The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead's Radical Empiricism

A New Study Of Whitehead's Philosophy

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 -- 1947) was co-author with his student, Bertrand Russell, of the famous work on logic, "Principia Mathematica" (1910 -- 1913). Whitehead slowly broadened his mathematical and scientific interests into philosophical questions. He became Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1924 at age 63 and published several difficult philosophical books, including his most famous book, "Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology", in 1929 at the age of 68. It, and his other books, are daunting, both in the writing and in the reading.

"A Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead's Radical Empiricism" (2017) by Randall Auxier and Gary Herstein is an ambitious, difficult new study which, among other things, tries to offer a view of Whitehead's philosophy as a whole, including his work as a mathematician, his books of science, (called the "triptych" by the authors, and his studies of religion and ideas, as well as "Process and Reality". The authors have read and learned from the extensive secondary literature on Whitehead, but they see their study as an essentially new interpretation. The book moves between interpretation of Whitehead, commenting on and critiquing the works of earlier Whitehead scholars, and arguing for the authors' own philosophical position.

The backgrounds of the authors are interesting and important in understanding their collaboration in this book. Auxier is a Professor of Philosophy and Communication at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He has been editor of the "Library of Living Philosophers" series, and has written extensively about American philosophy and about philosophy of religion, particularly, in both cases, about the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce in his book, "Time, Will and Purpose". Auxier is also a musician, and has recently written a book, "Metaphysical Graffitti" about the philosophy of rock.

If Auxier's background can be loosely described as humanistic and academic, Herstein's background is in mathematics and computer sciences. Herstein worked for 25 years at the cutting edge of computer science before deciding to pursue his passion for philosophy. A few years Auxier's senior, he became Auxier's student, with Auxier supervising Herstein's doctoral dissertation on Whitehead. Herstein is now an independent scholar pursuing his philosophical and other interests on his own without university affiliation. It is valuable to see these two scholars, with their different earlier backgrounds and interests, coming together to pursue the study of Whitehead. The authors worked together closely over several years on this book (with further books contemplated in the future); and they assure the reader that they are in total agreement as to the philosophy set forth in their book. ( a difficult accomplishment for any two people, let alone two philosophers and scholars.)

In thinking about this book, it is helpful to look at the title and the subtitle, as the work tries to expand upon some basic philosophical claims attributed to Whitehead. The authors' most basic claim in the book is the often-repeated statement, "what is actual is possible". The book begins with the discrete individual and argues that the individual (actual) is the source of understanding, including philosophical, scientific, religious, and logical understanding. By "individual", however, the author's don't quite mean "physical thing" such as, say, a table, an atom, or a human being. As I understand the book, the authors see individual physical things as abstracts and as constructs from the broad flow of experience which are studied and viewed for certain purposes. The world of science, for example, abstracts from the flow of experience to study and understand reality in certain ways. And so the "quantum" to be explained and studied in different ways by science, philosophy, what have you, is not the quantum of quantum physics, contrary to some interpreters of Whitehead, but rather a logical, abstracted actual individual or quantum.

The philosophical position of radical empiricism is most often associated with William James, and the authors argue that Whitehead was a radical empiricist as well. Experience is taken broadly, unlike a Humean or narrowly empirical concept of experience. It doesn't consist only of discrete, isolated perceptions but includes, importantly, relations of things and connectivity. Experience in this sense is broad, pluralistic and also fallible. The book, at least most of the time, tries to separate experience from the claim to ontological or certain knowledge, the quest for which has plagued philosophy. The authors quote Whitehead: "Philosophy has been afflicted by the dogmatic fallacy, which is the belief that the principles of its working hypotheses are clear, obvious, and irreformable." Much of this study involves getting a grip on what radical empiricism is, for the authors. In his book on Royce, "Time, Will, and Purpose" Auxier attributed a similar view of hypotheticals to that American idealist. I wasn't entirely sure what he meant and wasn't convinced that the position was Royce's. This new book treats radical empiricism in a much more detailed way than did the earlier study.

Drawing on its basic insights, other themes in this book become highly technical and mathematical, including its long difficult discussions of space, extension, mathematics, and algebra. I think the point of these discussions is to show how philosophical concepts, including concepts of necessity, possibility, and actuality emanate from individuality and quanta rather than from abstract theory. As is often the case with philosophical discussions which take their readers back to experience, portions of this book are maddeningly abstract and opaque. The explorations in this book of, say, topology, algebra, and computer theory are well beyond anything I know.

Here is another way of getting at what this book is about. From the authors' discussion of the literature on Whitehead, and from my own limited explorations of this thinker, his work attracts two types of philosophical readers. The first type focuses on Whitehead as the scientist and mathematician and tries to understand his philosophy as an extension of science. These readers tend to be uncomfortable with the parts of Whitehead that discuss God, ideal objects and the like and try to explain these discussions away naturalistically. The second type of reader is theologically oriented and looks to Whitehead for insights into religious understanding in an age of science in what has become known as "process theology." Both these approaches to Whitehead get considered and rejected in the course of this study. Whitehead is viewed as a naturalist but of a special, expansive sort in accordance with radical empiricism. His work is seen as theologically suggestive, but the authors deny that Whitehead is a process theologian in the terms that some of his readers and interpreters took suggestions from his work. Radical empiricism is broad, but it still doesn't give us experience of God.

There is much that is thoughtful and exciting in this book together with much that is provocative and polemical and much that is at least for this reviewer close to unintelligible. The book is often good when it develops concrete examples, in discussions of, among other things, a large Rolling Stones concert, baseball and Fenway, Park, model railroading, and the disagreements between General Lee and General Longstreet at Gettysburg. Most commentators on Whitehead, including the authors of this book, are at least as difficult as the philosopher they purport to interpret -- and that is saying a great deal. The authors are best when they are clearest. The first five chapters of this book are difficult but readable and set the stage for understanding what the authors think about Whitehead and about the nature of philosophy. Chapter ten on the nature of naturalism and chapter eleven on religion,