A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



A Lack of Social Leadership. 



Nearly all that has so far been said has been in praise of Whitehead's 

 writings from the biological point of view, though with no attempt 

 to pronounce upon the subtler points of his philosophy, a task im- 

 practicable for a working biologist. If any criticism were permitted, 

 it would be that Whitehead has not been sufficiently outspoken in 

 leading along the sociological and political directions in which his 

 philosophy clearly points. It is true that he describes the creative 

 aspect of evolution like any marxist, as the creation of their own 

 environment by organisms. He says that here the single organism 

 is helpless and that adequate action needs societies of co-operating 

 organisms. But what tendencies in the world to-day are showing a 

 capacity for such adequate action.^ If it were possible for Marx and 

 Engels in the days of a capitalism comparatively mild and progressive 

 to state their views uncompromisingly, whether right or wrong, 

 about the line humanity must take towards higher levels of organisa- 

 tion, how much more necessary would it be in our own time, when 

 the state power of fascism has arisen in a tottering social system, a 

 power purporting falsely to be a higher level of organisation, but 

 really -no more than a mechanical tyranny. One looks in vain in 

 Whitehead's writings for some clear lead among the social tendencies 

 of our times. This is not to say that he has not sketched out, sometimes 

 with brilliant detail, the historical origin of many of the features of 

 economic individualism. Just as we made a connection earlier in this 

 paper between economic individualism and seventeenth-century 

 atomism, so Whitehead points out the connection between both 

 these and the individualistic "cogito, ergo sum" of Descartes.^ It 

 led, he says, from private worlds of experience to private worlds of 

 morals. Moreover, he suggests, not unconvincingly, that the assump- 

 tion of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence 

 in the treatment of natural and artistic beauty. The supreme ugliness 

 of industrial civilisation, as it first arose, would thus be connected 

 with its utter failure to recognise the unity of mind and matter at all 

 the levels of organisation. But this is not what we are looking for. 

 Whitehead's apparent inability to give a lead in his own time comes 

 out especially strikingly in Adventures of Ideas ^ where the adventure 

 of civilisation is discussed.^ It is too abstract. It does not interlock 

 with the concrete realities of political life. The objection or the defence 



1 S & MW, pp. 279 ff. 2 AOI, pp. 352 ff. 



203 



