The Power of Reason

A mathematical genius on how philosophy shaped the habits of thinking

“The great conquerors, from Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence shrinks to insignificance if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long line of men of thought from Thales to the present day, men, individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world.” - Alfred North Whitehead

In the early years of the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead revealed himself as one of the most brilliant academic minds that ever blessed the British universities. Between 1910 and 1913, he and his friend Bertrand Russell published Principia Mathematica, which unearthed the logical foundation of mathematics. But Whitehead’s later philosophy proved difficult for his contemporaries to appreciate. His Lowell lecture series at Harvard in 1925 was barely attended - almost nobody could understand it! Only near the end of the twentieth century did Whitehead’s work undergo a revival, eventually having a profound influence on the philosophy of the early twenty first century.

While there is enormous depth to Whitehead’s philosophy, one aspect of his thinking is easy to understand: his criticism of the distortions the scientific mindset inflicted upon moral thought. According to Whitehead, Descartes gave status and stability to the idea of minds as independent substances, establishing a legitimacy to the strange idea of private worlds of experience - and thus private morals. During the nineteenth century, when manufacturing reconfigured society in Europe and elsewhere, this philosophical background led the industrialists to prioritise self-respect and making the most of individual opportunities. Whitehead criticised the limitations of this “efficient morality”, warning that the rise of industry had dehumanised existence.

Progress, Whitehead cautioned, was happening in compartmentalised grooves. Each profession was progressing in its understanding, but in a separate rut. What’s more, this was moulding the minds of the educated to live within their own private grooves, each characterised by its own peculiar abstractions. Yet ultimately “there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life.” Thus, Whitehead saw the celibacy of the medieval scholars being supplanted by a “celibacy of the intellect”, divorced from considering any complete picture of life.

Thus professionalism began to pose a threat to democratic society, unbalancing reason. We became a kind of human termite nest, where specialised functions grow progressively more capable while the overall pattern lacks any coherent vision beyond growing the mound. This gutted the habits of wisdom, which Whitehead saw as “the fruit of a balanced development”, undermining the very purpose of education. A bias crept in that deepened the gap between the sciences and the arts, glorifying the former and quietly denigrating the latter. The exclusivity and intolerance of the sciences, while key to their triumph within their own narrow limits, was leading to “disastrous oversights.”

The decline of aesthetic education, Whitehead claimed, lay at the heart of the growing crisis of his time - and even more so for our own. The practices of the arts entailed “the habit of enjoying vivid values”, yet the materialistic biases creeping in through our habituation to scientific methods directed people’s attention towards things and away from values. Whitehead recognised this as a false dichotomy, but accepted that it held in everyday thought. Things became all that mattered. Clothed in the habits of the sciences, political economy excluded thinking about the ultimate values that might make all this industry somehow worthwhile.

Reason has asserted a decisive influence upon the entirety of human existence - and this power long predates the methods of the sciences, which developed only in the last half-millennia. As the opening quote makes clear, European thought was shaped by a line of thinkers five times as long, from ancient Greece to today. Philosophers who on their own could do nothing, but who collectively became Whiteheads’ “rulers of the world”. Our contemporary idol of specialised efficiency is not the climax of this tale, but its greatest threat yet.

Hardly surprising that we encounter such misery and anger today, given that we have lost our ability to even perceive the necessity for the practices of values. The immense capabilities of reasoning to shape millennia of human habits towards the pursuit of the good life have now turned upon us, severing our connection to all those other dimensions of reason entailed in the arts and moral philosophy. Trapped in the grooves we have dug out for thought, we have turned the power of reason against everything that makes human life worth living.