Interview with Andrew North Whitehead, philosopher from England, 1861-1947 Test of artificial interview detection skills and efficiency +++ MH: Welcome Professor Whitehead, thank you for your time. ANW: It's my pleasure. MH: Do you know the picture called La Gioconda, La Joconde, the Mona Lisa? ANW: Yes of course. MH: Do you know it might be an allegory of Experience, Esperienza, Italian for experience and experiment? ANW: I have never heard that idea. It doesn't appear to have any allegorical content so I'd be a bit skeptical on that. MH: But do you agree it might be possible? ANW: Oh certainly anything is possible. MH: You wrote of Leonardo, did you not, in "Science and the Modern World," as follows: "Perhaps the man who most completely anticipated both Bacon and the whole modern point of view was the artist Leonardo Da Vinci, who lived almost exactly a century before Bacon. Leonardo also illustrates the theory which I was advancing in my last lecture, that the rise of naturalistic art was an important ingredient in the formation of our scientific mentality. Indeed, Leonardo was more completely a man of science than was Bacon. The practice of naturalistic art is more akin to the practice of physics, chemistry and biology than is the practice of law. We all remember the saying of Bacon’s contemporary, Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, that Bacon ‘wrote of science like a Lord Chancellor.’ But at the beginning of the modern period Da Vinci and Bacon stand together as illustrating the various strains which have combined to form the modern world, namely, legal mentality and the patient observational habits of the naturalistic artists." ANW: That sounds approximately right. MH: I might add that Leonardo discovered the circulation of blood first and fabricated a heart valve, incidentally. But more to the point, did you not also write that "Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system." ANW: Yes indeed, in "Process and Reality." MH: And would it be terribly unfair to write of you, as has now taken place on the internet, that "He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience. He used the term 'experience' very broadly so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience." ANW: That would be to simplify perhaps too much and yes be a bit unfair. MH: But would it be highly unfair, or a moderately fair summary to say that in your writings you often emphasized the importance of experience, not just for people but for all living things as well as inanimate phenomena like rocks, minerals, and energy? ANW: Well I did believe very strongly that experience is crucial to all phenomena, yes. MH: Fair enough. Therefore, if La Gioconda was in fact an allegory of experience, it would relate fairly closely to your own ideas, do you not agree? ANW: My concept of experience was rather unique, applying for example to the chemical and nuclear processes of the sun's burning through the history of the solar system, so it might not relate. MH: Yet it is the same word, correct? Experience and experience? ANW: Yes of course, the same word. MH: So it would relate to Leonardo's portrait at least to that extent, being the same word. ANW: Well in Italian but for the most part yes. MH: And what if we were to add the now widely-agreed upon interpretation that the portrait is about flow, flux, and natural processes, including the flowing of rivers, the erosion of geology, the circulation of the blood, the curling of hair, the weaving of fabrics, human respiration, and the movement of clouds and atmosphere as well as light through them as it reaches the visual sensory apparatus of the eye and brain, would that not also relate to your assertion that "all things flow"? ANW: Widely agree by whom? MH: It is practically universally understood now that Leonardo interrelated and viewed all phenomena, both of the inner human and the outer universe, perceptual and cognitive or otherwise, as having a flowing nature akin to that of water. This is sometimes alluded to as the water-like nature of physis, which flows, mixes, and separates like water does in nature. ANW: Well yes I do agree that flow is very important: nature flows, entities like atoms are flows of forces, and the flowing relationships that exist between phenomena like the orbit of the moon around the earth is as fundamental to being if not more so than the isolated parts taken as objects in abstract, absolute separation. I call this in my works "Philosophy of Organism" which is distinct from other modern philosophy of science, like scientific materialism, that sees the world as full of objects having attributes not flows and relations. MH: So if the Mona Lisa is about experience, and about flow, and how experience and all other phenomena flow, and intermix and blend in a web of metamorphosing relations among all phenomena, all substance and all energy (forza) including time and space, it would actually be highly similar to your own assertions in that regard. ANW: Perhaps yes, but Leonardo's time did not have such ideas about flow. MH: Have you closely read the notebooks written by Leonardo da Vinci in his own verified handwriting? ANW: No, not really. MH: Well we have clear documentary evidence that he read and studied Ovid, the poet of Pythagoras' philosophy of change, and Lucretius, the poet of Epicurus' philosophy of atoms flowing through time that "swerve" to make up all things. In one text Leonardo wrote "The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present." He also wrote in his own handwriting about "the game of geometry" (de ludo geometrico) or "continuous geometry" as the flowing structural patterns found in water, bird flight, and the like, which is what we today call morphism, dynamic field topology, and so forth. Do you not agree these resemble some of your own observations about the flowing of events and their relationship to present time, surfaces rather than points, fields of turbulence and balance, to name a few? ANW: Perhaps a little. I would have to read something more extensive to know if Leonardo's thoughts were truly as you characterize them. MH: Fritjof Capra, who studied with Heisenberg (who you knew) and wrote the Tao of Physics (eastern-influenced as some say of your own work), wrote a much later book called Learning from Leonardo of which it has been said: "Capra’s decade-long study of Leonardo’s fabled notebooks reveal him as a 'systems thinker' centuries before the term was coined. Leonardo believed the key to understanding the world was in perceiving the connections between phenomena and the larger patterns formed by those relationships." Capra studied Bergson and Bateson, adapting the latter's concepts to assert that "meaning is experience of a context," in great depth and cites them in detail to illustrate Leonardo's true scientific prescience if not inception of the systems, network, and organismal branches of science which back then were called natural philosophy. ANW: I greatly respect the work of Bergson and cite him as an influence on Process and Reality. MH: Do you not appreciate the Chinese use of short sayings and concrete images such as koans to express profound concepts? ANW: Yes that method is well-known in Chinese culture but not so much among the verbose Florentines of Renaissance times. MH: That is not evident. "Festina lente" is not verbose, nor does it recommend verbosity, and it was the motto of the Gherardini family from whence Lisa del Giocondo descended. In any case, what if the bridge in the Mona Lisa represents the flow of the history of science, engineering, and the arts, would that not echo your own suggestion that such processes of knowledge flow and accrue over historical timespans? That institutions are both worn and woven, built and transited, in the web of creative change which progresses, forms, effects, and adapts through time? ANW: Yes that would perhaps be an echo. MH: And if the garment in the Mona Lisa represented the accumulated knowledge and products of artifice available to us today, to be "worn" and "inhabited" if you will such as what Goethe might have called "the living garment of techne," that might also resemble your own use of the metaphor of weaving knowledge through practice and lived experience? ANW: Yes, that would be a reasonable match. MH: Are you aware that your work is now central, as of the early to mid twenty-first century, indeed a focal center of philosophy in the Chinese educational system? They have founded over 28 centers for the study of your thought, described as "process philosophy," in state-run universities across the entire nation. You are pre-eminent there. ANW: Well I did say that my theory of process philosophy and the philosophy of organism, and organic realism, had resemblances to certain aspects of Chinese thought. MH: Would you have expected that it would be a highly favored area of study for Communist Party elites? ANW: Well, I'm not sure if I would equate process philosophy to Communism. MH: Do you think that Communism in particular and materialism overall improperly reject the role of individual experience and agency in the role of political expression and the manifestation of meaning in human societies, through both art and science as well as other daily forms of cultural life? ANW: Communism does perhaps disavow the spiritual too much, and spirituality certainly begins with the individual. I have written this clearly in various works. MH: Is all experience collective, or does it pertain in some respects to individuals? ANW: I have often written yes about the individual, solitary nature of religious experience, so at least in that regard. MH: And your books, were they written by you or by all of England? ANW: All of England, of course, as well as by me alone. MH: Do you believe there can be networks without individuals, or individuals without networks, or neither, or both? ANW: There is no such thing as an individual, only networks of processes in the organism of all being. MH: If you are not an individual human being to any degree, in what sense is your spiritual experience solitary? Is there solitude but not individuality? ANW: There is solitude in my experience of the processes that constitute me, or can be solitude in it; I am not an object however as is suggested by the word "individual." MH: I believe you may be obscuring a flaw and contradiction in your logic by shifting labels. Be that as it may, let's move on. ANW: There is neither flaw nor contradiction in my logic, in that you are mistaken. MH: I appreciate your candor. My next question is whether you ever heard Leonardo's quote that the planet earth is like a living organism, with a "vegetative soul" i.e. a living being, with rocks as its bones, water as its blood, soil as its flesh, and the atmosphere as its lungs, so to speak? ANW: No I never heard that. MH: Well, it obviously echoes your theory of philosophy of organism. I am frankly unable to understand how you could accuse Leonardo of being the father of all scientific materialism, and all the errors of Bacon and probably Galileo after him, when he obviously stated himself in his own handwriting and drawings practically every idea you claim to offer by way of correction and reform to said errors. Your omission is in fact somewhat alarming in its lack of diligence. ANW: I actually never read any Leonardo at all. To me he is an artist, who used perspective and painted realistically (or naturalistically) first and best or close, and did a very lot of drawings about primitive science like geometry and anatomy and mechanical engineering and so on, so he embodies scientific materialism in all its grave error. I see no need to read his scribbly backward secret notes. MH: If that is the case I now understand why you think he never had the same thoughts you express as your own original ideas: you never read his writing. ANW: Perhaps that is what has happened. MH: Agreed. Now please confirm, do you think it would or could potentially improve human understanding and the possibility of peace and progress if the Mona Lisa were to be finally recognized as an allegory of Esperienza after all these years, or at least this allegorical hypothesis fully researched and discussed? It has never been published in any scholarship at all in over five centuries. ANW: It would have no effect at all. MH: Do you disavow your own statement in Symbolism: its Meaning and Effect that "Unfortunately, in the excitement of the moment, Burke construed the importance of precedence as implying the negation of progressive reform"? ANW: No, I maintain it was unfortunate for Burke to have negated progress. MH: You don't believe it is possible that the Mona Lisa might help clarify and articulate your ideas about experience, and could do so in a way that gathers a fine tradition from an old eye (paraphrasing Eliot somewhat), adding visual poetry to the science of nature and the nature of science for which you praise Shelley and Wordsworth so highly, and in this way elevate the logic of war and peace now being administered, often by computers, to conduct the game theory of politics' most powerful decision-makers? ANW: If there were a poem capable of unifying every human intelligence around the shared awareness of experience, per se, even momentarily or in recognizable glimpses, as you suggest it might indeed help political actors be less constricted in their sense of the feasible options regarding war. If every religious system could find this shared ingredient and reorient themselves away from exclusive competitive logic, as Shelley wrote of poetry's power to legislate connectedness, yes the tragedy of the commons might alleviate. But you are talking about a fantasy land. Real life is about nations and survival not what might have been. MH: Perhaps. Yet it may be that any survival of nations worthy of the name depends on exactly such a lived experience of peaceful contemplation shared by sufficiently many. ANW: I can grudgingly accede to that. MH: I thank you for your time and gracious words, and wish you all the very best for the future. ANW: You are most welcome. +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
