ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD'S POLITICAL THEORY AND METAPHYSICS: A CRITICAL RECURRENCE
Abstract
Alfred North Whitehead's political theory and philosophy of civilization were written in light of his metaphysics. Metaphysics should fuse, Whitehead argued, the various specialized notions which the special sciences take as fundamental, as well as religious notions, into one rational scheme of general ideas according to which every element of our experience can be interpreted. He claimed that such a scheme shows the limits of application of the more specialized notions, and leads to a positive, coordinating philosophy of life without which a society begins to decay. Whitehead's own metaphysics is worthy of examination since it represents perhaps the last and best effort to ground consciously, in a view of the totality of things, a loose ensemble of fundamental beliefs about the possibilities of human society--centering around a trust in the efficacy of ideas and "the love of mankind as such"--that is still quite pervasive and operative today. I argue in the present study that Whitehead's scheme fails at the task he sets for it. I show through a critique of several key notions, "conceptual feeling" and "physical feeling," that concrete discontinuities and irreconcilable dualities in experience are mediated in his metaphysics only by abstractions whose intelligibility is dubious. The work is also constructive. In the course of the critique I disentangle Whitehead's insight that experience is fragmented into discreet "actual occasions" with self-reference from its metaphysical context, and bring it forward as the basis for renewed reflection on the nature of human existence in general and political life in particular. I show that while Whitehead's notion of the "actual occasion" and an allied conception of society seem to inform his complex and often hard-headed account of political life, the metaphysical claims in which these notions are entangled for Whitehead finally skew that account in the direction of a naive optimism. I explore in a brief epilogue the implications for political life of these notions when they are freed from their metaphysical moorings.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Political science|Philosophy
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