Posted by The Function of Reason, by Alfred North Whitehead
I was rifling through my bookcase the other day and came across a slender little volume nestled between E B White, Walt Whitman, and Norbert Wiener, hidden almost out of sight. It was an extended essay by Alfred North Whitehead called The Function of Reason. Not exactly a corker of a title, but it rang a bell because I believe I’d read it in the 1970s in an undergraduate in a course called ‘Speculative Philosophy in Science Fiction’. I have fond memories of that course. In it, we read primary sources in philosophy on topics like metaphysics, the nature space and time, free will, and politics. Then we’d explore those same topics through the lens of science fiction novels. It left me with an abiding interest in both literatures ever since.
At the time, Whitehead’s book struck me as a bit out of touch with the revolutions in science that were just getting under way in his day — he was writing in the 1920s –let alone those upheavals that followed. Quantum physics was already taking off as he wrote, for example. I wasn’t sure why my professor had insisted that we read the essay. But, like the old adage of Mark Twain’s about how at twenty a young man believes his father to be an idiot, and at forty is astonished at how much the old old man had learned in those twenty years, I decided to give Whitehead another go, in hopes that one of us had matured a bit in the last few decades.
In my first reading of The Function of Reason, I remember having trouble wrapping my head around what Whitehead was getting at. As a chipper and enthusiastic young physics student, I found Whitehead’s sober critique of the limits of scientific reasoning unsettling, even off-putting. The book was first published in 1929. Though it was written in plain language, to post-adolescent me Whitehead’s prose seemed stiff and old fashioned. His colleague and sometimes collaborator at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, appealed to me more. Russell’s writings, in fact, had first introduced me to the idea that thinking could be enjoyable. He wrote with wit. Whitehead’s prose, by comparison, seemed flat to me. Where Russell was a fanboy for science in general, and physics in particular, Whitehead sketched out limits to the scientific method. In re-reading him now, I can see it wasn’t that the book was intrinsically difficult, but — enamored as I was with math and physics — I didn’t want to hear what Whitehead had to say. Here’s my take now.
First, what strikes me about The Function of Reason is how straightforward the language is and accessible. For example, he starts by saying that:
The function of Reason is to promote the art of life.
The sentence is set off as a paragraph by itself and italicized, so you can’t miss it. Whitehead didn’t hide his main point behind a thicket of undigestible prose here. By ‘art’ here I take him to mean ‘skill’ at a minimum, but in his choice of this word he also allows for a larger usage that might eventually include more aesthetic meanings, because just a few pages later he says that the promotion of the art of life leads to an ‘attack on the environment’, which a Darwinian would simply call the ‘struggle for survival’. But Whitehead argues that such a formulation of evolution misses the drive to do more than merely survive. The aim to promote the art of life expresses itself in a three-fold urge: (i) to live; (ii) to live well; (iii) to live better. It is that last urge, he argues, that leads to the emergence of ever more complex forms of life.
Those who believe in reductionist theories of evolution, like the ‘selfish gene’, will find this a form of heresy. Richard Dawkins, for example, argues that natural selection, coupled with genetic inheritance, alone are sufficient to explain the emergence of ever more complex forms in the natural world, including reasoning humans and culture. Whitehead, writing two generations earlier, had already encountered similar arguments among Darwinians of his own time, minus the knowledge of DNA, of course, but he found their arguments lacking. The structure of DNA wasn’t discovered until 1953. But, the biologists of the time when Whitehead was writing knew something like DNA had to exist, because something had to carry the hereditary information from one generation to the next. They just didn’t know what the physical and chemical nature of that encoding might be, let alone the structure and function of the encoding molecule(s). So why did Whitehead find mechanistic arguments for how evolution works lacking? It comes down to whether you believe science should completely purge itself of any hint of there being some larger purpose behind things. This is an old question in philosophy, and it goes by the name of teleology, or explanations of natural phenomena in terms of final causes. Here ‘final’ doesn’t necessarily mean later in time, but more foundational in purpose, or logically prior. Such notions were banished from theories of mechanics by Newton, who showed how to formulate physical theories as initial value problems. Once set in motion, things evolve under the action of blind forces. The later Lagrangian formulation of mechanics, with the appearance of the final as well as initial state connected by a trajectory, is a pale ghost of the teleologies of Aristotelian physics. Physicists ever since Newton find final-cause thinking old fashioned, covertly or — even overtly — religious.
But we are immersed in purpose-driven explanations in everyday life, most often when we consider the actions of others. The philosophers merely formalized such teleological arguments two thousand years ago, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages found them congenial to Christian theology. With Christian theology, things happen because God wills it so, and the world inherits the purpose God intends for it. Long before that the Greeks, especially Aristotle, were prone to rely on such purpose-driven arguments when they got stuck. Q: ‘Why do heavy things fall down?’ A: ‘Because they are seeking their natural place.’ It’s that use of the word ‘seeking’ when applied to inanimate objects, as if they are reaching out toward some purpose they must fulfill in the natural order of things, that modern science rejected when it emerged around four centuries ago.
So, purpose-driven explanations are how our minds naturally work. We seem gifted by evolution with a sense that things don’t happen without a reason. When we ask ‘Why did X happen?’ we actually can mean one of two things. ‘How did X happen?’ I.e., what was the mechanism behind it? Or, we can also mean ‘What was the purpose of X?’ The first is the kind of question science can attack, the second is considered scientifically beyond the pale. This banishment of purpose-driven explanations from science leads to a gap between how scientists view the natural world, and how most everyone else does. Part of the training of a scientist is learning to recognize teleological explanations as a flaw in scientific reasoning, positing instead that things move under the action of blind forces. Many non-scientists find this idea of a purposeless universe repellent.
The Aristotelian form of explanation was first purged from physics and astronomy, and later from other branches of science. It lingered longest in the life sciences. But even vitalism finally gave way to more modern forms of physiology and medicine, which are now based on assuming that even living things are animated by the aimless banging around of atoms and molecules. And even evolution embraces the idea that the emergence of new and varied forms of life is driven by chance, not the movement toward some goal. For a very long time now, all teleological forms of explanation have been banished from science. Anything purporting to be a scientific explanation of some natural phenomenon must be couched in purposeless terms. Perhaps this rigid insistence as part of a scientific orthodoxy is due to a lingering fear that the ‘hand of God’ explanation might be hiding in the wings, ready to be invoked if scientific momentum stalls in explaining living or evolutionary processes. But, just as I don’t have to invoke the deity to explain that I cross the room because I want a piece of toast, there are teleological explanations that fall far short of invoking a deity as the source of purpose in biology.
For example, check out the Sean Carroll interview with biologist Michael Levin ‘Growth, Form, Information, and the Self’. Levin argues that biology is suffering from ‘teleophobia’, and that the field should be more open to purpose-driven explanations, especially in evolution and embryo development, where final body forms seem to be more robust than expected, self-correcting in response to perturbations to a surprising degree. It’s as if the gene networks involved are ‘aiming’ toward a final body shape. But genes can’t possible ‘know’ that shape. Such ‘teleological’ theories of development would need to be properly framed, of course, so as to be testable experimentally. But the fact that Levin coins the term ‘teleophobia’ reinforces my sense that many biologists would currently reject such end-state explanations out of hand.
Whitehead’s main line of attack in The Function of Reason concerns a critique of the use of a successful methodology, i.e. scientific reasoning, outside its original narrow realm of application. He points out that if we banish the language of purpose more widely, it leads to some very silly results. Humans, after all, have purposes. To insist that a scientific study of human behavior must be reduced to a state of ignorance about the role those purposes play in behavior, or that any purpose we claim to have beyond the drive to reproduce is meaningless dribble, is an impoverishment of our view of what it means to be human. Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene (1976) pushes this notion of directionless evolution right down to the limit of molecules. Even the title is tongue in cheek, given that to be ‘selfish’ implies one has a purpose. This banishment of purpose from science has led to marvelous results, and the discoveries that have flowed from science have benefited all of us. But, Whitehead argues that it’s also possible to take things too far.
Another point in Whitehead’s book, which is rich in ideas. He says that philosophers have often focused on only one type of Reason, with a capital R, the formal one. But he uses the term Reason in the form quoted above, as an activity of organisms whose aim is to live, and flourish, to promote the art of life. This opens all sorts of doors in the mansion of ideas. He says, for example, that Plato’s Reason came from the Gods, while Ulysses’ got his from the foxes. Whitehead is so deliberate with his choice of words that I take him to mean that he accepts that animals share a capacity for some forms of reason, even if it’s not the highly abstracted forms so beloved of Plato and his heirs. Clearly animals must reason, because to live is to solve problems needed to keep one alive. I like the fact that Whitehead does not insist on defining his use of the term Reason in a way that restricts it to humans, but instead leaves the boundaries between different parts of the world more porous.
All of what I’ve covered so far comes in the first thirty pages of a ninety-page essay. Which is to say, it can be dense with ideas, though the prose is usually quite readable. In the second part of the essay, he moves on to talk about how dominant methodologies and ideologies provide a framework for exploration and discovery in their early innovative stages, contributing to the art of life by making it better, breaking new ground. This effort, he says, isn’t primarily due to the foxlike reason of Ulysses, which is clever at tinkering and escaping traps. Instead, breaking out of old ways of thinking and doing is mostly driven by the Godlike Reason of Plato, or at least the two kinds of reason must work in tandem to carry it off. The Platonic form of Reason is in the vanguard during periods of innovation, Whitehead argues, because of its urge to abstraction, and its claim to universal and eternal truths. But, in the late stages, when all possibilities have been mapped out, major discoveries pass into common knowledge, and those dominant ways of thinking become ossified, prone to repetition and elaboration rather than the pursuit of anything truly new. And, a danger of believing you have uncovered universal and unchanging truths is that this belief easily slips into a form of almost religious devotion to the status quo. Examples that he gives of this tendency are the advances in philosophy and logic in the Middle Ages, which began with a creative burst and ended with a more static form of scholasticism. When exhausted, this eventually gave way to the more nimble and creative thinking of the Renaissance, which led to another burst of new thinking and discovery.
Such transitions are never easy because they threaten the social position of the thought leaders of the previous generation, who control the major institutions of learning, determining what gets taught to students, and what types of work by younger colleagues should lead to their advancement within the institution. In the late 1920s, the dominant methodologies and theories taught in the schools of Whitehead’s day were holdovers from 19th century science. This had largely exhausted itself but was refusing to give way. Whitehead argues that in the late stages of a scientific field, or in ideologies and social mores more generally, the older dominant way of doing and thinking engages in all sorts of reactionary tendencies, primarily through what he calls ‘obscurantism’. That is, by keeping the full facts or knowledge of things from being known. By blocking its entry into the curriculum, for example. The current culture wars over what social sciences can be taught in our schools around race and gender immediately come to mind here.
Whitehead doesn’t mention it, but the conservative nature of physics of his day was fighting the inclusion of relativity and quantum theory in the physics curricula. The recent biopic Oppenheimer relates how he brought modern ideas from Europe to the US. Oppenheimer had studied with the leading lights of theoretical physics in the UK and Germany before he was appointed to the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1929. He went on to build one of the leading groups in theoretical physics. Up until then, theoretical physics had been underrepresented in US colleges and universities, and this was holding them back. That slow uptake of relativity and quantum theory in the UK and US is not mentioned by Whitehead, who would have been well aware of the recent discoveries in physics. Most of his examples in the essay are drawn from the theory of evolution, and he seems most preoccupied, once again, with its banishment of teleological explanations.
So, in closing, I’m glad I picked this slender little volume up once more. As as student, I wasn’t familiar enough with the theory of evolution, or the history of teleological explanations in philosophy and science, to grasp what Whitehead was getting at. While the essay seems a bit dated in spots, other ideas in it are fresh, in particular his notion that all methodologies and ideologies go through periods of growth and innovation, followed by a period of repetitive stasis and ossification, where the focus is more on the elaboration of details than uncovering new things. Those new ideas might reveal the limitations of the existing framework, so cue the obscurantist fog machine. This idea is very reminiscent of the later writings of Thomas Kuhn or Paul Feyerabend, and their theories of scientific revolutions. If you substitute Kuhn’s word ‘paradigm’ or Feyerabend’s ‘cognitive frame’ for Whitehead’s ‘methodological and ideological frameworks’ it maps reasonably well.
Whitehead is basically arguing that we should remain open to surprise, and willing to reexamine the foundations of our theories, to dig into them aggressively. That excavation project destabilizes things and it will always be unsettling. We have to live in that zone of discomfort, unsure if we stand on solid ground or quicksand, if we’re to make progress in the long run, and avoid getting trapped in zones of comfort that, in the end, will prove to have been a mirage. At least, forty years on, I believe that’s what Whitehead is arguing. And that’s something my student self should have heard in his writing.
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Image at top: Alfred North Whitehead, image by Nagelfar at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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