THE LOGIC OF METAPHYSICAL THINKING

At the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead writes:

This is easier said than done. How is one to proceed in the formulation of such a scheme? At what kind of intellectual construction does the metaphysician precisely aim? Abandoning common sense (and ordinary language) is a potentially risky enterprise. Once the safe boundaries of ordinary thought are trespassed, one may easily end up talking nonsense or get lost in idle speculations. Whitehead was aware of this risk:

Accordingly, the very first chapter of Process and Reality attempts to regiment revisionary thought by defining the methods, the aims and the criteria of success for speculative metaphysics.

Whitehead denies, to begin with, that a metaphysical theory can take the form of an axiomatic system. Neither the basic axioms nor the metaphysical notions used in framing them are given us from the start. How we have to think about reality cannot possibly be something we know ab initio; unless we are endowed with innate knowledge and notions (which Whitehead assumes not to be the case), basic principles and concepts can only be reached at the end of metaphysical research. ‘Philosophy,’ Whitehead says, ‘has been misled by the example of mathematics’ (PR 8); its deductive, foundational methods cannot be taken over in metaphysics. Always sensitive to the problems posed by language, he also remarks that at an early stage we lack not solely the ‘axiomatic certainties from which to start. There is not even the language in which to frame them’ (PR 13). ‘A precise language,’ he also explains, ‘must await a completed metaphysical knowledge’ (PR 12).

As the previous discussion of Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism in Science and the Modern World should have made clear, Whitehead conceives of metaphysics as being continuous with the natural sciences.