Becomings & Perishings

As the horse & buggy creaked along, the driver turned to the man in the odd little cape and asked: "You a traveling salesman?" The stranger nodded agreeably, but said nothing. The driver tried again: "What do you sell?" This time his passenger smiled. "Wit and wisdom" he said. After a shocked silence, the driver protested: "I've never seen a traveling salesman yet who wouldn't show me his wares."

But Philosopher-Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's wares were not for such men as the driver. For more than six decades he had displayed them to countless scholars and students, and not all of them were quite sure of what they saw. Nevertheless, Whitehead's wares had a wonderful reputation. On a platform and in his parlor, Whitehead's wit and wisdom were displayed most effectively. And when he put his style to it, he could write with crystalline clarity and poetic insight. But "getting me from my books," he once observed, "is not so much dangerous as unlikely."

"God Bless My Soul!" Generations of students at Cambridge and London, and later at Harvard, learned to look alive when he exploded "God bless my soul!" That invocative usually heralded a significant pronouncement. His voice, in later years somewhat shrill, had the range of a roller coaster. In cutaway coat with stiff collar and ascot tie, Whitehead paced the lecture platform with hands in pockets. Vestigial tufts of white hair fringing a shiny bald pate made him look, said one pupil, "like an angel whose halo had slipped." Now & then Whitehead arrested his pacing to sketch a deceptively simple blackboard diagram of what he called a "prehension" or to explain patiently what he meant by such Whiteheaded concepts as the "form of flux."

Whitehead once defined the ideal university professor as "an ignorant man thinking." He possessed the great teacher's greatest gift: nobody ever asked him a foolish question. His philosophy students at Harvard gladly took the calculated risk that Professor Whitehead had demanded--honors or a flunk; no "gentleman's C."

Twin Sisters. The first of Whitehead's 22 books (A Treatise on Universal Algebra) was published in 1898; his final volume (Essays in Science and Philosophy) appeared last year (TIME, May 12). After a nine-year collaboration with his famous pupil, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910). This book approached mathematics not as a science of magnitude but as a science of deduction; it undertook to replace two existing sciences--logic and mathematics--by one new science, mathematical logic. Because Whitehead felt that "conventional English is the twin sister to barren thought" and that words are coated with ambiguities, he developed a language of mathematical symbols to express logical truths. This kept the Principia off bestseller lists, but not off the St. John's list of the 100 Great Books.

After unifying mathematics and logic, Whitehead moved out into bigger playgrounds. "Philosophy," he remarked, "asks the simple question, 'What is it all about?' " Modern science had introduced new, disturbing concepts like relativity and the quantum theory that never bothered 19th Century thinkers. One of the first and ablest philosophers of modern science, Whitehead in Science and the Modern World (1925) sought to catch up with these experimental and theoretical advances, and organize them. Whitehead deplored the current tendency to overemphasize observation and experiment ("Can we elucidate the turmoil of Europe by weighing its dictators, its prime ministers and its editors of newspapers?"); a single incisive deduction, he insisted, is worth a thousand isolated experimental results.

God the Poet. Whitehead's metaphysical speculations culminated in Process and Reality (1929). Philosopher John Dewey once wrote that he was not sure he understood the book, but that it was undoubtedly the most significant work in systematic philosophy since Leibnitz. Whitehead had no use for philosophic systems that split reality between mind & matter, or between physical objects and man's ideas of them. (When someone asked him "What's more important, ideas or things'?" Whitehead replied: "Why, I should imagine ideas about things.") For Whitehead, all reality was a pattern of becomings and perishings.

Whitehead was saturated with the sense of a divine influence, which organizes the universe so that what is worth saving is never wholly lost. For Whitehead, God was not an awesome tyrant but "the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness." It is a long, hard road. In the Odyssey of the human spirit, said Whitehead, "every generation must carry the cross up the hill and there suffer for the next generation." Last week in Cambridge, Mass., 86-year-old Philosopher Whitehead went over his hill.

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