Alfred North Whitehead
From Philosopedia
Whitehead, Alfred North (15 February 1861 - 30 December 1947)
Whitehead, who taught mathematics at the University of London (1911–1924) and philosophy at Harvard University (after 1924), wrote Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910–1913) with Bertrand Russell. Like Russell, Whitehead was critical of organized religion:
- The greatest disaster in the history of the human race has been Christian theolog.
But unlike Russell, Whitehead was a metaphysician whose “philosophy of organism” concerned a view that what we experience consists of processes of becoming. God, he held, is interdependent with the world and, in fact, develops from it.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy called his system “the most large-minded synthesis since Hegel,” adding that it recalled views of Alexander, Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, and Peirce.
God, Whitehead believed, receives enrichment from the world process, thereby being in a sense temporal. Some have exaggerated that only Russell understood Whitehead’s mathematics and only Charles Hartshorne understood his metaphysics.
Whitehead had a wry sense of humor, once defining Unitarianism, according to James Luther Adams, as a “belief in up to one God.”
Whitehead and his wife lived an eventful life. Bertrand Russell apparently fell in love with Whitehead’s wife while writing the Principia Mathematica. Meanwhile, Whitehead’s affair with Christiana Morgan has been documented by Morgan’s Jungian biographer, Claire Douglas, in Translate This Darkness (1993).
Under Carl Jung’s guidance, Morgan had “plumbed the depth of her unconscious” and had contributed to the early development of psychoanalysis. Morgan, who was married to William Morgan and who became a celebrated psychologist, had an affair not only with Whitehead but also with writer Lewis Mumford, with Chaim Weizmann before he became Israel’s first President, and with Harry Murray, head of Harvard’s Psychological Clinic.
Twenty years after the eighty-six-year-old Whitehead had died, the seventy-year-old Morgan, drunken, depressed, and with Murray’s love turned to loathing, drowned herself in 1967 in the sea off St. John in the Caribbean.
