RECONSTRUCTING PHILOSOPHY

Whitehead believed that philosophy had lost its force in the contemporary world. Instead of being a progressive factor in human culture, it had become a sterile, self-enclosed academic exercise with no relevance to the most concrete problems of humankind. This was evidenced by philosophers’ increasing love of polemics. His disenchanted view about the status of the discipline can be gathered from a famous passage in Adventures of Ideas, where he says that philosophy ‘is not – or, at least, should not be – a ferocious debate between irritable professors’ (AI 98).

The way to make philosophy relevant to human life is to rehabilitate speculative metaphysics. Metaphysics tells us the way that all things hang together and the place we occupy in the overall scheme of things. It gives an answer to the question ‘What does it all come to?’ (PR xiii). Functioning like a secularised religion, it provides a framework that human beings can appeal to when they are uncertain about what direction their lives must take. The problem of vindicating speculative metaphysics as an enterprise ‘productive of important knowledge’ (PR 3) has a social dimension as well, for civilisation cannot subsist in a metaphysical vacuum. In the absence of an inspiring metaphysical vision, Whitehead argues in Adventures of Ideas, humankind cannot avoid falling into barbarism. One has to prevent the crisis of philosophy, which Whitehead interprets as a crisis of creativity, from becoming a crisis of civilisation (AI 99).

It is with respect to the double problem of infusing new life into philosophy and making it relevant to our private and social lives that we find a major point of contact between Whitehead and one of the leading intellectual figures of his day, John Dewey. According to Dewey, philosophy had been too long concerned with merely ‘dialectical’ (by which he meant unreal, artificial) questions. Moreover, he too believed that this impasse was a danger for civilisation: ‘contemporary society, the world over,’ he wrote, ‘is in need of more general and fundamental enlightenment and guidance than it now possesses’ (RIP 124).