Whitehead on flow and fluency

 

I mentioned Whitehead's apparent sympathy with Heraclitus in my last post about him. My reading had not yet at that point discovered Process and Reality. Part II, Chapter Ten, which takes the form of an extended meditation on the sentiment "all things flow." In Heraclitus' Greek, panta rhei. 

The sympathy is here made explicit. Indeed, a full understanding of that sentiment is said to be one of the main goals of philosophizing at all. 

Some of the thinkers of the early modern world tried to ban flow, or fluency, from their picture of the world. 

But Whitehead adds, "Newton, that Napoleon of of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regimented into his 'absolute, mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.' He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his Theory of Fluxions."

What a marvelous packing of two concise sentences!   Almost as magnificent as Heraclitus' two words.

"Newton, a Napoleon of the world of thought," from a Brit writing less than six score years after Napoleons final defeat by the Brits, this phrase is itself rich. It involves an acknowledgement of genius, but one that is at least a touch grudging. The subsequent language, of a brusque order, regimentation, the dispensing of uniforms, enhances the idea of Newton as a conqueror, in a world in which not few who are conquered are grateful. 

Let us fill out the metaphor a bit.  Think of the medieval scholastic ideas of time as the Bourbon regime. Think, then, of Descartes -- and even more so of Spinoza -- as Danton, Robespierre and the other revolutionaries, proud of their break with the past and willing to do without the monarch of flux altogether. Newton is then the Napoleon indeed.  The monarchy of time returns, uniformed with the new mathematics of what we call calculus and what Newton called fluxions. 

Yet Napoleon came to a bad end, confined to a remote volcanic island with no scope for his military genius or political ambition. Whitehead was well aware of early 20th century physics.  He knew that Einstein had proved to be the Duke of Wellington of the world of thought. 

Indeed, Whitehead may have fancied himself the Talleyrand, negotiating the post-Newtonian world with the other philosophers at the Congress of Vienna of the world of thought.   

As to the fluidity of the cosmos, Whitehead's view is that it is of two sorts: the pursuit by many actual occasions/societies (mindfully or otherwise) of their own ideals on the one hand, and the perpetual perishing of all, regardless of ideas, on the other hand. He calls these the fluidity of creativity and of transition, respectively. He finds references to this distinction in the works of Locke, but regrets that Locke did not put "his scattered ideas" on the subject of time together in a systemic way.