is REAL experience, for Whitehead, and yet when we talk about those experiences precise and scientific language fails us. Talk of "God" and of "fairies" and the like were just ways of organizing as best as possible what it is LIKE to be a human being. "There is a quality of life beyond the facts of life", Whitehead also said. For Whitehead life is like magic, and it is okay to talk that way, and philosophy of science needs to make such talk 'allowable', it cannot rob us of our ability to describe in the most creative way possible what it is like to be human. Life is more than science. A philosophy of science that denies this is self-defeating.