Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which he co-wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality was fundamentally constructed by events rather than substances, and that these events cannot be defined apart from their relations to other events, thus rejecting the theory of independently existing substances. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among both philosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, from ecology to feminism, practices that unite political struggle and spirituality with the sciences of education." Indeed, in recent decades attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of American philosophers and theologians, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.
In recent years, Whiteheadian thought has become a stimulating influence in scientific research.
In physics particularly, Whitehead's thought has been influential, articulating a rival doctrine to Albert Einstein's general relativity. Whitehead's theory of gravitation continues to be controversial. Even Yutaka Tanaka, who suggests that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, admits that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of events has proved attractive to physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.
Whitehead is widely known for his influence in education theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled Process Papers on process philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.
“Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.”
“Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.”
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”
“The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.”
“Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and float on gossamer for deductions.”
“A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view”
“Error is the price we pay for progress.”
“Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought.”
“For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.”
“It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.”
“A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.”
“The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”
“In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed.”
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.”
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
“The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.”
“The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.”
“The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.”
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
“Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected.”
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, 'Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.”
“Nature is probably quite indifferent to the aesthetic preferences of mathematicians.”
“We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only guide it by taking thought.”
“In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.”
“We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities.”
“...the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
“Kecerdasan adalah kecepatan untuk memahami segala sesuatu,sedangkan kemampuan adalah kesanggupan untuk bertindak bijaksana dalam menghadapi segala sesuatu.”
“The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ”
“Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”
“Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....”